Rose Wins MVP And There's Apparently Little Doubt About It

[EvanZ]

Rose 113 1st place votes, Howard gets 3, and LeBron gets 4 (but finishes 3rd overall). Media are sheeple.

[knarsu3]

My first post here (I've been reading for a long time) but this is disappointing that it was such a runaway vote for Rose. I was at least expecting Howard to get more first place votes.

[Bobbofitos]

My first post here (I've been reading for a long time) but this is disappointing that it was such a runaway vote for Rose. I was at least expecting Howard to get more first place votes.

Why were you expecting this? The media gave away the MVP several months ago and not a single person seemed to voice a dissenting vote.

I would have liked for a different person to have won, but I'm hardly surprised Rose won or that it was by such a staggering amount

[Mike G]

Rose was just 5th in Win Shares this year, but only one player was higher in both offensive and defensive WS -- LeBron.
So, how rare and/or great is it for a guard to get 13 WS in a season, of which at least 4.7 are DWS?
http://bkref.com/tiny/NQM7q

It's been done 16 other times: Walt Frazier in '70, '71, and '73; West in '72; Jordan 9 times, '87-98; Stockton in '88 and '89; Chris Paul in '09.

[knarsu3]

My first post here (I've been reading for a long time) but this is disappointing that it was such a runaway vote for Rose. I was at least expecting Howard to get more first place votes.

Why were you expecting this? The media gave away the MVP several months ago and not a single person seemed to voice a dissenting vote.

I would have liked for a different person to have won, but I'm hardly surprised Rose won or that it was by such a staggering amount

Call it unrealistic optimism. I did expect Rose to win but I think I was just hoping that more voters would give Howard some credit.

I guess I was overestimating the impact of the APBRmetric community.

[greyberger]

From the games I've watched and the statistics I've looked up, Rose appears to be a good (maybe great) defender.

He plays with excellent defenders in Noah, Bogans, Deng, Brewer and Gibson, however. It's a stretch to say he's much better than any of those guys. And you have to save some credit for Thibodeau; it's quite a stretch to say Rose is a MVP candidate on his defensive contributions alone.

And what, again, is so special about his offense in the 2011 season? Looks a lot like 2011 Westbrook, or 2009 Tony Parker, or 2010 Wade. It doesn't stand out, to me. Does he have that much more impact on defense? If you had to rank all the high-usage, high-assist guards based on their defense, where would he rank?

Dwayne Wade's bk-ref page is a pretty good argument against Rose for MVP. Didn't he do what Rose did this season, for several seasons in a row? Doesn't he at least compare on the intangible and less tangible parts of the game, i.e defense, leadership, etc?

As for the influence of apebear metrics and advanced stats - when this kind of thing is big enough to create a difference of opinion among MVP voters, you'll know because there will have been a enormous and vociferous backlash against it. Can't have one without the - oth-er!

[EvanZ]

Before Rose and Westbrook this season, the only pure PG who had USG>30% was Allen Iverson. It's apparently not a widely- or historically used strategy to depend on that much offense from your PG.



I have a feeling that John Wall will soon join that group. Wall for MVP in 2013... Should we start the anti-campaign now?

[greyberger]

They might not be from 'pure point guards', but there have been a number of player seasons with a comparable amount of assists and scoring load (as measured by usage). Rose 2011 isn't far off from some of the iIverson seasons or a pre-injury Arenas.

It's not entirely unique in this day and age for a high ast-rate PG to shoot this often. And it seems weird for Rose's usage to be a big part of his MVP case, since he wasn't that efficient with all those possessions... not enough to stand out from his most recent contemporaries in Westbrook, Parker and Wade.

Wade was the defacto point guard in pre-big-three Miami. And all things about his game considered, he's the best comparison I can think of for 2011 Rose.

[Mike G]

And of course, Wade might have been high in the MVP discussion, if his most significant teammate were anyone but LeBron.

[J.E.]

Not really Rose related but former NBA player Eddie Johnson, now blogging for HoopsHype, says Dirk is a horrible defender and dismisses RAPM numbers because
"stats for defense means nothing unless its steals and blocks"

holy
I wish I was kidding

edit: HoopsHype not TrueHoop

[Bobbofitos]

Not really Rose related but former NBA player Eddie Johnson, now blogging for Truehoop, says Dirk is a horrible defender and dismisses RAPM numbers because
"stats for defense means nothing unless its steals and blocks"

holy
I wish I was kidding

well, dirk is white, so he's automatically a poor defender.

[greyberger]

Jack Ramsey's MVP vote for Manu Ginobili, surely on the strength of his +/- case, more than makes up for it.

[kjb]

Eddie Johnson blogs for HoopsHype, not TrueHoop.

I ate dinner with Eddie in the press room at a Wizards-Suns game a few years back. He spent most of the dinner telling me what a great shooter he was. Gave me some nutty stat about holding some kind of record for scoring and shooting percentage for someone coming off the bench. I actually wanted to use it in my game notes, but I couldn't verify it. Don't even remember what it was now. Something like highest points per minute for a player 6-8 or under with a shooting percentage over 50% and at least 27 minutes played per game.

Not sure if Eddie would be able to recognize whether defense was well played or not. It wasn't exactly his strength when he played.

[YaoPau]

Rose's team ended up with 10 more wins than Howard's, and I think we'd agree the unit of past value is wins added and possibly improvement of seed.

Unless you're sure that Howard's supporting cast was more than 10 wins worse than Rose's this year, there's not much of a case that the media was way off.

[erivera7]

Unless you're sure that Howard's supporting cast was more than 10 wins worse than Rose's this year, there's not much of a case that the media was way off.

Yeah ... the media was way off.

See the first round of the Magic/Hawks series. Classic example of Howard's greatness being undermined by a flawed supporting cast.