Dunk Base

Trying to select a player for the 2011 NBA Most Valuable Player award is a lot like trying to select the most attractive cast member on Jersey Shore. Nobody really deserves the recognition that you’re trying to give them. If we were to use a time machine and compare the 2011 MVP candidates to the candidates from a particularly strong year (like, for example, 2008), the 2011 candidates probably wouldn’t even crack the top four.

This year’s batch of contenders doesn’t have one that completely stands out above the rest, like LeBron did in 2009 and 2010, or like Kevin Garnett did in 2004, or Shaq did in 2000. It also doesn’t have a group of 3 or 4 REALLY strong candidates that each have legitimate cases (like in 2008 with Kobe, Chris Paul, Kevin Garnett, and LeBron James, or in 2006 with Steve Nash, Kobe, Dirk, LeBron, and Chauncey Billups). This year’s batch is a lot like the 2007 batch, where there was a group of five or six guys that you ended up talking yourself into even though they were all pretty flawed.

Want another pop culture analogy? Most MVP races can be compared to TV shows like Dexter, or 24, or The Sopranos. You have one alpha dog (Dexter Morgan, Jack Bauer, Tony Soprano), and then the rest of the cast fills in around it. This year’s MVP race? It’s more like LOST or The Wire. You have a big ensemble cast that each takes the lead at different times, and nobody seems more indispensible than any other character. This season, LeBron would be Jack/McNulty (the “best” guy), Dwyane Wade would be Kate/Bunk (the “best” guys sidekick), Dwight Howard would be Locke/Stringer Bell (the underrated guy that never got totally his due), Dirk would be Sawyer/Freamon (I have no idea how these three guys are connected, I just wanted to try to compare three people who have nothing in common), and Derrick Rose would be Linus/Omar (the outcast that didn’t fit in with the others – because of Rose’s comparatively poor stats). Each player or character is equally important or valuable, just in different ways. .

To be honest, I really started thinking about who my MVP pick would be about six weeks ago, and I still have no idea who I’m going to pick. Like I said before, it’s probably because nobody really deserves it. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t even really want to make a pick. Not only can I not decide, I don’t especially want to.

But I’m going to anyway. Not choosing would be a cop out. If we were going to round out the top 10, here’s how the lineup would look:

10. Pau Gasol, Los Angeles

To be honest, you could make a decent argument that Gasol has been LA’s best player this season, not Kobe. He’s a more efficient scorer and nearly as good of a creator when you account for the fact that he handles the ball a lot less than Kobe does. In terms of production, there wasn’t much of a difference between Gasol and Kobe this season.

9. Manu Ginobili, San Antonio

Someone from the Spurs has to finish in the top 10. Ginobili was their best and most consistent player this season, and, as always, is the difference between San Antonio running the table and San Antonio losing in Round 2.

8. Chris Paul, New Orleans

Let’s put it this way – if he hadn’t been playing on one leg for basically the entire season, New Orleans would be much higher in the standings and Chris Paul would be much higher on this list. Since he’s taken the knee brace off, he’s been noticeably quicker and less restricted. I’m hoping for more of the same next season.

7. Kevin Durant, Oklahoma City

His numbers are down basically across the board, and a lot of that has to do with the leap that Russell Westbrook made. Considering how much better Westbrook has been this season, it would stand to reason that Durant is now less valuable to his team than he was last season, right?

6. Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles

Falls out of the top five for a two reasons.

First, basically by his own admission, the Lakers have been coasting this season. His minutes are down, he hasn’t participated in a full practice all season, the Lakers are playing through Gasol, Odom, and Bynum more than they have in previous seasons, and all of those guys are playing better than they ever have before.

Secondly, and this is where Kobe really loses points, is that his defense has really been bad this season. And I don’t mean bad compared to previous Kobe seasons. I mean just bad. My guess is probably it’s just a question of effort and knowing that he can’t expend the same amount of energy on defense anymore, but the fact remains, Kobe isn’t a good defensive player anymore. He rotates slowly (or sometimes not at all), his closeouts are poor, he gambles in the backcourt way too often, and he gambles in screen-roll situations way too often. If you need him to crank it up for one possession or one stretch of 3-4 minutes to end the game? Sure. He can give it to you. But he doesn’t reach back for that level very often.

5. Dwyane Wade, Miami

Wade gets my vote for the most underrated player in the league this year. When LeBron and Bosh showed up in Miami, he recognized the things that he needed to do better (score more efficiently, crash the boards, and play defense), and he’s doing them. He’s shooting a career high in FG%, averaging a career high in rebounds, and he’s playing defense on a level that he hasn’t really played in the past. Early in the seasons he had some growing pains, not knowing when he needed to assert himself (although that can partially be blamed on missing all of preseason with a hamstring injury), but once he settled in, he’s been a clear-cut top-5 player in the league.

4. Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas

The resume for Dirk is pretty clear. He’s the best guy on a 55-win team, and arguably the best clutch player in the league this season. Among players with at least 100 minutes of “clutch” time (4th quarter or overtime, less than 5 minutes left, neither team ahead by more than 5 points), Dirk is 4th in scoring, has the 2nd-highest FG% of anyone in the top 9, and 3rd in +/-. His team is 2-8 in games that he either missed or left early due to injury, and finished with the same number of wins as the Lakers, one more than Boston, and only one fewer than Miami despite not having a single All-Star besides Nowitzki.

The bad side? He doesn’t really affect a game in ways besides scoring. His rebounding numbers are down, he’s an average defensive player at best, he’s never been a great passer, and his teammates, while not having an All-Star in the bunch, do go 9-deep with legitimate NBA players. Dirk is valuable, but not THAT valuable.

3. LeBron James, Miami

Here’s what I wrote at the beginning of the season about LeBron’s MVP chances:

“The reason LeBron won’t win the MVP this year is the same reason Jordan didn’t win the MVP in ’93 or ’97, and the same reason we ended up with white guys with bad hair that didn’t play defense winning the MVP in ’05, ’06, and ’07, and it’s a stupid reason. The media just decides that they feel like voting for someone new, or voting for someone because it’s a cool story, or whatever.”

The reason I wrote that was because I thought that by Christmas, the Heat would have created for themselves a clear pecking order with LeBron at the top, Wade below him as a cross between Scottie Pippen and Young Kobe, and Chris Bosh as the third wheel, and that pecking order would clearly assert LeBron as the alpha dog, and thus deserving of the MVP that the media would eventually rob from him.

However, what ended up happening was LeBron and Wade seemingly split the difference and decided they were each going to be the #1 guy at different times depending on matchups and who was hot.

Last season, LeBron never deferred to anyone, because he couldn’t. This season, he deferred occasionally, because he could (and probably had to). He’s still absurdly valuable (his statistical chops alone put him in the top 3), but he isn’t substantially more valuable to Miami than Wade is, so he drops to #3.

2. Dwight Howard, Orlando

If we were to use the thought process where we create a hypothetical scenario in which each MVP candidate was simply removed from their team’s roster, and then judge the difference between the two teams, Howard very well may deserve to be the runaway favorite for this year’s award. However, I have never been a fan of judging players and teams based on contexts that don’t exist. It’s fun to say “look at how bad Orlando would be without Dwight Howard,” but really, is it that different from saying “look at how good Orlando would be if Dwight Howard could shoot 40% from three and play point guard.”? Neither scenario is going to happen barring a season-ending injury to Howard, and considering Howard has missed seven games TOTAL in seven seasons as a pro, I’m not exactly holding my breath on that one.

I can’t in good conscience give Howard the MVP for the following reason: Howard is Orlando’s best player and most efficient scorer, but they can’t run plays for him in crunch time because his free throw shooting is such a liability. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that Orlando’s entire offense in the first 44 minutes is predicated on Howard getting touches and forcing the defense to react to that, opening up driving lanes and jump shots for everyone else. So basically, Orlando has to switch up their entire offensive philosophy down the stretch because Howard can no longer be involved. That’s your MVP?

Mavs owner Mark Cuban likes to talk about a statistic that he calls impact percentage. Production is great, but more important is where that production comes in the context of time and score. Howard is the type of player that has a poor impact percentage. If you want to make the argument that Howard’s level of play in the first 44 minutes outweighs his disappearing act in the last four, that’s fine, but I’m not going to buy it. In my opinion, for that argument to work, Howard needs to be dominant on a level of 2000 Shaq or LeBron in 2009 or Jordan in 1991. Howard wasn’t that dominant this season.

1. Derrick Rose, Chicago

This is where the statistical community will turn on me. Rose’s stats are good, not great. The real MVP of Chicago’s team is the defense of their 2nd unit, specifically when Ronnie Brewer and/or Omer Asik are on the floor. Chicago is a great team because of their #1 ranked defense and #1 ranked rebounding differential, and Rose does not really impact those areas. Rose’s biggest tangible impact on the Bulls is offensively, and the Bulls aren’t much better than average offensively (12th in Offensive Efficiency, 15th in True Shooting %). Rose’s shooting percentages aren’t very good, his shot selection could be better, and he doesn’t get to the line as much as you would expect from a player who attacks the basket as much as he does (11th in the league in FTA).

However, Chicago was a team that executed down the stretch of close games. I’m not going to rattle off a bunch of win-loss numbers like people did to point out Miami’s troubles, because, like I wrote at the end of March, most of those numbers don’t mean much because of arbitrary endpoints. Rose’s individual numbers weren’t eye-staggering in “clutch” time (same parameters as the ones I used for Dirk), shooting under 40% from the floor and just 20% from three. However, Chicago, as a team, jumps from 12th in offensive efficiency all the way up to 4th in the league inside the last 3 minutes, and that’s almost entirely attributable to Rose, considering he’s their only ballhandler and the only guy that can consistently create scoring opportunities.

Another argument against Rose? Chicago’s scoring differential doesn’t change much when Rose goes to the bench. Per 100 Possessions, they’re 8.7 points better than their opponents when Rose is on the floor, and 7.4 points better (per 100 possessions) when he’s off the floor.

Now, on one hand, this statistic might seem to imply that Rose is not especially valuable. A net gain of 1.3 points per 100 possessions isn’t very impressive. However, let’s compare his +1.3 number with Russell Westbrook’s. Oklahoma City is 2.0 points better per 100 possessions when Westbrook is on the floor, and 11.0 points better per 100 possessions when he is OFF the floor. Don’t believe me? Check out this link and take a gander at the line “Net Points Per 100 Possessions.”

If we’re going to put a ton of stock into this statistic (and others like it), the way some detractors are doing in their analysis of Rose, this would also mean that Westbrook is unquestionably one of the least valuable players in the league. Meanwhile, by this measurement, the two most valuable players in the league would be Paul Pierce and Steve Nash, Kyle Lowry of Houston would be more valuable than Dwight Howard and LeBron James, Mike Conley would be more valuable than Dwyane Wade, and Keyon Dooling would be more valuable than Kobe Bryant.

But that doesn’t quite make sense, does it?

This exemplifies a growing problem with the statistical community. Too many people are basing their opinions primarily in statistics instead of using statistics to reinforce the opinions we get from the things we actually see, and in other cases, people assuming that if you can’t tangibly measure something (like leadership), it shouldn’t be considered. In a lot of cases, it won’t be a huge problem. The stats say that guys like LeBron are awesome because they play at a crazily efficient level and contribute in just about every area. And they are awesome, so it works out. The stats also tell us that guys like Travis Outlaw are terrible because they don’t do anything well and shoot a terrible percentage. And they are terrible, so it works out.

With Rose though, I’m taking most of these with a grain of salt. Offensively, his degree of difficulty was off the charts, so I’m giving him some leeway in the stats department. More importantly, however, if we can agree that the numbers on a few of these players (Like Westbrook’s on court/off court splits) display some type of anomaly, why can’t Rose’s numbers be displaying a similar anomaly? Most hyper-advanced stats on Rose say that he’s certainly ONE OF the most valuable players in the league. Maybe not THE most valuable, but up there. When you factor in all of the intangible stuff, like leadership (both directly and by example), the effect of Rose buying into the system of a rookie coach, the effect of Rose never taking a possession off and always being accountable to his teammates, it tips the scales. Even if you can’t definitively measure that stuff, it DOES matter. And in my opinion, it makes Derrick Rose the MVP.

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