[FritzParticipant]

Can someone please post the hollinger insider article saying "Rose over Cp?" Thanks a whole lot

[JayhawkFan23Participant]

Originally Published: October 17, 2011

Derrick Rose has edge on Chris Paul

The reigning MVP has reason to be upset about being ranked below CP3 in #NBArank

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By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
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Gary Dineen/Getty ImagesDerrick Rose ranks lower than Chris Paul in the eyes of #NBArank voters.

 

 

Is Chris Paul better than Derrick Rose?

That was the conclusion of our 91-person ESPN.com panel*, apparently, as Paul landed in the top five of our ranking of every NBA player while Rose was only eighth. This is surprising on multiple levels — most obviously because Rose is the league’s reigning MVP, but also because exposure has factored heavily into the ratings thus far, and Paul undoubtedly gets less exposure than his counterpart.

(* – Yes, 91. I’m pretty sure ESPN has more people than live in the state of Maryland. Also, here’s how it worked: We were asked to rate every player in the league from 0 to 10. In the interests of full disclosure, I gave both Rose and Paul a 9. The only 10s I handed out were for Dwyane Wade, Dwight Howard, Targuy Ngombo and LeBron James. Well, three of those four anyway.)

While I commend our panelists for thinking outside the box on this one, I’m not sure they got it right. Our mission was to rate players based on how good they are right now, and right now my best estimate is that Rose is slightly better. Let’s run through the facts:

 

 

Paul had a better player efficiency rating

 

OK, it was barely better — 23.76 to 23.62. Rose played slightly more minutes than Paul and missed one fewer game, and as a result had a slightly better estimated wins added; on the other hand, Paul also had the league’s best playoff PER in his six first-round games last spring. If you’re scoring just on this metric, it won’t surprise you that Paul is ahead of Rose.

 

 

Paul is the best in clutch situations

 

As our Henry Abbott has outlined in great detail, to the constant consternation of the fanatical army of insane Kobe Bryant fans, Chris Paul and the New Orleans Hornets have been the best crunch-time offensive team over the past few years, by leaps and bounds. This owes as much to strategy as to execution — the Hornets do this crazy thing called running the offense rather than isolating for hero shots at the end of games — but obviously we have to give Paul a big chunk of the credit.

Those are two big feathers in Paul’s cap — a slightly better efficiency rating and an elite standing when it comes to the high-leverage end-of-close-game situations.

However, there are three negatives that I think offset that and puts the check mark on Roses’ side:

 

 

They pad Paul’s assists

 

Anecdotally, I’ve always been amazed by the dubious assists that wind up in Paul’s ledger in games in New Orleans, ever since I covered their 2008 playoff run and realized David West‘s four-dribble drives were showing up in Paul’s assists column.

The numbers back up that theory. Last season Rose averaged 8.1 assists at home and 7.3 on the road, a fairly normal split for a high-profile point guard. Paul, on the other hand, averaged 10.7 at home and just 8.8 on the road, a decidedly abnormal difference. Alas, that spread has been consistent his whole career, except the two that he didn’t play in New Orleans. I wrote more about this in my individual player comments for ESPN.com, which we’ll release when basketball returns in 2013, but other measures also indicate that Paul is getting a lot of cheap assists from the home scoring crew.

The overall impact is small — probably less than a point of PER — but significant in the context of a splitting-every-little-hair debate between CP and Rose. Paul out-rated Rose by only 0.14 in PER last season, for instance; if they change scorekeepers Rose outranks him easily.

 

 

Paul got worse as the season went on

 

This could just be random, but given that (A) Paul has a bad knee, and (B) he visibly appeared to run out of gas as the grind of the regular season wore down, only to suddenly revive once he got some rest in the most spread-out playoff schedule, I think it’s pertinent. Paul played his best basketball in November and his PER steadily dropped from there; check out his splits. Most notable were the two late-season games against Memphis, which were crucial for playoff seeding but saw Paul muster only five points over the two games, including a bagel in the second one. Again, if you’re trying to decipher who’s better in October, six months after either played his last game, I think this is pertinent information in Rose’s favor.

 

 

Rose got better as the year went on

 

But the strongest trump card is the one belonging to Rose, which is that he significantly improved his one biggest weakness as the season went on. Over the first two seasons of his career, Rose drew shockingly few fouls for such a potent driver, and that continued in the early part of last season. What propped up Rose’s numbers at that point was an unlikely eruption of 3-point accuracy; once he predictably regressed to the mean his overall production should have sank like a stone.

Instead, Rose offset this decline by finally getting to the line in decent quantities; in the first 30 games he barely reached the stripe five times a game, but after the All-Star break he averaged 8.1. This appears to be a permanent addition to his game — he averaged 8.4 in 16 playoff games — and if so it means that we shortchange Rose’s value on Monday by just looking at his full-season stats.

Rose’s PER gently improved over the course of last season despite the fact that his shooting stats were going south; while the latter is prone to short-term blips and jumps that should be disregarded, the sharp uptick in free-throw trips over more than half a season is a much more reliable indicator of a genuine change in performance.

Obviously, the differences between these players are microscopic enough that reasonable people can disagree (and apparently do) about which one is better. Nonetheless, if I could have had two extra decimal points for my ratings I’d have given Rose a 9.03 and Paul a 9.01. It’s close, but as of this month Rose is a little better.

 

 

ESPN Insider John Hollinger
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[M-DYMESParticipant]

"Paul got worse as the season went on"

IDK bout that..he looked pretty damn amazing in that playoff series.  Dude showed top 5 ability in that series. 

 

 

 

[joecheck88Participant]

This whole article is dumb in my opinion. I really like Derrick Rose but he is not better than Chris Paul. D Rose can score 40 sometimes but I doubt we will ever see him do what CP3 did against the Lakers this year in the playoffs(22ppg, 6.7rpg, & 11.5apg). Including the 27p 13r & 15a game he had. Plus I think CP3 is a better defender.

[Author]

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