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Derrick Rose has edge on Chris Paul
The reigning MVP has reason to be upset about being ranked below CP3
By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
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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.