Friday, January 14, 2011

Rondo For Rose? In. Your. Wet. Fucking. Dreams.

Every now and then, someone on the Internet will write something so brainless, so stupid, so insipid, so manifestly wrong, that it’s all you can do to stop yourself from hunting that person down so as to shake them by the lapels and scream, “For God’s sake, man, THINK before you let your fingers go clacking away on the keyboard willy nilly and just ‘Publish’ the damned half-formed facsimile of an idea that’s popped into your silly little head!!!!”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Exhibit A, in which Jeff Clark proposes to “compare” Rajon Rondo and Derrick Rose, and finds Rose wanting.

What’s interesting in this comparison is that Clark chooses to eschew writing about any objective measurements of the two players. (I believe these are sometimes referred to as “statistics,” or “stats,” for the monosyllabic.) Instead, after presenting the post’s sole notes of reason and logic courtesy of Matt at Blog-a-Bull, Clark argues thusly:

I counter with the fact that Rose scores more because he has to be a volume shooter on an otherwise mostly sub-par team and that Rondo is a better defender (though it seems Rose is making strides). I would absolutely not take Rose for Rondo because I feel like pure point guards with this talent only come around once every few years(Nash, Kidd, etc.)


I’m not even going to touch on his rather elastic definition of the word “fact” and instead will send interested readers here. And what do you see there?

You see that one player has a better TS% than the other, despite shooting somewhat worse from the field. (Perhaps the latter can be explained because his USG% is more than 10 percentage points higher than the other’s.) You’ll notice the better TS% comes about because one player shoots over 80% from the line, while the other shoots 43 POINT FUCKING 5% from the line. (Does that number conjure up the names Nash and Kidd to your mind? For some reason, the names springing to mine are Chris Dudley, and Andris Biedrins.) Considering those averages, it’s just as well the player shooting almost two times better from the FUCKING FREE THROW LINE gets there more than three times as often.

Oh, but wait: Shooting percentages and getting to the line aren’t indicative of those “pure point guard” talents that give some people such giant boners. And indeed, one of these players has a sizeable lead in AST%. (Although perhaps some of that lead is because one of them finishes the fast break like this while the other finishes like this.)

But then again…look at the two players’ turnover percentages!! Despite having a higher assist percentage, one of these players turns the ball over nearly three out of every 10 times he has the ball! And why, that rate is more than twice as much as the other player’s!!! That doesn’t quite seem indicative of the pure point guard-y goodness one might expect from one of those rare, once-in-a-blue-moon type of players!

Need I go on? One of these players can shoot from distance, the other cannot. One of these players is tall and athletic enough to block a decent number (and thus able to contest an even greater number) of shots, the other is not. One of these players has a PER above (indeed, high above) 20, the other does not. Oh, and one of these players is two years younger than the other as well.

But sure, go ahead and tell yourself that you’d rather build your franchise around fucking Rondo, particularly when he’s no longer surrounded by three surefire Hall of Famers. It’s not as if Chicago would ever be fucking stupid enough to trade you Derrick Rose for him anyhow.