When I ranked the Eastern Conference's top point guards last week, someone was conspicuously missing. Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose, four years removed from winning league MVP, appeared in none of the leaderboards.
After nearly two seasons lost to knee injuries, Rose has demonstrated in the past two months or so that he can stay healthy. But he hasn't demonstrated that he belongs with the NBA's best point guards in terms of performance.
What sort of company is Rose keeping in terms of production? Consider this blind player-comparison:
East PG Playmaking Stats
Player A, as you might guess, is Rose. Player B, who has put up eerily similar numbers this season, is Tony Wroten. Needless to say, to advance deep into the postseason, the Bulls will need Rose playing more like an MVP and less like the Philadelphia 76ers' sixth man.
Struggling from beyond the arc
In truth, Rose's 2-point percentage isn't out of line with the rest of his career. He has made 48.5 percent of his 2-pointers overall, and was just 48.1 percent during his MVP season. That's a difference of two shots over 28 games from his current rate.
Instead, the larger issue is from longer range. Rose was a poor 3-point shooter when he entered the NBA, and his rise to stardom was facilitated in part by an improving jumper. After shooting 24.2 percent from beyond the arc in his first two seasons, Rose got to an acceptable 33.2 percent in 2010-11. This season, he's making just 25.4 percent of his 3s, but the damage is far worse than Rose's younger days because he's taking so many more of his shots from outside -- a career-high 5.1 per game. Rose's current 3-point accuracy would be the worst ever for a player attempting at least five 3s per game, and by a sizable margin over Jason Williams in 1999-2000 (28.7 percent).
While Rose worked hard on his shot while coming back from his knee surgeries, he has developed bad mechanical habits. He tends to get off balance while rising, and his flat arc causes misses both long and short depending on the shot distance and how high he jumps. These problems are exacerbated when Rose shoots off the dribble. According to Synergy Sports, Rose has shot an effective 44.3 percent on catch-and-shoot jumpers (weighting 3s as 1.5 field goals), but just 29.2 percent on pull-up attempts.
The good news, as I noted this past summer, is that players coming back from ACL injuries often tend to struggle with their outside shooting before improving. This hasn't happened yet with Rose, who has recently suffered through his worst slump. Rose has shot 5-of-29 (17.2 percent) on 3s this month and made just 35.8 percent of his 2s.
Unfortunately, the scouting report might be out already. One of Rose's best recent games was a Dec. 23 win at Washington, when he had 25 points on 10-of-17 shooting. On Jan. 9, the next meeting between the two teams, who play Wednesday (8 p.m. ET, ESPN), the Wizards adjusted by going under screens and daring Rose to shoot off the dribble. He had 19 points on 8-of-19 shooting and Washington won going away.
Driving selectively
The other difference between the current Rose and the MVP version is free throw rate. In 2010-11, Rose averaged 6.6 foul shots per game. This season, that's down to 4.7 even though Rose is actually averaging more field goal attempts (19.6 versus 19.0). Rose hasn't been getting to the basket as much, possibly part of a conscious strategy to avoid the kind of contact that caused his past knee injuries. He told reporters as much while playing for USA Basketball last summer.
"I think you will see that next year," Rose said in July. "Just trying to [keep] people off my body. I'm using a lot of floaters, using a lot of pull-ups, stuff like that so that I won't get touched as much."
But that mindset of self-preservation seems to disappear when Chicago needs Rose most. As Grantland's Zach Lowe has shared, SportVU tracking numbers show Rose driving to the basket more frequently in the fourth quarter than the rest of the game. In Quarters 1-3, Rose averages 7.5 drives per 36 minutes. That mark surges to 10.7 drives per 36 minutes in the fourth quarter, a rate that would put Rose among the 10 most frequent drivers in the league (minimum 175 total drives), according to NBA.com/Stats.
We've seen the old Rose re-emerge and take over multiple close games down the stretch, perhaps most notably a Dec. 22 win over the Toronto Raptors. Rose had 15 points on 6-of-6 shooting in the last seven minutes of that game as the Bulls scored 49 points in the fourth quarter to come from behind and beat what was at the time the top team in the Eastern Conference.
Performances like that make it difficult to write off Rose's chances of re-emerging as a star come playoff time. For now, however, Rose's tendency to moderate his aggression is one reason Chicago has experienced such a frustrating season.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how LeBron James' "chill mode" helped explain the Cleveland Cavaliers playing to the level of their opposition. The Bulls have shown the same tendency. In fact, Chicago is one of two teams (the Detroit Pistons are the other) that actually become more inconsistent when we factor in their schedule. (Typically, this reduces inconsistency because opponents of varying strength are part of the reason teams are inconsistent in their results.)
Monday's home loss to the Orlando Magic was only the latest head-scratching performance by the Bulls. Meanwhile, Chicago has won both head-to-head meetings with the Raptors and is an impressive 4-3 against current West playoff teams. Expect more of the same ups and downs if Rose continues to play like Wroten.
News and notes
• This week has offered teams in need of point guard help a couple of options. Nate Wolters cleared waivers after being waived by the Milwaukee Bucks last week, and Marc Stein reported he might sign a 10-day contract with the New Orleans Pelicans. That makes sense, because the Pelicans were thin at point guard after trading Austin Rivers and Russ Smith, even before starter Jrue Holiday missed the second half of Monday's game with ankle inflammation.
The Cavaliers and Los Angeles Clippers are two contenders who have struggled with their starting point guards on the bench this season, and they both might take a look at Nate Robinson if he can complete a buyout with the Celtics following Tuesday's trade to Boston.
Robinson has struggled with his shooting after ACL surgery (not unlike Rose), but he has been effective as a distributor in the month of January, handing out 24 assists against just three turnovers.
Robinson's playmaking mentality would serve either the Cavaliers or the Clippers well, because he had been playing with a high-scoring former Sixth Man award winner (Jamal Crawford, J.R. Smith) with either team.
• The NBA's first 50-point game of 2014-15 came from an unlikely source: Minnesota Timberwolves guard Mo Williams, who entered Wednesday's game averaging 11.0 points per game. Williams made six of his 11 3-point attempts and shot 13-of-22 inside the arc, adding eight free throws in nine attempts to finish with 52 points -- one better than the mark Corey Brewer tied in April. (Kevin Love also scored 51 points in March 2012.)
At this point, we probably shouldn't be surprised by unexpected 50-point games. Besides Brewer (who averaged 12.3 points per game in 2013-14) and Williams, the past year saw Terrence Ross become the 50-point scorer with the lowest scoring average that season in the Basketball-Reference.com database, finishing at 10.9 points per game. Williams (now averaging 12.4 PPG) could threaten that record. As Dan Feldman noted for Pro Basketball Talk, Tony Delk had held the lowest scoring average in a 50-point season at 12.3 PPG in 2000-01. Despite the lowest career scoring total of any retired player to score 50 in a game, Willie Burton averaged 15.3 PPG that season.
• It's no surprise that the New York Knicks are shopping Andrea Bargnani and Jose Calderon, as reported by ESPN's Marc Stein and ESPNNewYork's Ian Begley on Monday. Calderon's 2015-16 salary is the largest on New York's books beyond this season, other than Carmelo Anthony's, and New York would love to move him to clear more cap space. The motivation for trading Bargnani would be more purely monetary. If the Knicks can move him for someone making less than about $7 million, they'd likely avoid paying the luxury tax this season. That has huge financial ramifications down the road because New York is unlikely to be a taxpayer in 2015-16. If the Knicks don't pay tax in either season, they would not have to worry about the costly repeater tax until 2019-20.
The most likely trade for Bargnani might be to the 76ers for Jason Richardson, who is making $6.6 million in the final season of his contract -- about the perfect amount to get New York out of the tax. Because Richardson is injured, the Sixers are likely to collect insurance on his contract after the midpoint of the season, but Philadelphia has proved willing to take on more salary if it gains assets of any kind. The Knicks could offer cash (per BasketballInsiders.com, the Sixers have received $1.4 million of the allowed $3.3 million this season) and future second-round picks to make a deal happen.
Weekly top five: Best midseason trade pickups in the past 25 years
5. Ray Allen to Seattle, 2003
4. Kevin Johnson to Phoenix, 1988
3. Pau Gasol to L.A. Lakers, 2008
2. Rasheed Wallace to Detroit, 2004
1. Clyde Drexler to Houston, 1995
Honorable mention: Dikembe Mutombo to Philadelphia, 2001; Jason Kidd to Phoenix, 1996; Sam Cassell to Milwaukee, 1999; Jeff Hornacek to Utah, 1994; Tim Hardaway to Miami, 1996; Mark Jackson to Indiana, 1997