Here is a quick, less formal, and not entirely conclusive study after the first game of the season.
The Chicago Bulls attempted 93 shots from the field in their opening day loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. Of these, 31 were attempted by Derrick Rose. The most taken by another player on the Bulls was 13.
In Stumbling on Wins we noted that both Isiah Thomas and Stephen Marbury consistently led their respective teams in field goal attempts. In essence, some point guards – the players charged with distributing the basketball and therefore shot attempts – often decide that they are the person who should take the shot. Derrick Rose was one of these guards in the first game this season. Has this been the case historically?
One game doesn’t really tell us much (a frustrating point at the beginning of the season). But if we look at last season, we do see –as the following table illustrates – that Rose has been a point guard who likes to call his own number. Rose led all point guards (who played at least 2,000 minutes) in field goal attempts per 48 minutes. He also led all point guards in field goal attempts.
This story this list tells is not confined to who shoots more than others. We also see that the point guards who shoot the most tend to be less productive [in terms of WP48 (Wins Produced per 48 minutes), a measure that considers all the box score statistics] than the point guards that shoot the least. The ten point guards listed first in the above table have an average WP48 of 0.088 while the ten point guards listed at the bottom have an average WP48 of 0.128. No, it is not a very strong correlation. But given the direction of the relationship, it does not appear that the scoring point guards are helping their teams more than the point guards who take fewer shots.
So should Derrick Rose shoot less? One could argue that his teammates aren’t very good scorers. So maybe that is why Rose shoots so much. On the other hand (a phrase economists love to use) Rose is often taking the shots. So how can we tell if the other players are capable of scoring more?
Whether Rose should shoot less is hard to say. We do know that Rose has an incentive to take shots. Scoring is the primary determinant of salary (a point Stephen Marbury made three years ago). So we can understand why Rose is taking so many shots. What is not clear is whether all those shot attempts are really in the best interest of those who want to see the Chicago Bulls win more basketball games.
- DJ
Rose’s adjfg% is about average for the field. So is he hurting the team by taking that many shots? He’s not hurting his team as bad as say Rodney Stuckey, who takes just 1.7 fewer shot per 48, yet shoots 41.3% on his shots. With Boozer healthy Rose’s fg attempts should go down, or at least they had better if the Bulls want to win games. And couldn’t you use the same argument to say that Steve Nash should shoot more? In fact shouldn’t Nash just take every single shot for the Suns? Or is the argument that if Nash shot more his wp/48 would drop because the correlation was made between PG’s that shoot more have a lower wp/48? If Rondey Stuckey shot less it looks like the Pistons would benefit a lot more than the Bulls would if Derrick Rose shot less.
We know from the World Championships that Rose is capable of deferring. The question is whether he will do so when not playing with Durant.
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The problem is not that Derrick Rose is an inefficient scorer. His TS% was 53.2 last year, which I don’t think is bad for a PG. Also, a big part of his game is takin shots and he had an average WP48. I think the issue is that the better PGs get the other players the ball with even easier shots. Better to get your C or PF a good look closer to the basket then make tougher shots at a decent rate.
PG has 2 options on every possession- pass or shoot. Most of the players at the top of that list are poor passers in the context of running a half court offense, so they end up calling their own number. Nash, Kidd, Rondo all shoot well because they mostly take easy shots that come to them from ball movement in the flow of the offense vs the guys who dribble around for 22 seconds before launching a low % shot.
fricktho/bduran:
I think the fact that Rose was able to shoot 47.6% while taking 31 shots was incredible when you think about the skill curves from Dean Oliver’s “Basketball On Paper.” I think the real problem with Rose is that he took 31 shots but only went to the line 4 times. I couldn’t think of any other star that would get up 31 shots w/ only 4 FTs, so I looked it up on basketball-reference.com and apparently it’s been done by 88 players since 1986, including 22 times by Michael Jordan (which is phenomenal) and 13 times by Kobe Bryant & Tracy McGrady. Makes you wonder if superstars really do get the preferential treatment from refs that NBA fans talk about all the time.
See http://www.basketball-reference.com/play-index/tiny.cgi?id=SCZbf
svsuns24:
I wouldn’t use the words “Rondo” and “shoot well” in the same sentence. He scores efficiently (48% of shots taken at the rim, according to hoopdate), but I think that’s different than shooting well (knocking down open jumpers – he only shot 32% eFG from behind the arc).
Agreed. Scoring efficiently is a better way to put it.
You can’t miss the shots you don’t take.
resvoirgod,
Last year Rose wasn’t that good getting to the line either. If he did he would score more efficiently, but he’d still be the one “shooting” (whether FGA or FTA) on a large number of possessions. So the question is, how much can a PG expect to increase team efficiency by increasing his scoring efficiency? If he could get a 60 TS% then sure, take as many shots as you want. However,in general players who are taller and closer to the basket have an easier time than those shorter and farther away, so it would make sense to try to get the taller guys the ball in good position as much as possible. Rose trying to maximize his shots and efficiency is more likely a tougher route to helping the team.
bduran:
I know Rose has had low FTAs since he entered the league and I don’t necessarily disagree with you about getting the big men the ball, but I just didn’t understand how a player whose game was based on getting into the paint managed to have such low FTAs.
So I changed the search at basketball-reference.com to count the number of games in a season a guard took 15 or more shots from the floor but 5 or less shots from the line since 1986 and the list was full of jumpshooters (see http://www.basketball-reference.com/play-index/tiny.cgi?id=dbYti). That made sense, and at the top of the list was Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf with 54 games of FGAs>=15 and FTAs<=5. Derrick Rose had 39 games like that last season. I go to hoopdata and, lo & behold, Rose took more shots between 16-23 feet than he did at the rim. So that explains the low FTAs.
I would've thought Reggie Miller would've made the top 100 of a list like that but he isn't in the top 100 (31 games or more)! I looked up Reggie Miller's stats and he averaged 13.2 FGAs & 5.1 FTAs for his career. In fact, he only averaged more than 15 FGAs twice in his career. He averaged less than 5 FTAs 9 times in his 18-year career and 7 of those were at the end of his career when he was 33+ years-old.
All of that was my long-winded way of saying – I'm onboard the "Derrick Rose is inefficient" bandwagon. If he's going to take the majority of his shots from 16-23 feet, then he better find a way to get to the line like Reggie did (assuming that's where Miller took a significant number of shots).
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I don’t have the exact quote handy, but Bob Cousy said something along the lines of “If a guy’s dribbling the ball down the court and thinking ‘pass’, he’s a point guard. If he’s thinking ‘shot’, he isn’t.” By that definition, many of the guys playing the PG position in the NBA aren’t actually point guards.
Although we’ve also had articles in WoW that PG are unusual in that they often get judged heavily on their assist totals rather than scoring totals, so you’ll see PGs passing to a trailing big man on a fast break when they have an easy layup and no defenders in sight.
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