Derrick Rose and the difference between useful and helpful

It’s been a strange season for the New York Knicks. After starting the season 3-6, they pushed their record to 14-10 and vaulted to third place in the Eastern Conference by mid-December. The Knicks have backslid over the last three weeks, though, losing nine of their last 11 games (and six in a row), including the first leg of their Wednesday-Friday home and home against the Milwaukee Bucks.

It’s arguable that the Knicks were playing over their heads through that 11-4 push toward the top of the conference. They were carrying the point differential of a 10-14 team at the time of their ascension to the No. 3 seed and had the league’s 26th-ranked defense at the time as well. They’d also played in 14 games that were within five points in the last five minutes, winning nine of them. A team’s record in close games tends to regress toward .500 over time, and true to form, the Knicks are just 1-4 in such games since that point. Their defense has held steady in the league’s bottom-five for the most part, and the borderline top-10 offense they played through a month and a half has sunk toward the bottom over the last few weeks.

Accordingly, Knicks fans (or at least a segment of them) have gone from elated and convinced that their team was an Eastern Conference contender despite the abundance of data saying otherwise to “the sky is falling” in record time, even for New York. Neither of those things is exactly true — the Knicks are likely somewhere between a slightly above and slightly below average team, and that’s pretty much how they’ve played if you view their season as a whole, rather than in segments. Thirty-four games into the year, they’re two games below .500. For a team with a largely middling but occasionally above-average offense and a bad defense, that’s probably the expectation. The early win-loss record just masked the team’s true quality for a bit.

Fittingly, given that he was the linchpin of their offseason plans, perhaps no player has exemplified all that the Knicks have been this season — the good and the bad — more than Derrick Rose. Flip over to Rose’s Basketball-Reference page; his counting numbers look great. Better than at any point post-injury. He’s averaging 17.7 points, 4.1 rebounds, and 4.4 assists per game and shooting just a smidge south of 45 percent from the field. There are only 15 other players with per-game averages of at least 17, 4, and 4, and all but two of them (Blake Griffin, Eric Bledsoe) can be described as somewhere between likely and surefire All-Stars. A few of them are MVP candidates.

Viewed through that lens, it’s difficult to argue that he hasn’t been a smashing success. Of course, just as the Knicks’ 14-10 start obscured some issues lurking beneath the surface, so too, do Rose’s flashy stats. There’s a reason he falls so far short of that aforementioned group of 15 players in advanced numbers like Player Efficiency Rating, Win Shares, Box Score Plus-Minus, Value Over Replacement Player, and Real Plus-Minus (he ranks last of this group of 15 in each statistic by a considerable margin). His level of success has been more moderate than smashing, his usefulness more circumstantial than contribution-driven.

That’s not to say Rose hasn’t been a helpful player in any way. On the contrary, he has helped in exactly the way the Knicks envisioned him helping when they acquired him. (The issue, as we’ll get to later, has been that he hasn’t contributed much else, and has played a starring role in some of the Knicks’ biggest areas of weakness.) The Knicks didn’t initially plan on making an aggressive move for a point guard at the start of the offseason, but when they hired Jeff Hornacek as their new head coach, they identified an attacking ball-handler as one of their biggest needs. In Rose, they found and acquired a player whose signature skill has always been exactly that.

With the ball in his hands and a head of steam toward the basket, Rose has been quite successful, and that success has in turn been quite helpful on the offensive side of the floor. The Knicks score nearly nine points more per 100 possessions with Rose on the floor than off this season, per NBA.com, and though some of that has to do with his playing nearly all of his minutes with Carmelo Anthony (814 of 963 minutes entering Wednesday’s play) and/or Kristaps Porzingis (699 of 963), not all of it is attributable to them. Rose has taken advantage of the attention those two draw and used it to attack the basket with fervor. Those basket attacks have proven quite fruitful, and given the Knicks’ offense an element it simply has not had in some time.

Rose has driven to the basket 10.3 times per game this season, per the SportVU data on NBA.com, tied with Damian Lillard for 11th-most in the league. The Knicks’ point guards last season, Jose Calderon and Jerian Grant, averaged 5.7 drives per game combined. Rose himself is driving more often per game than the top four players on the 2015-16 Knicks. Not only that but Rose has been extremely effective finishing off the drive. There are 54 players averaging at least five drives per game this season; Rose ranks eighth among that group in field goal percentage on the drive. When he puts his head down and decides he wants to get to the basket, he gets to the damn basket, where he’s able to finish off the bounce with either hand.

He’s shown the ability to finish while absorbing contact in the air; while fading away and lofting shots over much taller players; and while using his off-hand to create separation near the basket.

He’s also shown an impressive feel for when his defender is gearing up for a screen in delayed transition, then wrong-footing him and getting easy access to the paint when opposing bigs are slow to get back.

Rose, though, is shooting only 38.9 percent on shots taken anytime other than off the drive. Defenses know he is not a threat to score outside the immediate area of the basket, and they treat him as such, practically daring him to shoot a jumper on every ball screen.

To his credit, Rose has often treated the space afforded to him when his defender ducks under a screen as a runway to the basket — over 38 percent of his shots this season have come within three feet of the rim, the highest share since his rookie season. He occasionally gets so locked in on attacking that space, though, that he misses readily-available passes and forces shots that aren’t there.

In the plays above, he missed open passes to Kristaps Porzingis (transition pick and pop), Willy Hernangomez (high pick and roll), and both Courtney Lee and Lance Thomas (drive and kick) to take tough floaters over significantly taller defenders — and with plenty of time left on the shot clock each time. He’s hit his share of passes to the corner out of pick and rolls, with dump-offs in transition (a specialty), and when he strings pick and pop plays out toward the sideline rather than going downhill, but because he so often puts his head down when he wants to attack the basket, he misses passes that look rather obvious on replay.