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 1-5 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-five games into the year, they’re three 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.
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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 17.6 points, 4.0 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.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than with Porzingis, who Rose seemingly misses more than anyone else. Rose has made 33 baskets off passes from Porzingis, per NBA.com’s SportVU data, while Porzingis has made only 39 off passes from Rose. Brandon Jennings has played 190 fewer minutes with Porzingis than Rose, yet has connected with him on 10 more baskets. That balance is way out of whack. It should come as no surprise, but Rose most often misses Porzingis when he has his head down on the drive and isn’t looking to pass — he works his way into tough floaters or forced layups over multiple defenders instead.
Those extra shots that should be passes get into the matter of Rose’s efficiency — or rather lack thereof. Rose sports a 26.3 percent usage rate. That’s the second-lowest mark of his career but also the second-highest on the Knicks. It’s in the top-40 among qualified players leaguewide, meaning he’s using possessions almost at the rate of a No. 1 (or 1B, at least) option. The problem is that Rose’s true shooting percentage (a measure of shooting efficiency that accounts for 3s and free-throws) ranks 209th out of that group of 285 qualified players. He’s using 6.6 percent more possessions than the average player while shooting nearly five percent worse. In other words, his efficiency doesn’t come anywhere close to justifying the amount of possessions he personally uses.
Using a lot of possessions while maintaining below-average efficiency wouldn’t be quite as big an issue if Rose contributed on the defensive side of the floor. (The specific usefulness of his driving skill is so rare elsewhere on the Knicks’ roster that it would be difficult to argue that he doesn’t help their offense despite his own inefficiency.) However, Rose himself is one of the biggest factors in the Knicks’ poor defense.
While the Knicks have myriad problems on the defensive side of the floor, nearly all of them stem from the fact that — for seemingly the 15th straight year — they simply cannot stop ball-handlers at the point of attacking. Opposing guards and wings live in the paint all night, every night. That repetitive penetration draws help from all over the floor, which opens up players either underneath the basket or behind the arc, depending on the area of the floor from which the help comes. Rose is by no means solely faultless in any of these areas, but everything starts with the fact that he and Brandon Jennings have a maddening tendency to die on screens.
Watching that video is like having a recurring nightmare. Dennis Schroder just rains pick-and-roll jumper after pick-and-roll jumper, with Rose running directly into Dwight Howard or Paul Millsap’s screens over and over and over. He doesn’t get much help from Joakim Noah (Did you find yourself asking, “Why doesn’t Noah just step up already?” by like clip four?), but if Rose had actually gotten over any of those screens (or alternately, gone under them, given that Schroder isn’t the most threatening shooter in the world), the looks would have been considerably more difficult.
And as you can see later in the video, Rose’s propensity for screen-death doesn’t just hurt when it’s his man getting the shot. If he dies on the screen, the big working with him in pick-and-roll actions has to stay with Rose’s man for an extra beat and effectively has to guard two players. That almost never works. Rose leaves Noah and Porzingis out to dry all the time. Porzingis has been able to cover up for some of it with great individual rim-protection (he ranks third in field goal percentage allowed among 51 players challenging at least five shots per game at the rim), but Noah hasn’t. Because of the threat posed by the two-on-ones teams so often generate with their pick-and-rolls, the Knicks’ wings feel they have to send extra, ultra-aggressive help from the perimeter, which is a huge factor in their giving up 12.6 wide-open three-point attempts per game, the fourth-highest mark in the league, per SportVU. Again, he’s not solely at fault in any of these issues. He’s just the start of the cascading problems.
His issues aren’t limited to on-ball defense, either. He’s just as prone to off-ball mistakes.
Rose gets caught in the elevator doors in the first play above, yielding a wide-open three to D.J. Augustin. Next, he helps off Augustin one pass away to corral a pass to Bismack Biyombo 18 feet from the rim, and Augustin gets another wide-open trey. He only feigns help on a driving Trevor Ariza when he’s the last line of defense between Ariza and the basket, deciding that simply stunting toward him and sticking his hand out is the better choice than abandoning career 28 percent three-point shooter Corey Brewer. He falls asleep in transition and lets Ariza out-run him down the floor for a dunk, then decides to abandon Ariza (hitting just south of 38 percent of his threes this year and over the last five) in the corner to help on a pick-and-roll that already three (arguably four) Knicks devoted to it. These are basic mistakes, and they’re pretty common, both for Rose and the rest of the team.
All of these issues, of course, are reflected in the numbers. Rose ranks 71st among point guards (out of 86) and 404th among all players (out of 434) in Defensive Real Plus-Minus. The Knicks’ dreadful defense is 2.4 points worse per 100 possessions with him on the floor. There isn’t a single teammate with whom Rose shared the floor for at least 100 minutes with the Knicks sporting an above-average defensive efficiency while they’ve been on the court together. (That’s also true of Melo and Noah, by the way. Porzingis at least has above-average marks with Jennings and Holiday.)
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Has he had good defensive possessions, or even good defensive games? Sure. Nobody is 100 percent bad, 100 percent of the time; and nobody is 100 percent good, 100 percent of the time. Even Kawhi Leonard gets caught napping every once in a while. It happens. So do stretches of good, spirited defense from players who mostly tend toward the bad on that end. And unfortunately, that’s been largely true of Rose. The same is true of his offense. While inefficient overall, Rose has had several games where he’s been remarkably effective — not just with his shot but with the pass as well. There’s just a consistency to it that isn’t there. It shows up every few games. (He’s had an above-average shooting efficiency in back-to-back games twice all season.)
It shouldn’t be all that controversial to term a high-usage, low-efficiency player whose contributions are mostly limited to one side of the floor, a negative player. Because Rose is who he is, though, that’s just how it is.