Round 2: Is Carmelo Anthony an Elite Level Player?

Back in March, as a kind of experiment to see just how juiced I could get in head to head combat with a Carmelo Anthony detractor, I was a guest critic on the blog of David Friedman, a very experienced basketball commentator whose mega blog is 20secondtimeout.blogspot.com. I bring this heated debate back to (1)Get us through the dog days of the off-season and (2)To partly make up for me being bogged down in a huge real estate project, which is keeping me away from Nuggets 1 lately.

Enjoy the fight. Here is Round 2:

At 3:11 PM, David Friedman said...

DAVID FRIEDMAN:

"Elite" means best of the best. You listed three "high scoring" (not sure how you defined this) small forwards who outrebound Melo. Don't forget that Melo is also a poor defensive player. If he is an "elite" player then he should be able to raise the games of non-elite players. Denver has much more talent than the Lakers, who have been a solid playoff team all year because of Kobe Bryant and are still in the top eight despite missing both starting forwards, the backup small forward and other players (in addition to starting a CBA level point guard who is probably the worst starting point guard in the league and certainly worse than anyone in the West). What kind of record do you think a nucleus of Kobe-Iverson-Camby would have? Is there any way that team would be below .500?

As for Najera, scoring has never been part of his job description. He is a scrappy role player who plays defense. I'm sure Kobe would like to have someone like him on the Lakers.

Melo is a talented player but he is not an elite one.


At 7:13 PM, Nuggets 1 said...

NUGGETS 1:

Carmelo Anthony is underrated by so many people that I took some time and came up with a relatively simple but surprisingly effective statistical comparison of the very best players in the NBA. Using the up to the minute stats at www.dougstats.com, I used the following performance indicators to come up with a "Gross Defense & Team Play Index":

Assists
Steals
Blocks
Offensive Rebounds
Total Rebounds

This index measures defense much more than it measures team play; you could double or triple the assists even it out more. I used the per 48 minutes stats across the board to eliminate differences caused by differences in playing time per game among the best players.

Here are the top 10 on the limited measure, which correspond to what fans think of when they think of defensive superstars:

Duncan 27.6
Okafur 27.6
Garnett 27.3
Kidd 26.7
Howard, D 26.6
Boozer 25.8
Ilgauskas 25.7
O'Neill, J 24.8
O'Neal, S 24.5
Ming 23.3
Gasol 23.3
Brand 23.2
Stoudemire 23.0

Carmelo Anthony, a more offensively oriented player than these, scores 17.4 on this. Kobe Bryant is at 17.0 and LeBron James is at 18.5.

Then, I subtracted the turnovers per 48 minutes to get the "Net Defense & Team Play Index". Melo takes a hit here because he gets slightly more turnovers per 48 minutes than other top players.

If you stopped there you would have a limited result, appreciated only by those who are biased in favor of defense and big men who use their sheer size to produce on the court. But games up to and including the Championship are decided by points, not by which team gets the most rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks.

On the other hand, if you simply add the points per 48 minutes, that might bias things too much in favor of scoring for the tastes of those who appreciate the other aspects of the game. And you have the simple mathematical fact that a score counts for 2 or sometimes 3 points, even though it is one event. So I simply divided the points per 48 minutes by 2, to come up with a basic but useful and effective "Offensive Punch" Index, and then added the result to the "Net Defense and Team Play Index".

Dividing the points by two, obviously, leaves the results still at least somewhat biased in favor of defensively oriented players such as Boozer and Dwight Howard. The resulting index, which I am simply calling "Total Player Value" for now, is biased in favor of power forwards and centers over guards, with small forwards being somewhere in the middle.

The Results:

TOTAL
PLAYER POS VALUE
Garnett PF 37.9
Duncan PF 37.7
Boozer PF 36.7
Camby C 36.5
O'Neal, S C 36.1
Ming C 35.8
Nowitzki PF 35.4
Okafor C 35.3
O'Neill, J C 34.1
Stoudemire C 34.0
Wade SG 33.7
Gasol PF 33.4
Howard, D PF 33.4
Brand PF 33.1
Bosh PF 33.0
Ilgauskus C 32.5
Kidd PG 32.3
Marion PF 31.2
Anthony SF 31.1
McGrady SG 31.0
James SF 30.7
Davis PG 30.6
Bryant SG 30.4
Nash PG 29.8
Webber C 29.5
Arenas PG 29.0
Carter SG 29.0
Okur C 28.4
Butler SF 28.0
Pierce SF 27.6
Odom PF 27.4
Allen SG 26.2
Parker T PG 24.6
Iverson PG 24.0
Redd SG 23.8
Prince SF 22.2

Melo is the 19th most valuable player in the league, according to this statistic, which emphasizes everything other than scoring more than scoring. Centers and power forwards are 16 of the 18 players ahead of Melo. Only SG Dwayne Wade at position 11 and PG Jason Kidd at position 17 are not centers or power forwards.

There are over 400 active players in the NBA. I'd say elite would cover the top 5 percent at least, which would be the top 20. Melo would squeak in. Of course, someone more particular might want to limit the elite to the top 10 or 15.

I have to note this too: Melo is slightly more valuable than Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Steve Nash, Gilbert Arenas, Baron Davis, Tracy McGrady, Vince Carter, and the others you can see. Yet if you took a popularity survey, most of these other players would be considered better overall players than Melo. Aside from suffering alot of bias in general for reasons that are too complicated to discuss here, Melo specifically suffers from being such an efficient scorer, because many fans assume that someone who scores so much can not possibly be doing much (or at least enough)of the other things that win basketball games.

But the facts show otherwise: Melo IS doing enough of the other things for him to be considered an elite player already. And since he is young, he will probably get even better in the future.

Once they see the facts, only those very biased in favor of size and defense are still going to insist that Melo is not one of the very best pro basketball players playing today.

More installments are coming, to be followed by a new comment by me regarding Melo's coming of age playoff series, and how those like Mr. David Friedman now have to update their views.