Round 3: 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 3:

At 8:10 PM, David Friedman said...

DAVID FRIEDMAN:

You obviously spent a lot of time and effort putting these numbers together. Your passion for basketball is quite commendable. Nevertheless, you have not proven that Melo is an elite player.

First, before even discussing the merits of your methodology let's look at your conclusion. You conclude that Melo is the 19th most valuable player in the NBA. At the end of the season, three All-NBA teams are selected, recognizing the top 15 players in the league. By your account, despite having a career year, Melo would not make that cut (he did make All-NBA Third Team last year, though I wonder if he would have using your system).

I don't know how "elite" the All-NBA Third Team should be considered to be, either. For a long time there were only two All-NBA Teams. When I say "elite," I am thinking of MVP caliber players, which limits the discussion primarily to the first two All-NBA Teams (with a few exceptions, like if there are four great centers but only two can make the first two All-NBA Teams because of positional designations).

You have to believe in a pretty big conspiracy theory to go along with the idea that Melo is simply the victim of bias. The fans have never voted him into the All-Star Game. OK, maybe the fans are not that well informed. However, the coaches have never voted him on to the All-Star Team, either (he made it this year as a special injury selection by David Stern). Melo has made the All-NBA Team (selected by the media) once. Why exactly should fans, coaches and media all be singling him out?

If you look again at your final list objectively, you will see that several of its rankings are highly questionable. Do you really believe that Ilgauskas is more valuable than LeBron James? Or that Pau Gasol is better than Kidd, T-Mac, James and Bryant? I actually disagree with some of those rankings more than placing Melo 19th. I don't have Melo in my top 10--which would be as far as my "elite" list would go--but if I started listing 11-20 and 21-30 I'm sure Melo would fit in there somewhere, so 19 could be right or pretty close. Still, I'm skeptical of the overall results that your system produced. Also, Boozer is too high, Okafor is WAY too high and some other rankings are questionable as well.


At 9:26 PM, Nuggets 1 said...

NUGGETS 1:

As I said, the ranking above was something I put together to check for myself whether Melo is an elite player or not. I used a relatively simple additive formula, though the results are far better than they would otherwise be due to the use of the per 48 minutes measures. As I said, that forumula is biased in favor of very defensively oriented players, and the top 20 positions are mostly centers and power forwards, as you can see in the previous post. In other words, the formula is biased against a player who puts scoring above everything else, such as Melo.

I never said that this is the way I would rate the players, though most of the players listed would appear on my list, but in a different order.

By refraining from dividing the points per 48 minutes by 2, and simply adding the points per 48 minutes to all the other performance measures per minute, you get a less biased measure, though some would argue that now there is a small bias in favor of scorers.

Melo becomes the 9th best player in the NBA:

Ming 53.6
Nowitzki 52.0
Garnett 51.7
Duncan 51.7
Wade 51.5
O'Neal, S 51.3
Boozer 51.1
Nash 50.7
Anthony 49.8
Stoudemire 49.0
McGrady 47.6
Bosh 47.5
Gasol 47.3
O'Neill, J 47.2
James 46.7
Arenas 46.0
Brand 46.0
Okafor 45.3
Howard, D 45.3
Carter 44.9
Camby 44.5
Davis 44.0
Pierce 43.7
Ilgauskas 42.4
Marion 42.4
Allen 42.1
Okur 41.5
Kidd 41.4
Redd 40.6
Butler 39.8
Webber 39.8
Iverson 38.6
Bryant 38.4
Parker, T 38.0
Odom 37.5
Prince 31.4

This is closer to how I would rate the players, though even I would probably have a little more bias in favor of rebounders and assist specialists than there is in this simple formula. Melo would most likely end up ranked in the low teens if I spent, say, 100 hours working on a complex formula.

This list is less biased against scoring, so more folks will tend to agree with the rankings, except that many will disagree that Melo should be ranked so high.

Now, why is it that the views about Melo are different from the facts? I could write a book about bias; and there are probably at least two dozen sources of the extensive bias in the way that people look at how Anthony plays. Let me mention three.

In order to easily win the all-star voting, or MVP recognition, a player must play for a solid team, a "legitimate contender" The Nuggets were 17-65 in the year before Melo arrived, and they were 43-39 in the year after he arrived. They were just about the worst team in the league before he got there and then they have been slightly above average since he got there. He has improved the team as much as one man can.

Even Michael Jordan did not immediately produce a winning team in Chicago, The Bulls were a losing team for the first 4 years Jordan was on the team. They were 30-52 in his second year, 1985-86. There were no internet posters or misguided coaches trying to blame Jordan for all of that losing back then. By contrast, Melo is under a microscope in today's world.

The Nugget's position in the NBA has not changed much since Melo's arrival in Denver. The Iverson thing, it turns out, is not in and of itself going to make the Nuggets a legitimate contender, as we can now plainly see. It's alot to do about nothing, as Shakespeare said. The Nuggets are still losing almost every game they play against the top teams of the West. If you were to take away Melo from the Nuggets right now, but leave Iverson, you would have the Sixers of the West, one of the very worst teams in the League. Anyone who plays on such a team is going to face a substantial fan (and coach community) bias against being considered an elite player. There are alot of folks in Denver right now who are being harder on Melo than folks anywhere else.

More generally, the Denver front office is struggling to make Denver a "basketball town," but they have not yet succeeded. It is still a football, baseball, and hockey town more than it is a basketball town.

A second bias I will mention, which is obvious if you think about it, is age. Melo had only one year of college and is only 22 years old. He hasn't "paid his dues" yet like, say, Kobe Bryant or Steve Nash have. Fans are still not as familier with him as they are with the established "elite players".

A third bias I will mention is that he grew up in extremely low income neighborhoods, whereas the vast majority of the popular elite players grew up in neighborhoods that were at least close to average economically. There are those who automatically associate low income neighborhoods with criminality and other shady things, which is a real drag on any pro basketball player's reputation. For more information on this, you could consult Allen Iverson, who has become an expert on this bias.


At 9:58 PM, Nuggets 1 said...
In the previous post, I made a transcription error on the Nash and the Bryant calculations. Nash should be 42.7 and Bryant should be much higher at 48.0. Melo remains slightly ahead of Bryant and goes ahead of Nash with these corrections.

Sorry, I was working a little too quickly; I am sure everything is correct now.

Corrected Complete List:

Ming 53.6
Nowitzki 52.0
Garnett 51.7
Duncan 51.7
Wade 51.5
O'Neal, S 51.3
Boozer 51.1
Anthony 49.8
Stoudemire 49.0
Bryant 48.0
McGrady 47.6
Bosh 47.5
Gasol 47.3
O'Neill, J 47.2
James 46.7
Arenas 46.0
Brand 46.0
Okafor 45.3
Howard, D 45.3
Carter 44.9
Camby 44.5
Davis 44.0
Pierce 43.7
Nash 42.7
Ilgauskas 42.4
Marion 42.4
Allen 42.1
Okur 41.5
Kidd 41.4
Redd 40.6
Butler 39.8
Webber 39.8
Iverson 38.6
Parker, T 38.0
Odom 37.5
Prince 31.4

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.