I don't know what you have listened or read from Bill Simmons. He has always been a Rockets hater. Anyone can say bad things about a player playing bad and good things about him playing good. Why should we listen to his "change of mind"? We have plenty of CF posters who know Rockets basketball better than Bill Simmons. And Simmons didn't just say Jalen Green was playing bad. He said some pretty derogatory things that mainstream media shouldn't even use.
Sure, if the award was for improvement over the course of a season. But I think most people vote on it as a year-over-year improvement. Compared to last year, Jalen is marginally better in some areas and in some areas he is marginally worse. A decrease in PPG is not going to garner you any votes.
I'm trying to argue your point, but I can't find game-by-game on/off numbers anywhere. Help? Or have you just been monitoring his seasonal on/off over time? You inspired me to do a dive into pbpstats.com, which is great stuff, so thanks for that!
As someone who sees this argument in politics so much, it's kinda funny to see how apt this can apply to sports fandom. You don't care that stars are generally slightly worse against good teams while Jalen Green falls off the face of the map, as long as there are some sort of drop off by everyone. This is the you're technically correct that "slightly worse" and "a lot worse" are both "worse." Fine for winning internet arguments, but less so when your favorite team is getting its ass kicked because there is still a practical difference between playing worse and playing a lot worse.
I don't have any access to pay sites so I was just eyeballing bref. But to answer your question I downloaded jalen's game log and some simple excel math came up with this. Games Played Team Differential Jalen Plus/Minus Difference Games 1-10 4.1 4.7 0.6 Games 11-20 3.5 -3.3 -6.8 Games 21-30 0.1 -4.3 -4.4 Games 31-40 -5.5 -1 4.5 Games 41-50 2.8 1.6 -1.2 Games 51-60 -6.2 -5.4 0.8 Games 61-70 12.4 13.8 1.4 Not sure how to do tables here but hopefully the numbers make sense. First number is team point differential, second is Jalen's +/-, and third is Jalen's number minus team's. As you can see Jalen's worse games by +/- are between games 11-30. And the reason is because Tari Eason played most of those games. And he was injured before and after for the most part. So yes, there have been improvements, but it's mostly cause Tari Eason is much better than our other backups.
https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/player/4865/onoff#tab-team_efficiency From cleaning the glass about 2 weeks before the ASB his on/off impact was at the 12th percentile which is putrid. It has steadily gone up since then to 40 percentile.
I think they usually give MIP to players whose stats improved season over season, not first 75% vs last 25% of the season.
I'm pretty sure Maxey has that locked up by now. Sengun could have made it a debate but he didn't get to get to the minimum amount of games played unfortunately.
Yes, I also think Maxey will get it. However, I am pretty sure I read that Sengun is eligible for the award, due to some exception about season ending injury or something similar.
Loving these suckups. I doubt they'll last, but after 3 years of being belittled or ignored, even the bandwagoning feels nice.
It would only be fair to compare next yr Green first two games as Rocket since Harden didn't become a Rocket until like his fourth season And man was he special in those first two games and 8yrs........hope-fully JG4 and the rest can bring back that '18/90's vibe TBD
Floor on Jalen is mow decent 24 ppg scorer. Some issues with efficiency but makes the right pass and defenfds rebounds OK. ceiling is top 15 player.