Bulls blow out Cavs, but somehow this is about Derrick Rose vs. LeBron James

Friday night's game was...too blowout-y, didn't watch. I did like this stat from Bulls 101: "It was the seventh time this season the Bulls have handed out 30 assists or more as a team, which is pretty ridiculous considering no other team has done it more than three times."

And the Heat lost, so not only are the Bulls back in the Eastern Conference lead, we can make fun of LeBron James, fairly or not. For the latter type, you gotta love Sam Smith just spitballin' nonsense:

It’s making for an uncomfortable vote. How can you be MVP if you keep making what the apologists keep saying is the right basketball play and the least valuable.

This...huh?

More relevant to who signs his paychecks, in the same post Sam says this about Rose:

Rose again was one of five on threes, the third straight game he was one of five. He’s shooting just 31 percent on the season on threes. But he’s really much better than that. If you watch at the end of quarters, Rose generally gets a half court shot when the Bulls have the ball. Most players in the NBA don’t want those half court heaves because of what it does to their shooting percentages. Rose got two more of them Friday. But Rose couldn’t care less about stats, making him further unique among his peers.

The beauty of stats is that someone else watches the game and writes it down. So when basketball-reference rolled out their PlayIndex+ a couple of weeks ago, commenter DRoseO1 went through Rose's shots and found that while Rose does take a lot of these types of low-percentage heaves, removing them moved his 3pt% up a single percentage point.

[OK, doubling back after publishing this, I found Alex's method to eliminate attempts by shot distance, and that currently has Rose moving from 30.6% to 33.7%. My point was more that while it's certainly statistically significant, it's not by that much, and Sam should just ask a Bulls PR guy down the hall to dig it up instead of saying 'much better'. He's not shooting the 3 well this year.]

I'm not trying to say Derrick Rose isn't amazing, quite the opposite: he's so great he shouldn't need 'comforting' though nonsense. And to his rival, I love making fun of LeBron unless it's to insinuate he's not amazing at basketball, the best in the league even.

But indeed, Rose (appears to be) the better dude, which is something I don't particularly care about, but it's something. He may have been a dud at the All-Star game, but this Rose anecdote (with video) from Cavs blog Stepien Rules made me smile, and may make Sam 'uncomfortable' in a different sort of way*.

After completely annihilating the Cavaliers, there wasn't too much to really ask Rose about. As he walked through the locker room, towards the media, Derrick actually stopped and said real politely to the 7 or 10 people: "Do you guys want to talk?". Everyone, including myself, started pulling out their recorders or whatever and waited for somebody to ask a question. Awkward pause ensued, nobody said anything. Rose then smiled, kinda started laughing, and then said, "Does anybody want to start?" I started laughing myself, couldn't think of anything to say, then finally somebody asked the first question. Derrick Rose is the coolest, is what I walked out of there thinking. Maybe next time I'll ask him something.

*(Yes, I mean arousal.)