Making the jump. NBA most improved player. Jeff Green

[Eric M VAN]

All the back and forth over what exactly are the expectations for Jeff Green in the upcoming 2013-14 season got me thinking about how to figure out "what" kind of statistical jump would he have to make in order to meet some of the expectations that the more optimistic posters have laid out for him.

I wondered if there was any kind of historical reference of examples of player X being recognized for surpassing his previous performance by some kind of amount that would give credence to some of the lofty expectations being thrown around for Green.

The Most Improved player award (to me) has always been some kind of subjective thingy that attributed substantial statistical improvement  to a player being in a situation where there was an injury or trade that significantly improved said players minutes and thus his stats.

I skimmed through some of the data available since the award has been handed out, looking at the age a player received it, how many years the player had been in the league, trying to find an example that would fit Green's current situation....I'm still looking though there were some players who may be "fits" in age & tenure. Hedo Turkoglu, Jalen Rose..sort the list by age and look for yourself

http://www.basketball-reference.com/awards/mip.html (those entries with a "V" after them list the voting for the award for that particular year)

None of this proves anything but in looking a bit harder I found an interesting article on the last years players being considered.

http://www.sheridanhoops.com/2013/04/04/trying-to-quantify-the-most-improved-player-award/

An excerpt:

There’s no single stat that indicates how much a player has improved from one season to the next. And why has that player improved? Is it just from increased playing time, or are there other factors involved? There’s just a whole mess of gray area involved.

To make it a little bit easier, we will only compare the top five players in the latest Sheridan Hoops Most Improved Player Rankings: Houston’s Omer Asik, Orlando’s Nikola Vucevic, New Orleans’ Greivis Vasquez, Indiana’s Paul George and Milwaukee’s Larry Sanders.

The problem with the list is that all of the players are very different. How do you measure a point guard like Vasquez against a stopper like George and an energized paint stalwart like Sanders?

I'm still farting around with it to get a starting point for Green and extrapolating a % increase to see where he would fall if he did something crazy like avg 20-8-4 pts/rd/ast that have been tossed around (or whatever #'s would be needed to compare) but I'm not sure how much I really care at 1 AM EST on September 17th 2013 

Interesting stuff to me at least in trying to be realistic for a players improvement.

[indeedproceed]

This is quasi-unrelated to the OP, but Jeff Green averaged something like 17 and 6 for the latter part of 2013.

How much can the guy legitimately improve on that? If he started every game, and got like 20 and 5 with good shooting, that's great, right?

But if guys like Paul George improve his shooting %, or Anthony Davis plays 75 games and New Orleans makes the playoffs, it's just...seems out of reach to me. The Cs gotta make the playoffs on Jeff's 20+ ppg or he's gotta average 25 and 7 in a good way, or I just think it's super unlikely.

[D.o.s.]

Generally it's been awarded to the player who gets a large minutes increase and plays up to his per36 estimated statistics.

Ladies and Gentlemen; Ryan Anderson (from 22mpg to 32), Paul George (29mpg to 37), Kevin Love (28mpg to 35), Monta Ellis (18 to 34), Boris Diaw (18 to 35), Bobby Simmons (24 to 37), Zach Randolph (17 to 37), etc.

There are a couple of exceptions (Danny Granger and Hedo Turkoglu), but it's a pretty reliable formula--as reliable as anything can be when it's at the fickle mercy of a voting bloc.

Fun article, though.