bebopdeluxe wrote:Mitchell has had a great season, and he is a great player...but to me, this call is not "splitting hairs". And - again - if Mitchell supporters have a non-subjective, statistically/analytically-based argument on why Mitchell deserves to be Rookie of the Year over Simmons, I would love to read it.
It's one thing to say that Mitchell supporters have been overly defensive or spit weak and perspective-less arguments--there's always a lot of that in ROY debates--but it also seems misinformed or dishonest to say you can't see an argument that Mitchell is as good. The eye test mixed with stats tells me a pretty clear story. I've probably seen every Simmons game but 3 or 4 this year, and he's sort of a high-level, very entertaining opportunist: he reads the floor, improvises, watches for defensive screw-ups, etc. But almost everything he does on offense still depends on defenses screwing up or on his shooters hitting pretty tough shots. I don't mean to say that Simmons doesn't do a lot to make that possible--he obviously does and not many players can make all those things happen--but he can't take over games or impose his will as much as we'd like, and if RoCo and Redick aren't hitting semi-contested 30 footers, his stats and impact often aren't that great. (Fwiw, I think the first thing he'll improve next year is getting his shots off from 4-10 ft, and drawing fouls).
Mitchell on the other hand can take over a game and make something happen by himself, largely since he can put the ball in the hole himself (and also creates pretty well). He can do that every time, and he can do it in many ways. (Also, iirc Simmons +/- without Embiid isn't very good, so that would be the building block for an argument against Simmons' superior impact.) Simmons is in a great spot for his type of game to succeed now, with almost all of the rotation being near-elite 3pt shooters (Redick, Bellinelli, Ilyasova, Saric, and Covington, plus good-not-great Embiid). We see that every single game. And Jazz fans see Mitchell being effective at scoring in a bunch of different ways every single game too, while also chipping in pretty impressive defense, creating, IQ, etc. They're both in pretty good situations for themselves, but let's not pretend that Simmons' putting up good advanced #s is all because of his inherent talent, or that those advanced #s aren't capturing something more than just purely superior game.
Club Shai Shai GA
Except Oden manged to play over 100 games in the NBA, I don't think Embiid will play more.