Who is the Mavs Most Improved Player this year?

[mvossman]

It depends on what you want to measure to define improvement.  A good bit of the DFS argument comes from the expansion of his game (doing new things) and doing so without losing efficiency.  A good overall measure might be VORP where DFS went from a career high 1.0 to a career high-er 1.9 (which is tied for second on the team with DFS).  Part of defining MIP might come from answering the following question...

Before the season from among JB and DFS, I expected _________ to have the second best VORP on the team.  Whichever one you pick, the other one is probably MIP.  BTW, if I'm being fair, Lebron and EPM tell different stories.  Both players actually dropped their Lebron score from season to season.  Brunson took a much bigger jump than DFS in EPM.

My issue with picking Brunson is he pretty well exactly matched the expectation one would have had from a 27% increase in minutes.  If you look at him per minute, his PER and WS/48 and scoring all stayed the same (so the improvement all came from the extra minutes).  Boards went down and assists went up on a per minute basis and his TS% went down 0.35% while Usage went from 20.2 to 21.9.  Keeping efficient shooting with an uptick in minutes and usage is an accomplishment, but I'm not sure it is improvement.  Not trying to dog JB.  I like what we got from all four candidates and all four certainly passed most people's expectations.  I just think DFS is the best of the best for this category.

I think one thing to look at is the level of competition he is facing between last year and this year.  Last year he was coming off the bench and a significant number of his minutes were against bench players.  This season he started and played a lot more minutes against starters.  That is why his box score stats (like VORP) don't show an improvement this season, but advanced on/off stats like EPM and Lebron show that he has improved significantly.  Also, playing 7 more minutes a game at a high level is added "impact".  He basically contributed more than 25% over the previous season without even looking at improved competition.