Will Derrick Rose’s Play Improve With New Proposed Scheduling?

On Monday, it was reported that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has put a legitimate emphasis on cutting down on short turnarounds for teams during the regular season. If the schedule opens up for teams, how will that affect a guy like Derrick Rose?

One of the many issues that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has been planning to address is putting less stress on players during the grind that is the 82-game regular season.

Silver has proposed in eliminating as many “back-to-backs” for teams, including the “four-game-in-five-night” spans that teams have to endure throughout the year. The Chicago Bulls for example, played four games in five nights on three different occasions throughout the 2014-15 season, and went 8-4 during those spans (with seven of those games at home).

With the 2015-16 season schedule set to be released soon, Silver has “almost” accomplished his goal of eliminating the spans, according to Grantland writer and NBA insider Zach Lowe.

Draft of NBA schedule circulating among teams. Sources say 4-games-in-5-nights nearly eliminated in that draft version.
— Zach Lowe (@ZachLowe_NBA) August 3, 2015

Since 2005, the “four-game-in-five night” spans have been reduced from 3.7 percent of team’s games (90 games) to 2.8 percent of team’s games (70 games) in 2015, per ProBasketballTalk.com.

There’s still work to do for Silver to completely rid the league of those treacherous spans for teams, and one of the people that will be thankful for Silver’s work will be Bulls point guard Derrick Rose.

Rose played in his first extended action last season for the first time since his MVP campaign during the 2010-11 season, and despite playing in 51 games, the injury bug still bit the youngest MVP in league history.

Here’s a list of why Rose missed 31 games during the 2014-15 season:

Missed two games on Nov. 1 and 4 – Tweaked both ankles on Halloween vs. Cleveland
Missed two games on Nov. 7 and 8 (back-to-back for Bulls) – Rest from ankle sprains
Missed four games from Nov. 15-21 – Strained left hamstring
Missed two games on Dec. 18 and 19 (back-to-back for Bulls) – Illness
Missed one game on Jan. 10 – Left knee soreness (same knee that Rose tore ACL in 2011 Playoffs)
Missed 20 games from Feb. 25-Apr. 5 – Right meniscus tear (same knee from previous meniscus tear in 2013-14 season)

Last week, Ian Levy of Nylon Calculus wrote on how Derrick Rose was a completely different player in terms of how much rest he got in between games during the 2014-15 season.

Levy wrote:

"For an examination of player performance at the single-game level, Kevin Ferrigan’s DRE is a handy metric. DRE connects single game box score statistics to RAPM, creating a per 100 possession estimate of a player’s total impact. It can also be calculated across a stretch of games or an entire season. DRE was not fond of Rose last year, rating him at -2.35 for the season (0.00 represents an average level of performance)."

While using Kevin Ferrigan’s “DRE” metric, Levy went on to display the difference between Rose playing on no rest and Rose with one day and two days of rest:

Derrick Rose with no days of rest, one day of rest, and two days of rest, according to the DRE metric. (Data table via Ian Levy.)

Reminder: 0.00 is an average performance from a player, so yeah … Rose’s numbers on no days of rest is pretty startling.

Further more, Rose with no days of rest last season was not a good player.

In the 11 games Rose played with no days of rest, Rose shot 35.5 percent from the field with 36 turnovers in 316 total minutes last season.

How is that significant?

In the six games with two days of rest, Rose shot 46.1 percent from the field with just 15 turnovers in 174 total minutes. Sure, the sample size is a bit different, but the numbers support that Rose needs more rest at this point in his career with the injuries.

The “less stress on players” movement wouldn’t only affect Rose, but it would positively affect the Bulls roster, after five seasons under the nightly grind that is playing for Tom Thibodeau.

An interesting tidbit from Levy again:

"They [The Bulls] were outscored by 3.2 points per 100 possessions on back-to-backs, about the same as the Brooklyn Nets’ scoring margin last season. On two days of rest, they outscored opponents by 9.7 points per 100 possessions, a margin that would have ranked second in the league behind the Golden State Warriors across the entire season. So at team level, two days of rest was worth about 13 points per 100 possessions in net performance."

Not only was Rose much better with two days of rest, the Bulls collectively were much better offensively as a whole. Rose wasn’t the only one to have his fair share of injuries, as Joakim Noah and Doug McDermott battled through their own knee injuries throughout the 2014-15 season.

Silver cutting down on tough stretches for teams — four games in five nights, back-to-backs — wouldn’t just benefit an injury-plagued player like Derrick Rose, it would benefit the entire league. Guys getting more rest means a better product on television and even more money for the league.

Next: Derrick Rose's Top 5 Performances From The 2014-15 Season

On Monday, it was reported that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has put a legitimate emphasis on cutting down on short turnarounds for teams during the regular season. If the schedule opens up for teams, how will that affect a guy like Derrick Rose?

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