Oh, and did I forget to mention that he agreed to donate $1,000 per point last night to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund? Since he scored 32 points, that is $32,000 for relief.  Not bad.

So back to this whole all-star thing.  Rose is teetering on the edge of his first all-star appearance and he has clearly made his case.  Although the first month of the season he was playing with a nagging ankle injury, he has shown that he belongs among the NBA’s elite RIGHT NOW.  Not in 3 years, not next year, but now.  He is by far the best player on a team full of scrubs and has managed to keep those scrubs in the Eastern playoff race by skill and sheer force of will.  Some idiot writers over at NBA.com think that Rose, Deng, and Noah have a shot next year, but not now.  Deng I agree with, Noah is borderline, but Rose seems like a slam-dunk to make the team.  Obviously it is up to the players to vote on the reserves, but I think Rose’s 19.4 points, 5.9 assists, and 3.8 rebounds on 47% shooting combined with his ability to completely take over games puts him on another level.

We’ll find out soon enough if he gets a spot, but he has definitely earned it.  Want to see the video of his dunk again as it was happening?  Yeah, me too.  Here goes:

Rick Morrissey drives the Joakim Noah bandwagon after eating his words the other day.

Before I start in on this post (which is mostly going to be about how Noah should be an all-star this season), I just want to throw out a huge “I told you so”.  I have loved Noah since day 1 (yes Ethan, I’m happy we took him over Spencer Hawes), and now that everyone else has joined in, I feel vindicated.

Anyways on to Noah’s amazing 2009-2010 campaign.  He has improved in all three aspects of the game: Offense, Defense, and Rebounding.  Clearly the kid has hit the gym hard, putting on some added muscle and bulk.  The great thing about that muscle is that whether he appears that much stronger or not, he actually is playing stronger.  He is being more aggressive on the offensive end and seems to be able to tear balls out of other big men’s hands way more this season.  His rebounding numbers reflect that difference, as he is averaging about 12 rebounds a game.

On the offensive end, its not like he became Amare Stoudemire all of a sudden.  In fact he is still a very shaky player on that end.  The difference this season is he has gone from totally unreliable and clogging up the offense, to serviceable with a bit of a hook shot around the rim and an inexplicably decent 10-12 foot jump shot (where the hell did that come from?)  He’s never going to average 20 points a game, but if he can finish strong around the rim and make a shot from more than 5 feet out a few times a game, he will be very effective.  As it stands, he is averaging 11.5 points per game so far this year.

Defense has been huge.  This relates back to his conditioning, as he seems to be bullied around significantly less this season than in years past.  As great as that has been, he has also seemed to learn what it means to rotate on defense.  As simple as that sounds, he seemed a little lost the last couple years knowing when to slide over to help cut off penetration or rotate out on a shooter.  The ferocious play by him on the boards and at the defensive end is giving the Bulls the identity of a great rebounding and defensive team.  This is especially important with the team’s shooting in the crapper so far.

So should he be an all-star?  Well look at the other candidates.  Although Noah is not on the ballot, that is almost irrelevant.  The ballot is only to select the starters and Dwight Howard is a lock to get that spot in the East.  Most all-star coaches carry 3 centers though, and the only possible competition in the East (outside of Shaq, but he has no shot), is Brook Lopez.  As good as Lopez has been (18.5 points, 8.5 rebounds), his team is 0 for the season.

I’ve been on the bandwagon all along, but I welcome the rest of you to join in.  Noah All-Star Campaign at NQTC starts today!

In his first season with the Cubbies, Derrek Lee hit 39 doubles, 32 home runs, and drew 68 walks en route to a great season.  Then something amazing happened in 2005.  Lee, a career .270s hitter, hit .335 with 45 home runs, 50 doubles and 85 walks.  He finished 3rd in MVP voting and won the Silver Slugger and another Gold Glove.  He made his first all-star game as well.  Was this crazy 2005 season the start of something special?  Or just a fluke season and he would return to the norm?

Cubs fans never got to find out the answer to that question, because in 2006, only 2 weeks after signing a huge contract extension, Derrek Lee broke his wrist and missed most of the season.  Would he ever be the same?  He was 30 years old, and most ballplayers never come back quite the same after a serious hand injury like that.  In general it takes at least a full season to rebuild hand strength and get your bat speed back up to normal.

In 2007-2008, he continued to see the ball well, hitting an average of .304 with 71 walks per season.  This would seem to indicate that 2005 Derrek Lee, the one who had hit the ball more than 60 points higher than his career average, may have been the Derrek Lee that Cubs fans were going to get going forward.  The wrist injury clearly showed its impact, however.  In 2007-2008, he hit only 22 and 20 home runs respectively.  He also blasted a huge 43 and 41 doubles in those two seasons.  This would seem to point to the fact that the tiny loss in his power resulting from the injury was enough to turn many of what were previously home run blasts into hard hit doubles.

And maybe that’s where the story would have ended.  Most Cubs fans (myself included), were resigned to the fact that maybe D-Lee was going to be a Gold Glove first basemen that hit about .300, got on base well, and hit a lot of doubles.  With the power gone, it wasn’t like D-Lee had been rendered useless, his contributions were just going to be lower than we had all hoped.

Bumbling through another rough Cubs start this year, most of us didn’t think twice about Derrek Lee.  No worries about his slow start, we thought.  He is a consistent guy.  He’ll hit about .300 and get us a lot of doubles.  No one expected he would find his power stroke though.  It’s not like he wasn’t hitting the ball hard the last couple years, its just that it wasn’t quite getting over the fence.  Well all that seems to have changed.  A wrist injury is a serious thing and usually takes about a year to fully recover from, so we all just assumed that he never would completely recover after two years of lacking 30 home run power.  Looks like we were wrong.  Maybe at 31, it took him 2 years to regain that power.  To date, Derrek Lee is hitting .288 with 16 home runs and his slugging percentage is .519, the highest of his career outside the 2005 season.  Those doubles that used to be home runs?  Yeah they are home runs again.  He is on pace to hit well over 30 dingers and is carrying an anemic Cubs offense to a 41-40 record at the midway point.

Is this just a hot streak?  Or is Derrek Lee back, the way it was supposed to be before the tragic wrist injury?  There’s no way to know for sure, but there’s no reason to think he won’t keep stroking the ball like he did before 2006.