MVP Zack Rosen

After witnessing another Penn loss despite another great effort by sophomore guard Zack Rosen, I was thinking about just how much worse (if that's even possible) this Penn team would be without the red-haired floor general.

In fact, you could make the case that no player in the Ivies is more valuable to his team than Rosen. For example, take away Ryan Wittman and Cornell would still be good. But take away Zack Rosen ... and Penn would still be bad? Well OK obviously it's not like Zack Rosen himself wins games for Penn. However, looking at the top scorers for each Ivy team, Rosen has scored the highest percentage of his team's points (this is similar to baseball's Value Over Replacment Player stat):

Ryan Wittman (Cornell): 18.6/75.9=24.5% Alex Zampier (Yale): 18.4/68.4=26.9% Noruwa Agho (Columbia): 17.4/64.3=27.1% Zack Rosen (Penn): 17.3/62.8=27.5% Jeremy Lin (Harvard): 17.0/77.2=22.0% Douglas Davis (Princeton): 13.4/57.9=23.1% David Rufful (Dartmouth): 8.5/55.4=15.3% (not a typo; Dartmouth doesn't have any scoring more than 8.5 points per game)

So in short Zack Rosen is this year's Alex Barnett. However, unlike last year's senior at Dartmouth, there's very little chance he'd win Ivy League Player of the Year since it's not strictly a Most Valuable Player award. As for POY, I'd say it's 60-40 Wittman or Lin, depending on whether Cornell or Harvard win the Ivy title.

I realize the conclusion that Zack Rosen is critical to Penn isn't groundbreaking at all. But it's interesting to quantify the impact he's had on the team. Feel free to leave your thoughts about Rosen's skills in the comments.