Numbers Watch I: Lakers at the rim
Will the Lakers' substandard outside shooting hamper their rim shooting?
From the Logo will try to kick back into gear now that the NBA season has resumed. One semi-recurring feature I may toy with is a number or trend that I find intriguing and worth monitoring in the games ahead. More often than not, it may turn out to be nothing; generating hypotheses off of small samples will do that.
Coming into this season, two questions that I and others have about the Los Angeles Lakers are:
Can they sustain their top shelf defense of recent seasons after swapping out some of the better defenders (say Alex Caruso) for players who are less so (say Carmelo Anthony).
What sort of spacing will a team that plays a non-shooting big with Anthony Davis, along with Rajon Rondo and Russell Westbrook in prominent roles, have? What will the knock-on effects of that spacing be?
One game is just that, so consider this mere spitballing around those two questions. There were some worrying signs on the first, such as Carmelo choosing to play deep drop on a Draymond Green-Steph Curry high pick and roll in the year 2021.
Still, the Lakers had a defensive rating of 107.1 on the night, a number that would have ranked top of the league last season and better than their second best 108.1 mark. If they maintain anything close to that, consider the defense a success.
On the other side of the ball, the Lakers don’t sport too many three point threats outside Malik Monk. This isn’t an anomaly in the Lebron-AD era; they shot right around 35% from 3 in each of the last two seasons (bottom ten in the league per Cleaning the Glass). They have typically made up for this by dominating at the rim, ranking in the top ten league-wide in both frequency of rim attempts and accuracy on those shots. The growth of the three ball notwithstanding, dunks and layups still typically represent the most efficient way to score. Led by the man dubbed The Interior Minister by Kirk Goldsberry, the Lakers have leveraged those shots to overcome their perimeter deficiencies.
Those shots become harder to come by when defenders can cheat off the perimeter and clog up passing lanes. Simply looking at the league-wide (both within season and across seasons) correlation between three point percentage and rim percentage doesn’t tell the story here since a team’s rim attempts are partly a function of what tools they have at their disposal from other areas of the floor. Watch how cramped spacing plays out though:
Even though Carmelo has no trouble roasting Nemanja Bjelica off the dribble, he runs into Otto Porter (covering Dwight Howard’s roll), with Andre Iguodala and Damion Lee (cheating far off of Russell Westbrook) further mucking up the paint.
Steph Curry points Lee towards the double team on AD as soon as the pass leaves Rajon Rondo, but notice Draymond Green push Bjelica into better help position (preventing the rim from obstructing Bjelica) while he covers Lebron.
This is a strategic gamble by Draymond, recognizing the threat posed by AD on the low block as greater than that of a pass from AD to Carmelo in the corner. That gamble is made easier by Carmelo historically being a middling threat from the corner and on catch and shoot threes per NBA advanced stats. The payoff rides a lot on who occupies the weakside corner and the Lakers don’t have a great many threats to plant there.
The Lakers attempted just a quarter of their shots in the opener at the rim and shot an abysmal 52% on those attempts. With Lebron and AD taking a large chunk of Laker shots, those numbers will surely improve (and the Lakers did miss some bunnies). And again, this was just one game.
Keep an eye on those rim numbers going forward though; any slippage there could mean trouble for this Lakers offense.