LaMarcus Aldridge, Damian Lillard and the Make or Miss League

Apr 1, 2015; Portland, OR, USA; Portland Trail Blazers forward LaMarcus Aldridge (12), forward Nicolas Batum (88) and guard Damian Lillard (0) react after Lillard made a three point basket against the Los Angeles Clippers during the third quarter at the Moda Center. Mandatory Credit: Craig Mitchelldyer-USA TODAY Sports

Two years in a row, the Blazers find themselves in the Western Conference’s fifth seed. And while we all remember how last years first round matchup ended, it doesn’t look as great this year. While there are a lot of factors involved, one thing that is easy to point out (and surely has been) is the shooting slump of Portland’s big two, which only Damian Lillard seems to have slowly escaped during the last two games. Comparing their shooting during this regular season and the two first round matchups (this year against Memphis and last year against Houston) we can see two main things:

First, on the left side, we see that their ‘hunting grounds’ (© Matt D’Anna) have not drastically changed. LaMarcus still takes around 50% of his shots from midrange and Damian Lillard still takes a big share of top of the key three-pointers. The biggest difference to last year — they aren’t making them.

After making 35-of-84 mid-range shots during last years playoffs (for those of us that are in the church of Morey: 42% is of course not a dream result by itself, but we are still not that great at quantifying how much more indirect damage you can create from these locations) and articles like this one after the first two games, he is now at 22.2% shooting, which after 45 shots is most likely significant. And Lillard going 4-of-19 instead of 21-of-42 does surely not help either.

The narrative for these changes in efficiency is clear — Memphis’ smothering defense is turning Rip City into Brick City. While this surely is a part of the equation, it is not reflected in the publicly available SportVU data. Looking at average defender distance (a closer defender generally leads to a worse shot) and time left on the shot clock (shots that are later in the shot clock tend to indicate forced shots), we can see — not much has changed:

LaMarcus is slightly closer defended on his mid-range shots, but it is unlikely that this explains a 20% decrease in shooting percentage. I did not find a good explanation for Lillard’s shooting slump — especially as he seems to take the three-pointers on average even slightly earlier in the shot clock.

There is a lot of information that SportVU is not capturing, but a lot of the end result of a seven game playoff series still comes down to: do you make your shots or do you miss them?