2015-16 NBA Preview: Los Angeles Lakers

LOS ANGELES LAKERS

The purple and gold half of Los Angeles failed to bring much in the way of top-end talent over the off-season. The lure of Lakers exceptionalism seems muted in a loaded conference while the team had no incumbent (on-court) stars and few assets. It’s a rebuilding team whether or not they keep trucking in veterans, and the season will be a testing grounds for rookie D’Angelo Russell, a potential Kobe Bryant successor as a guard and scorer. Unfortunately, they owe a first round pick to the 76ers, and there will be a delicate race in either keeping their draft pick by securing a top 3 lottery slot or climbing up the standings enough so they’re not shipping off something more valuable — but I doubt they’ll be good enough to climb up the ladder significantly.

2015 in review:

The Lakers were terrible in 2015. There’s no getting around that. They could not shoot, and they failed at every aspect of defense save for rebounding. The team was led in minutes by Wesley Johnson. Julius Randle, their prize lottery pick, was knocked out for the season with a broken leg suffered in the first game. Kobe Bryant played 35 games. Even Nick Young was out half the season. The silver lining of the season was Jordan Clarkson, who emerged as a quality combo guard scorer after being selected in the second round .

Rotation players in: D’Angelo Russell, Lou Williams, Roy Hibbert, Brandon Bass.

Rotation players out: Wesley Johnson, Jeremy Lin, Jordan Hill, Ed Davis, Carlos Boozer, Wayne Ellington.

D’Angelo Russell has an internship as a Laker golden boy, and there’s a decent chance he becomes a star scorer. Lou Williams was added because … well, honestly I have no idea. Roy Hibbert as a lumbering giant was added to the collection of toys from a bygone era; he’ll be in the exhibit next to a picture of a Laker taking a contested midrange shot with 12 seconds on the clock. Brandon Bass is a veteran power forward who experimented with a three-point shot last season with the progressive Boston team, and that probably won’t carry over to this season.

Wesley Johnson and Wayne Ellington were pretty basic role players who got a lot of playing time due to extensive injuries to the Los Angeles wing players. Jeremy Lin had a perfectly cromulent season at point guard for the Lakers. He led the team in assists, steals, and nearly led in points. As one of the better non-star pick-and-roll point guards in the league, he actually had decent targets in Jordan Hill and Ed Davis. Davis and Hill were both power forwards who played like centers — they don’t have the perimeter skills gaining popularity at the four position position in the modern NBA. Further, they weren’t good on defense. Carlos Boozer, alas, is still a free agent, roaming the lands with his trademark scream and grabbing rebounds from unsuspecting squirrels.

2016 Projected

Barring a miraculous season or an unexpected all-NBA season from one of their players, the Lakers are going to be awful; the only thing this season will prove is what color of awful they’ll be.

As a science experiment, Roy Hibbert will be an important player to track. He was the first rim protection king of the SportVU era and he manned the middle for some of the best recent defenses in the NBA. Now he’ll be surrounded by new teammates, many of whom are poor defenders, as they slide far into the lottery. He’s a case study in how much of rim protection is controlled by an individual player and how much depends on team context.

As a whole, the Lakers will still be a poor defensive team, even with Roy Hibbert. The problem is on the outside. There’s almost no plausible way to form a solid defense around a rookie in Russell, Jordan Clarkson, old man Kobe Bryant, Lou Williams, and Nick Young. There are no other saviors in the frontcourt either. Tarik Black is solid, but there are no plus defenders at power forward and it’s unlikely the team is going to implement a smart scheme to punch above their weight in defensive effectiveness.

On offense, things are even more confusing. The Lakers were already at individual creation overkill with Kobe Bryant next to Nick Young. Then they drafted D’Angelo Russell and decided to add Lou Williams on top of that. The team received a lot of criticism for Young and his wild shooting, yet they seem to be doubling down, as if you told someone they were adding too much sugar to their coffee and they responded by pouring in four more packets. There’s no basketball sense to this team anymore. Maybe the Lakers think they can get an exception and play with two balls at once on offense. Who knows?

The team’s best hope on offense is Russell, who’s already shown a deft passing touch and nice scoring instincts in summer league and preseason. He was an efficient scorer in college, and his playing style might encourage the team to take better shots. But he’s a rookie, and young rookies rarely make a positive impact on NBA teams. He’s a season or two away from that, optimistically. Julius Randle has been heralded, but I’m not him sold on him yet given his size and skillset. He could fall in Thomas Robinson territory as a guy who just can’t make the same kind of impact he had in college against NBA big men. He was great during pre-season, however.

As the NBA’s highest paid player, Kobe Bryant has an unorthodox role on the team. A legend, he’s a few injuries and years past his prime, and he doesn’t mess up their lottery plans anymore because his defense and shot selection have been so poor. Ideally, he’d be smart teammate and a consummate teacher for the roster, but he doesn’t consistently apply those qualities. Sadly, we may not see much more of Kobe Bryant. His final exit will likely be soon and it could be unflattering.

Quick statistic/graph

After the summer, I was slowly tweaking a player metric that used box score stats with miscellaneous stats taken from play-by-play logs. No stat is perfect, obviously, but there’s enough information encoded that you get usable, interesting numbers. For instance, no Laker is projected as above average — Kobe Bryant and Ryan Kelly are the closest at roughly league average[4. Roy Hibbert is near average too, which is the same result you’ll get from ESPN’s RPM. Basically, his defense is great but his offense washes out the results.]. They’re a bad team, sure, but they brought in a lot of veterans too.

Thus, the statistic of the day here is … projected MVP rankings, which is a list that contains no Laker players, no matter how tenacious Kobe’s fans are. LeBron remains king, and a lot of that has to do with how great he was before Cleveland. Kevin Durant is a likely MVP as long as he’s healthy. The rest of the list passes the eye test pretty well. A couple of defensive guys, Kawhi Leonard and Draymond Green, make the cut, and so does Kyle Korver. The two most surprising names are Eric Bledsoe and Ricky Rubio, but both guys are young leap out statistically in a few key respects. Gordon Hayward is another surprise, and if he were in another conference I’d push hard for an all-star appearance. This list, by the way, shows a pretty respectable estimate for Paul George in this predictive form [5. Multi-year with an aging curve.] He was injured for nearly an entire season, but let’s not forget how good he was before that.

Table: top 25 players by projected minutes and metric results

Summary

The Lakers are in the unsuitable position of playing deep in the lottery with the possibility that they’ll lose the first round pick. There’s some young talent on the roster, but after clearing cap space during the summer and coming up with a boot in the shape of Roy Hibbert, it’s a team in an awkward phase with some veterans and ball hogging gunners sharing the court with NBA kids. The Lakers are going to be terrible, and this will be part of one of the worst stretches in franchise history.

PBP-Metric[1. This is the initial version of my own metric, which uses a full range of stats collected from play-by-play logs and tested extensively to avoid overfitting.]: 25.9

PT-PM: 23

Nick‘s[2. For a short description, the predictions use regression models and neural networks to apply various stats like BPM, RAPM, and Win Shares to 10,000 simulations of the season game-by-game to select the “best” result.]: 26

Nathan Walker: 21