The Whiteboard: Please, Lakers, don’t let Andre Drummond post-up anymore

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The numbers are ugly. Like, intuitively, you know they’re bad and you still kind of gasp when you see them.

Andre Drummond has finished 136 post-up possessions this season, making up 26.3 percent of his total offensive load. He’s managed 0.82 points per possession on post-ups, which ranks in the 30th percentile in efficiency. Russell Westbrook is the only player to have posted-up at least 100 times this season and posted a worse points-per-possession mark, but Westbrook is also adding some value as a passer from those spots, which isn’t included in this points-per-possession number. Drummond is decidedly not.

It’s not really an outlier either. Last season, Drummond finished 4.5 post-up possessions per game and produced 0.91 points per possession, which ranked in the 49th percentile. The year before that — 3.3 possessions per game, 0.84 points per possession, 29th percentile. Dare me to do one more year? For 2017-18 — 2.1 possessions per game, 0.83 points per possession, 40th percentile.

Post-ups on the whole are a generally inefficient scoring structure and Drummond has, for basically his entire career, been among the least effective players who are given the opportunity to post-up regularly. That’s not to say he doesn’t have a useful offensive skill set, because he does. He’s among the league’s best offensive rebounders. He’s shown flashes of being consistently effective as a decision-maker from the elbows, hitting cutters and setting up dribble hand-offs. In theory, his size and athleticism should make him effective as a screener in the pick-and-roll but his results there have been inconsistent and not much better than his outcomes in the post.

But for whatever reason, his teams have been willing to repeatedly let himself park on the low-block, catch the ball with his back to the basket and do whatever it is that he does (turn the ball over or miss jump hooks).

How should the Lakers be using Andre Drummond?

The Lakers are in a tough spot because they’re adding Drummond to the roster while both Anthony Davis and LeBron James are out. The offensive structure is now a bit more vague without its two stars to anchor things. There will be an urge to let Drummond get some post-ups, to bring some stability and order to the offense, to make things easy for him as he gets acclimated to a new team and new teammates. But it’s a losing proposition both in the actual value it provides and in setting the expectation that these are opportunities Drummond might continue to see in the playoffs or once LeBron and Drummond are healthy.

For the sake of context, Drummond’s points per possession on post-ups this season (0.83) is about the same as the Lakers could expect from Wesley Matthews or Dennis Schroder attempting a pull-up jumper (0.88 and 0.81, respectively), running an iso for Talen Horton-Tucker (0.81) or letting Montrezl Harrell post-up (0.93) — all of which are probably more useful as postseason offensive scenarios they’d want to work the kinks out of.

So, please, Los Angeles. Help Andre Drummond be the best version of himself. While LeBron and Davis are out, get him some touches at the elbow. Let him hand the ball off to a ball-handler in motion and then crash the glass. Let him lurk on the baseline, looking for lobs and misses to slam home. Please, no more post-ups.

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