The Lakers' Stupendous Lack of Shooting
Los Angeles' ineffectiveness is reflective of a roster building calamity.
Much has been made of the precipitous decline in effectiveness of Russell Westbrook. The former MVP proved to be a terrible match for his co-stars on the Lakers - LeBron James and Anthony Davis - last year.
Westbrook is a terrible shooter and isn’t good enough at functioning as a lead ballhandler to take repetitions away from James. That leaves him with few avenues to provide positive contributions on the offensive end when sharing the court with L.A.’s two best players.
The Lakers watched as the illfittingness of their roster and a rash of injuries torpedoed their season just a year ago. New head coach Darvin Ham has moved Westbrook to the bench in hopes of remedying the former.
Westbrook makes more sense with James on the bench. He can be the lead dog against second units. A high usage, low efficiency player is more valuable among backups, where talent tends to be less abundant.
Paying Westbrook $47M for those contributions is obviously not ideal, but unless they plan on making a trade, the Lakers are just going to need to stomach the cost of having him on their roster and do what makes the most sense with the pieces they have. That means separating James’ and Westbrook’s minutes as much as possible.
L.A’s roster flaws extend well beyond the lack of synergy between its stars. Both James and Westbrook thrive when surrounded by shooting, and the Lakers have no rotation players that have proven capable of being reliable outside threats at any significant volume (James excluded, but the best offense should include him with the ball in his hands).
The Lakers’ collective 28.7 percent rate from beyond the arc ranks dead last and is nearly eight percentage points lower than league average, per Cleaning the Glass. The team’s 33.3 percent mark from mid-range is the third worst in the NBA, and even an eleventh best shooting percentage at the rim (66.2%) doesn’t help make up for L.A.’s ineffectiveness elsewhere on the court.
The Lakers location effective field goal percentage - which measures expected effective field goal percentage if league average shooters were taking the shots a team generates - is 55.7 percent, the second best of any team in the league, per Cleaning the Glass. L.A.’s actual effective field goal percentage of 49.6 is the NBA’s second worst.
Typically such a difference would be reason for optimism across such a small sample size. The Lakers have only played nine games, and reason would suggest that their percentages from all over the court will rise as the team’s shooting normalizes over the course of the year.
But L.A. is something of a unique situation. The Lakers’ top five shooters in terms of total volume from deep are James, Lonnie Walker IV, Russell Westbrook, Troy Brown Jr., and Kendrick Nunn. Of that group, only Nunn has cracked 35.0 percent from beyond the arc for his career, and he’s at 36.0 percent on the nose.
L.A.’s quintent of highest volume three-point shooters is currently shooting 27.0 percent from distance, which is well below their uninspiring career rates. In that sense, expecting some positive regression may be wise, but there is a definite ceiling on what to expect.
The deviance they’re experiencing from what would be anticipated from league average shooters is driven in part by small sample, but its also largely attributable to the fact that the people taking the shots are well-below-average shooters.
James himself admitted there aren’t many “lasers” that suit up for the Lakers in a recent press conference (apparently that means good shooters). What’s more astonishing than the level of shooting incompetence that L.A. has displayed to date is the fact the team has committed so many roster spots to players no one would expect to be particularly effective from beyond the arc.
Surrounding James with shooters is a proven formula. It’s worked for more than a decade. It worked in Miami. It worked in Cleveland. It worked for the Lakers when they won a championship in the bubble year. Since then the team has steadfastly run away from the model that success was built on.
Everyone saw the limitations of this year’s team coming from a mile away, just like everyone saw them coming last year. Everyone except for the L.A. front office that is, which appears to have been happily asleep at the wheel, having done nothing to address its blatant dearth of capable marksmen.
NBA fans deserve to see James play out the tail end of his career in more suitable surroundings. That doesn’t seem likely if he is going to stay on the Lakers.