Hugi Mancura wrote:HomoSapien wrote:madvillian wrote:
Grant only has a 16.8 PER now that I just double checked your numbers I'm not even sure he's that good. Anyways, hard to compare them at all, vastly different players.
My comparison wasn't about style, I just meant he needs a team to say "hey, we think you're talented, and for at least a year we'll allow this to be your team." Obviously, no one is going to win with Lauri as their focal point, but he needs someone who is willing to go to those lengths to rehab his value/reputation. No one saw it happening with Grant, so maybe there's a team out there for Lauri.
I don't think he needs to be a focal point. Just to get to a team which is more about ball movement. Near what Bulls had earlier in this season. Lauri has been efficient scorer in post this year. More efficient than Thad or Vucevic, but basketball and especially NBA basketball is about opportunity. Do you get opportunity to do things in the court. This is not decided by the player himself. This is decided by coaching staff most of the time. Typical NBA team has maybe 2-3 players who are those people who get to do stuff where they are good at. Rest of them... don't. Unless they are really good at supporting role, but I would think majority of the 'role' players are star's who are just forced to be in supporting role.
If Bulls as a team would have wanted Lauri to improve his post game they would have put him to the post, but they never did this continually. They did these small one game spurts like last game where they did it 3 times, but to really teach someone to play in the post you need to do it 4-5 times in every game. Not 3 times in one game and then 20 games nothing. So Bulls organization never wanted Lauri to build a post game.
I never actually understood why people hate Lauri for not creating his own shots. That is not what bigs do anymore. Maybe in the 80's and 90's. This is first year of AD's career when he assisted basket's is under 70% (didn't really check this, but I think at least last 3-4 year with NOP his basket's were assisted). J.Collins creates about the same amount of his shots as Lauri. List can be continued forever. There are some bigs who create their own shots, but those are few. But it seems for a many people this is a negative thing for Lauri, but for other big's it's acceptable.
Lauri has done lot of things wrong, but he has also played in organization who have never wanted Lauri to be anything else than he is now. Fans maybe have wanted Lauri to be more, but fans don't pay Lauri's salary or decide how many minutes he gets. Lauri has now good/great PnR numbers, both on ball handler and as a big, great post numbers and do Bulls use Lauri in those plays? No. Lebron can choose what he does in court, majority of the NBA players don't and Lauri is one of them.
Lauri is the same situation as 90% of the NBA players. A player who his own organization doesn't really care about as long he does his job (which in Lauri case was to spread the floor for Dunn, Valentine and White). Organizations really cares about their star's and players who they believe will be star's.
The biggest mystery to me, post FebruLauri, was why the Bulls' coaching staffs insisted on moving him to the weak-side spacer role almost exclusively. I know why, but it was a crappy choice for the reasons I'll describe in the paragraphs below. He stopped being used as a P&P and P&R player, his touches dropped in half--after he had what looked like a breakout season no less. So, in typical fashion, they finally found something that worked very well... and then promptly threw it in the garbage bin... because? FebruLauri was as good an offensive player as Zach is right now. Let that sink in for a second.
As I've written countless times, you've got to pimp your players out. Just have to. If that means that Lauri is guaranteed 70 touches to score 22-23 ppg, you do it, especially on a young team. Zach deserved his touches. Coby definitely didn't deserve his. Neither did WCJ. Lauri was the ONLY other player where we knew what he can do with more touches... and Boylen never gave them to him (if you remember, Boylen's comment that if Lauri wanted more touches, he needed to make up the 40-touch difference by rebounding more). That's just dumba$$ery in not understanding what you've got on the roster. Our team was so young it lacked discipline--Blah, blah, whatever. If you can't execute what the coaches tell you to--ride the effin' pine.
This season, schematically, isn't that much different than last, with the major change being that Lauri does get 3-4 plays run for him every game and, to start the season, he was allowed to roam outside of weak-side corner jail. He responded well and had a really good stretch to open the season.
Now that teams have started sitting on the Bulls passing lanes, and especially on our shooters (it's not a coincidence that we're shooting much worse from 3 the last 15 or so games--people are letting Thad score more and staying home more often than before; better for cutters like PaW, worse for our shooters, in theory).
Anyhow, back to Lauri.
A FebruLauri-lite at 23 ppg and 60%+ TS (say last year) was either going to make the team vastly more attractive to potential FAs because the Bulls would have had 2 "stars" (if we wanted to keep Lauri), or he would have fetched a (semi)star in return in the trade market, if they didn't want to pay him. Either way, the Bulls would have been better off with Lauri getting 70+ touches / game instead of 40 like last year and this year.
Instead, this year we opened up by giving Coby 75 / game and Wendell and Thad darn near 60. Yeah, given that Zach deserved his 70, there's nothing left for anybody else. In retrospect the 20 ppg Lauri managed to pull off on 40 was some sort of mini-NBA-miracle.
That's one of the problem with young teams that don't have guys who've already been paid but also understand a bit better their place in the pecking order. Even if Lauri was FebruLauri-lite (which he was to open the year), why would Coby, Wendell or Denzel go out of their way to give up their touches and opportunities to him, unless the coach stressed it to them and if they don't, they won't see the floor? That's true for every other young player on the team.
A single very smart player like Chris Paul or Mike Conley could have made a TON of difference on our team the last 2 years, and they both could have been had. Just somebody to keep feeding the hot hand and bring some structure to the team where it has been "lord-of-the-flies" after Zach gets his touches for 2 years running now.
Anyways, that shipped looked to have sailed. Sucks they blew it, IMO. Lauri could have been much better, or could have been sold for a king's ransom.
