Offense
Rondo posted a career-best 51.8 effective field-goal percentage last year at age 31. He hit 33.3 percent of his threes, and after a few seasons of respectable low-volume shooting from deep, he's got his career conversion rate up to 30.9 percent. A Splash Brother he's not.
Ball was wildly inaccurate as a rookie. An effective field-goal percentage of 44 percent should have torpedoed his chances of being a positive contributor. He couldn't finish at the rim (49.4 percent; the league average was 65.8 percent) and made only 30.5 percent of his treys. Despite his errancy, Ball attempted 7.9 threes per 100 possessions, outpacing Rondo's rate of 4.2.
There's value in a player's willingness to fire away—even when that player misses as often as Ball. At least defenders have to attend to a willing shooter once in a while. Rondo, despite being the better long-range option, doesn't try enough deep ones to earn respect.
Defense
Ball distances himself from Rondo on the other end.
Last season, the Lakers rookie ranked third among point guards in ESPN's defensive real plus-minus with a plus-2.31 figure. Rondo checked in at No. 46 with a minus-0.37. The best you can say about Rondo's D in 2017-18 is it wasn't quite as awful as it was the year before: minus-0.49.
The 6'6" Ball is bigger and a better rebounder, and he projects as a superior switch option. The 6'1" Rondo is notorious for quitting when posted up by a larger opponent, and his consistent failure to fight over screens up top compromises his team's pick-and-roll defense. Rondo ranked in the 50th percentile as a pick-and-roll defender last year. Ball was in the 66th.
It's damning for Rondo that Ball is already so clearly a superior defender.
Rookies are supposed to get abused on D, but Ball's physical profile and high intelligence contributed to his positive impact on that end. It seems reasonable to assume there's growth ahead for Ball, and legitimate All-Defense production could arrive as soon as next year. Meanwhile, Rondo is entering his 13th season, having not played well on defense since roughly 2011.
Ball's VORP ranked 34th among rookies in league history, which was right between Vince Carter and Dwyane Wade. So...pretty good.
Maybe the Lakers are warming to the idea they handed Ball too much as a rookie. That he was too coddled, too quickly anointed. It's time to push him and see what happens.
It shouldn't come as a shock that Kobe Bryant, who shattered too many young teammates to count, is into the idea.
"They've been growing so much and now, here they are, thrust into the spotlight, and you know how pressure makes diamonds?" Bryant said on The Dan Patrick Show on Monday. "So, in this situation, you'll see Lonzo step up...the young guys will really step up and rise to that challenge and hit their potential a lot faster than they ordinarily would."
The efficacy of disempowering young players as a means of improving them is spotty. For an example of just how wrong the practice can go, maybe someone should ask Smush Parker how he enjoyed it.
So...who should it be and why?
