Rerisen wrote:Chi town wrote:I think you are underestimating high percentage high value 3s and the spacing of the floor. Lavine gets his shots but he doesn't hold the ball or play hero ball. He's decisive.
And yet the team offense was worse with him on floor. How do you explain that? Style isn't more important than results.
Here's the difference I see as far as in the lead role.
Butler wasn't a great visionary passer, but he was more than willing when put in the lead role, and most importantly, drew double teams via the fear of him getting to the rim, and this made things happen for an offense and opened up shots for others.
Zach by comparison, scores far more of his points beyond the arc, yet we know on ball pull ups aren't great offense generators, so usually means someone else has to create to get him open for those threes.
So while yes he can space the floor and hit volume 3s, this means his ideal role would be as a 2nd or 3rd option, not our main guy.
Is there a good website to access each team's plus minus stats? The only numbers I'm currently finding are from basketball reference, and from there LaVine's OBPM and OWS are both in the positives. Either way, I didn't watch enough Wolves' games to comment on why the Wolves ran a better offense with LaVine off the floor, but there are several possible reasons for this. It would be irresponsible to label LaVine as as chucker automatically, without looking at film of him playing in full games (which I'll eventually try to do).
As for the Jimmy and Zach comparison - it's irrelevant, in my opinion. I doubt LaVine will ever have as much of an impact as Jimmy does game to game as a primary initiator, but what's wrong with having a young player with all-star upside as your 2nd or 3rd option? I'd be perfectly happy and content if Zach ends up maxing out as a Derozan or even a Rudy Gay type player. It's worth noting, however, that neither of the latter two players have ever had a offensive season as efficient as Zach's most recent one. If Zach improves his free throw rate by 50-75%, which is very doable, you're suddenly looking at an elite offensive player, without even accounting for improvement in other offensive areas.
The advanced team stats, for whatever reason, don't favor LaVine as a plus-player but now that he's changing teams, systems, and roles, I think we need to pump the breaks on the pessimism. Yes, we probably should've gotten more in return for Jimmy, but that doesn't mean LaVine needs to be as good as Jimmy is to make this trade a wash. We need to re-evaluate our net return after watching LaVine/Markkanen/Dunn/2018 pick/2019 pick all develop as players. If Zach is our #3 guy, and we get another #2 or #3 guy from the other group of players, then in 5 years no one is going to be talking about how we got fleeced in this trade.
