GimmeDat wrote:Interested to hear your thoughts on the many people that argue against LaVine's effectiveness citing advanced stats that suggest his team is not better with him on the floor.
I'm assuming these people are citing last season? I have always said that wasn't very fair. LaVine's defense is an issue to be sure, but clearly he wasn't the only Wolf that was atrocious on that end. LaVine was playing very well at the start of the season, he was our best offensive player.
At the start of the season, KAT was trying to do too much he wanted to prove he was the leader and would take over the team after KG retired, he said as much basically. He was also seeing a lot more defensive attention and I think it was a hard adjustment for him. He was forcing shots over multiple defenders, taking too many threes etc.
Thibs was also experimenting during this time to see what Wiggins was capable of in more of a facilitating role. Needless to say, it didn't go so well. Combine all of that with the fact that Rubio was playing off the ball and he had some of the worst gravity as a shooter I've ever seen in my life. Rubio would pass it and his guy would often send a hard double at KAT or shade heavily towards Wiggins so he couldn't drive etc. and when people would pass it to Rubio he would be paralyzed in fear of shooting. None of those things were LaVine's fault.
How I would summarize LaVine's game offensively is a guy who was a high level three point shooter, a high level transition scorer, with the ability to operate in the half court reasonably well, nothing great. His passing game is solid with potential to be more.
So basically when LaVine went down, Wiggins was moved to the 2 and played a lot more off ball. Rubio was running the offense a lot more while also starting to get out of his shooting funk and Towns was dealing with multiple defenders a lot better and finished the season really strong.
The team did get better after LaVine went down (not by a lot) but there's a lot of context behind why it happened.
