Making Excuses for Lauri: A Season Breakdown

[coldfish]

I strongly suspect that at this point, he wants out. The Bulls should agree. He is going to get a huge offer as a free agent just based on potential. That kind of contract can really hurt a team if the guy doesn't live up to it.

Not in a million years if the Bulls dont get something out of it.
Hes never going to get a max and its actually good if he struggles as long as it gives a huge discount to the point nobody offers big sum of money like the Kings.
Same reason why Celtics nearly maxed Brown. They cannot lose these blue chip level prospects for nothing considering how high they were drafted. By letting them go, you have wasted development time and draft pick.

Like I said above, I wouldn't dump him for nothing but if given the choice of letting him go for nothing or giving him an extension worth $20m per year or more, I would let him walk.

[drosereturn]

Until the last Zach-less game, I don't think there's been one game all year where the Bulls played conventional, good basketball. So a 15 ppg floor is a positive take-away. Lauri literally has not had anybody generating looks for him - if anyone can list a PF who generates his own baskets in a Harden/iso manner, let me know. Cause all I see are good teams with good PGs or point-wings. Draymond looks like hot garbage without the Splash Bros. Davis stopped making the playoffs after Rondo left, until he joined Lebron. Siakam has Lowry.

It really isn't hard imagining Lauri as a 22/10 player on a +.500 team. Note: I didn't say contender. Just tired of seeing the guy compared to Kornet. I would trade him 'high,' because I think he misses the mark as a defender and ball-handler, but definitely not dumping him for a bag of kettle chips. He's capable of strongly improving, pretty much every attribute in the game. I can see him bringing his rebounding up, defensive awareness, his assists, FTAs, 3P%, FG around the rim, possibly his block attempts.

Summed up what I was thinking in mind in better words.
This is how a Bulls GM should be viewing Lauri, including Presti. You see great players in their prime like Dray struggling in a lottery team tells you a good system is not enough. Just think about how better Lauri would be if he had a better team and a better guard. Your lead guard is Lavine who has a massive usage with below avg ball handling skills. Thats just depressing and hurts the ceiling of any team unless Lavine covers his weakness by strictly playing offball.

Comparing Lauri to Kornet is just dumb why not compare to Bertans, Bjelica?
Sure they play similar role, and I am very high of Kornet outplaying his contract several times.
But if you cannot their difference, you just do not understand how big man works in the NBA.

[Ctownbulls]

Great analysis and read.

Still, I find it hard to excuse him for his awful play on both ends. By year 3, for what we expected, we shouldn't have to cherry pick a 17 game stretch as the highlight.

I am ready to move on from him, and the rest of the roster for that matter. I really thought he was a keeper coming into the year.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Ctownbulls]

What isn't positive is the 6.5 rpg. Coupled with WCJ rebounding poorly, between Jim's system (which takes the bigs way the hell away from the basket), 6 rpg from a starting big man is unacceptable. I'm convinced that with a little coaching and big man mentoring, he can easily become a 20/10 player.

Do you realize that there's only 11 guys in the whole league who are averaging at least 10 rpg? And that they’re all centers and/or athletic freaks?

Meanwhile, there’s TONS of dudes Lauri’s size who definitely aren’t considered weak rebounders but who don’t average anything close to 10.

It’s just a weird complaint. For a guy with bad length who plays a lot on the perimeter, around 7-8 rpg is totally ok. Lauri has some room to improve but expecting him to be some kind of a rebounding specialist is baffling.

Fine. 8 rpg.

His rebounding skills have been a terrible display this year.

Not a specialist. Just competent.

Competent rebounder, defender and general IQ would be nice. I don't see it happening any time soon. It may happen in 4-5 years but are the Bulls going to be the ones to invest big money into him just so he can use the Bulls as training grounds? I hope not. That is what the rookie contract is for.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[ZOMG]

Do you realize that there's only 11 guys in the whole league who are averaging at least 10 rpg? And that they’re all centers and/or athletic freaks?

Meanwhile, there’s TONS of dudes Lauri’s size who definitely aren’t considered weak rebounders but who don’t average anything close to 10.

It’s just a weird complaint. For a guy with bad length who plays a lot on the perimeter, around 7-8 rpg is totally ok. Lauri has some room to improve but expecting him to be some kind of a rebounding specialist is baffling.

Fine. 8 rpg.

His rebounding skills have been a terrible display this year.

Not a specialist. Just competent.

Competent rebounder, defender and general IQ would be nice. I don't see it happening any time soon. It may happen in 4-5 years but are the Bulls going to be the ones to invest big money into him just so he can use the Bulls as training grounds? I hope not. That is what the rookie contract is for.

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1) He is a competent rebounder. You can't compare a short-armed perimeter player to a guy like Wendell who's practically handcuffed to the basket stanchion all game. Seriously, it's ridiculous to expect Markkanen to average something like 10rpg. That would make him ELITE among power forwards.

2) He is a very comperent individual defender at his position, which means around the perimeter in the modern NBA. He can't defend 5's under the basket, which is OK. His awareness in team defense needs work, but it's a rare young big who doesn't have that problem. After all, his job is a bit more complicated that just standing under the rim and challenging all comers.

3) I do not know where this urban legend of Markkanen as a low IQ player originated. There's no evicence at all that he doesn't understand the sets, defensive priciples or player movement. On the contrary. He's probably one of the most "coachable" players on the team, which is basketball code for "does what the coach wants him to do".

[mtron32]

I just figured the dude was playing through injury, there's no way the walking corpse we saw in late 19 was the same cat from last season or even the first game of THIS season. I'm going to be looking to see how he moves out there and see if his shot is any better from all the rest. This off season my man needs to do many many ball handling drills and post footwork so he's comfortable handling the ball because recently he cant pass the rock fast enough.

[bledredwine]

****

If he Mirotic’s our tank, Im going to be so pissed.

[madvillian]

****

If he Mirotic’s our tank, Im going to be so pissed.

Wouldn't worry much about that. Lauri can't hold Mirotic's jock as far as on court impact. When he was healthy and confident Mirotic was a game changer. It's an absolute shame how he was handled. But GarPax loves to just waste assets and otherwise let them depreciate under their watch.

[Bandit King]

Don't worry Big Softy will find another excuse not to play good defense and probably won't finish the season.

[PaKii94]

I'll respond to the other comments later when I get the time but p36 last night was 22.6p/7r 65% TS (and that's going 25% on 3s). Closer to "healthy" Lauri vs "injured" Lauri

[Bandit King]

Our Ryan Anderson! We love Lauri! 12 points a game!

[PaKii94]

Our Ryan Anderson! We love Lauri! 12 points a game!

That's the spirit!

[PaKii94]

Great analysis and read.

Still, I find it hard to excuse him for his awful play on both ends. By year 3, for what we expected, we shouldn't have to cherry pick a 17 game stretch as the highlight.

I am ready to move on from him, and the rest of the roster for that matter. I really thought he was a keeper coming into the year.

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Thanks. yeah it's frustrating on my end too. I want to see a solid season's worth of Lauri but we keep getting deprived of it. and if that keeps on happening throughout that would be a big big dissapointment.

Do you realize that there's only 11 guys in the whole league who are averaging at least 10 rpg? And that they’re all centers and/or athletic freaks?

Meanwhile, there’s TONS of dudes Lauri’s size who definitely aren’t considered weak rebounders but who don’t average anything close to 10.

It’s just a weird complaint. For a guy with bad length who plays a lot on the perimeter, around 7-8 rpg is totally ok. Lauri has some room to improve but expecting him to be some kind of a rebounding specialist is baffling.

Fine. 8 rpg.

His rebounding skills have been a terrible display this year.

Not a specialist. Just competent.

Competent rebounder, defender and general IQ would be nice. I don't see it happening any time soon. It may happen in 4-5 years but are the Bulls going to be the ones to invest big money into him just so he can use the Bulls as training grounds? I hope not. That is what the rookie contract is for.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

I think he can reach competent rebounder/defender. That definitely dipped this year. I don't agree with the IQ comment though. I think Lauri is fine in that regard. There is a difference between the mental aspect of knowing where to be/positioning on defense & offense and physically being able to do it. Any kind of injury and the physical aspect of it falls off a cliff for Lauri.

[PaKii94]

I have a lot of respect for the OP but I can't agree with any of this. You can't break a season down into selective endpoints. You are what your numbers are at the end of the year. Every player goes through adversity during a season on and off the court. Part of being a successful pro is handling that adversity.

That's a super weird take. You can bet none of the people making personnel decisions in the NBA think like that. If they do, they deserve to get fired. Hell, there’s a whole number crunching industry of advanced analytics that leans on the fact that basketball isn’t played in a vacuum. Everything affects everything.

What would be the point of pretending that streaks, injuries, coaching or intra-team dynamics don’t mean anything when looking at the performance of an individual player? How could that ever be true?

It’s easy to say that a player should "handle the adversity”, but if your boss tells you that your new job is to blitz the ballhandler on defense and space the floor on offense, and your rebounding numbers drop as a consequence, what do you do? How to handle the ”adversity”? After all, according to you this player has now regressed as a rebounder.

Yea I'm done. Nobody in analytics uses smaller samples when they have bigger ones available. He's played to a 14.4 PER this year. You are what the back of your baseball card says you are. Players get hot and cold. Players play in bad schemes with **** coaches and poor team mates. Somehow the stars manage to elevate themselves above all that -- like Lavine and countless other players stuck on **** teams.

Sorry friend but that's not how analytics work. Obviously a bigger sample set is preferable but that's so you can dissect it more. A simple example:

Sample set #1 of 1,3,2
Sample set #2 of 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3
Sample set #3 of 1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3
Sample set #4 of 1,1,1,1,1,3,3,3,3,3
Sample set #5 of 1,3,2,2,3,1,3,2,1

These all have an overall average of "2" but they all tell a vastly different picture:
#1 - a too small sample set, you really can't tell anything
#2 - a cyclic/seasonal trend
#3 - a gradual improvement as time passes
#4 - a sharp change from 1 to 3.
#5 - random order, probably normal variance

The distinction you are making of the normal ups and downs of a season is usually a mix of #2 & #5.

#3 is how we would expect/want young players to gradually improve in performance and you can see numbers slowly improving

#4 is what Lauri experiences when hit with injury. It's damning that any injury and Lauri becomes a limp noodle but there is a distinction in how he plays.

as far as what analytic departments do - They for sure do a much deeper dive compared to "what the back of your baseball card says you are". The overall season numbers are a good starting point but the next step is "How were these numbers achieved?" and you break it down piece by piece.

I can understand the frustration though.

[PaKii94]

One statistics class examples is for the teacher to take a normal coin and start flipping it. The class is to mark down the results. Invariably, you will get slightly more heads than tails or runs of heads or tails. The teacher then asks: Is this a normal coin or a trick coin?

Most of the time, the class will say its a trick coin. They will see a pattern where there is none.

Basketball is a game of ups and downs. You get hot and cold. Tons of factors play in. Your shot timing changes slightly over time, rest, outside factors, opponent strategies, etc.

If you look at virtually any player, you will see hot runs and stretches. Good months and bad. Lauri is no exception in that. IMO, people give him too many excuses to ignore the bad. Most of the things that are happening to him happen to every NBA player and will continue to happen to Lauri.

Offensively, Lauri can be better. His teammates, his coaches and him can certainly get more out of his talent. Defensively? Its a problem. His off ball awareness is Boozer level bad and for a 7 footer, that's an issue.

I strongly suspect that at this point, he wants out. The Bulls should agree. He is going to get a huge offer as a free agent just based on potential. That kind of contract can really hurt a team if the guy doesn't live up to it.

Sorry coldfish but you're off base on this one. That analogy doesn't apply to this. A coin flip is truly a random occurrence. The "pattern" you are describing is due to a small sample size and due to the fact that the coin is a binary. It will never land halfway but flip it enough times, it will oscillate the average will be the middle between the two.

Basketball performance can be interpreted as timeseries data. You can't use the simple averages for timeseries that aren't stationary. I went over this with doug in another Lauri thread when comparing Lauri's career with Nikos. When analyzing time series, those are broken down into trends/noise/outliers.

Outliers are what they are, outliers. If Lauri dropped 65 points next game, and then went back to his season averages for the next, I wouldn't predict him to put up 65ppg. I also wouldn't predict the average of 65 ppg and his career (15 ppg) to put up 40 ppg. I would say that's an outlier.

Noise is what you guys consider up and down of the season. hot/cold streaks. It's the natural variance in a person's game. That's quantified by variance/standard deviation. It's saying I expect Lauri to be at his average 15 ppg +/- 5 ppg going forward.

Trends are the outside influences that significantly impact the performance over a longer period of time. the key term here is "significantly". Statistically significant means a sustained change greater than the average + the standard deviation (or noise/regular day to day performance).

These kind of groupings are clustered separately. i.e. if you randomly sample from the two sets of data, The mean+std for each will be different from each other. If it was just normal noise (up/downs of basketball), then if you sample from two sets of data, the mean+std should be very similar. Last night we had another measurement sample added to the pool. With his numbers, those clearly fall into the "healthy" pool

Injuries fall into this trend category. Lauri has a strong injury trend in that as soon as he has any type of injury and continues to play through it, his numbers are statistically significantly different compared to when he doesn't have an injury. This has continued throughout Lauri's career. The damning aspect is yes, all players see dip in production when injured. That's a normal trend for players. However with Lauri, he falls off a cliff.

----

To bring it off of Lauri, I think what we are seeing with post all-star break Coby is now becoming a trend instead of an outlier. We saw the scoring burst randomly near the beginning of the season but this is now sustained performance. Something seems to have clicked with him.

[PaKii94]

What isn't positive is the 6.5 rpg. Coupled with WCJ rebounding poorly, between Jim's system (which takes the bigs way the hell away from the basket), 6 rpg from a starting big man is unacceptable. I'm convinced that with a little coaching and big man mentoring, he can easily become a 20/10 player.

I agree with all the rest of your post but this. Idk about WCJ rebounding poorly. He's averaging 12 boards p36. He's not the best rebounder and sometimes gets outrebounded due to his size but he is still getting the boards. I covered this in another thread but I don't think Lauri is getting the "freebie" rebounds anymore. Rolo used to let Lauri grab the rebounds. This year WCJ is getting those. I think coldfish in another Lauri thread went through the rebounding rates for PFs these past few years and Lauri was slightly above average last 2 years and slightly below average this year.

When you hard hedge on screens the big is out of the position when the ball moves away from the double team. All the Bulls bigs have lower RPG other than Wendell who tends to stay home more than Lauri/Gafford.

When we played a older style dropback defense, Lauri averaged 10.1 and 9.6 rebounds per 36.

He's very capable of being a solid or great rebounder, that's just not what coaching is asking for him. The hard hedge defense trades bigs rebounding for more pressure on the ball and the 3 point line. Whether that's a good decision or not can be debated, but the issue here isn't Lauri's rebounding capability or potential.

This is also a factor too. Roles are different. I think we can all agree he's been on the perimeter a lot more this year.

[mtron32]

Just started listening to the most recent Locked On Bulls with Joe Cowley and he mentioned Lauri's frustrations with his place in the offense and being just a spot up shooter. Much like the new rebirth of Coby, we've all been scratching heads at the downright aversion Boylen seems to have to the mid range in favor of chucking up 3's all day.

[PaKii94]

Just started listening to the most recent Locked On Bulls with Joe Cowley and he mentioned Lauri's frustrations with his place in the offense and being just a spot up shooter. Much like the new rebirth of Coby, we've all been scratching heads at the downright aversion Boylen seems to have to the mid range in favor of chucking up 3's all day.

Yeah he also mentioned it on the Lauri piece in the suntimes:

Boylen’s not alone in that boat.

The entire organization would like to see Markkanen finish the season with a flourish, especially after having to endure his inconsistent play before the injury.

Markkanen and Zach LaVine were considered the key pieces of the entire rebuild, so the 7-footer’s struggles were not a good sign. To make matters worse, Markkanen privately expressed his displeasure with his role in the offense.

Far too often he has been “The Big Decoy’’ rather than “The Finnisher,’’ as he was dubbed his rookie season.

Of course, the always-stoic Markkanen wasn’t going to make a big deal of what the rest of the season means to him.

“Just get in the system again and compete and be aggressive,’’ Markkanen said. “Hopefully, I can help the team get some wins down the stretch.’’

https://chicago.suntimes.com/bulls/2020/3/4/21165640/bulls-lauri-markkanen-return

[mtron32]

Just started listening to the most recent Locked On Bulls with Joe Cowley and he mentioned Lauri's frustrations with his place in the offense and being just a spot up shooter. Much like the new rebirth of Coby, we've all been scratching heads at the downright aversion Boylen seems to have to the mid range in favor of chucking up 3's all day.

Yeah he also mentioned it on the Lauri piece in the suntimes:

Boylen’s not alone in that boat.

The entire organization would like to see Markkanen finish the season with a flourish, especially after having to endure his inconsistent play before the injury.

Markkanen and Zach LaVine were considered the key pieces of the entire rebuild, so the 7-footer’s struggles were not a good sign. To make matters worse, Markkanen privately expressed his displeasure with his role in the offense.

Far too often he has been “The Big Decoy’’ rather than “The Finnisher,’’ as he was dubbed his rookie season.

Of course, the always-stoic Markkanen wasn’t going to make a big deal of what the rest of the season means to him.

“Just get in the system again and compete and be aggressive,’’ Markkanen said. “Hopefully, I can help the team get some wins down the stretch.’’

https://chicago.suntimes.com/bulls/2020/3/4/21165640/bulls-lauri-markkanen-return

he said they made him into a 7 foot Doug McDermott which was spot on.

[Bandit King]

Boylen made Lauri into a 7 foot bum.