Making Excuses for Lauri: A Season Breakdown

[coldfish]

Boylen made Lauri into a 7 foot bum.

Career stats by year, per 36
1 18.4p 9.1r 1.4a 0.7s 0.7b 1.5to 55.2%ts
2 20.8p 10.1r 1.6a 0.8s 0.7b 1.8to 55.3%ts
3 17.7p 7.7r 1.8a 1.0s 0.6b 2.0to 55.5%ts

This is largely who he has always been. Even this year, he had his hot streak like always. His first year, we really focused on that hot streak and forgave him for his bad games. His second year, pretty much the same. This year, there are very few people who are only paying attention to his hot streak.

The big problem is that he hasn't added anything to his skill set. If he had, Boylen couldn't hide that. We would see either better rebounding, help defense, shooting, a post game, etc. Something. Even if it was limited in how many times it showed, it would be there.

[keobulls]

I think Lauri is just physically built wrong for the way he (or the coach?) wants to play. He just isnt' quick enough to play on the perimeter like he tries to do (can't create his own) and he is not strong (or tough) enough to back anyone down consistently. If you think about PFs that play the way Lauri tries to, the only successful ones are athletic freaks like Durant, Griffin, and the like. If Lauri tried to play like Sabonis did last night, he would have more success. Just focus on being tough on the boards and making good passes to cutters and hit the 3's when they come to you. Instead he is running around screens and failing to take people off the dribble all the time.

[PaKii94]

I'm bumping this because I think what I said in the OP is still a valid take on Lauri's season last year. If healthy I think we see a different Lauri this year.

[ZOMG]

I'm bumping this because I think what I said in the OP is still a valid take on Lauri's season last year. If healthy I think we see a different Lauri this year.

It all comes down to how we play offense.

We'll see early on if all the talk about movement and smart passing was just lip service. As I've said all along - that is the ONLY way this team is going to win with this roster. Surely Donovan knows this.

I've always wondered why so many people here seem to enjoy watching the kind of basketball where four guys stand around and one tries to score from a completely static set-up. It must be some flawed mental remnant of the previous Bulls teams where athletic 1-on-1 players were always the alpha dogs. However, the best MJ teams were GREAT passing teams as well. You could even say it was the most important way to unlock Jordan.

We don't have an alpha dog now. We have no star. That's why it's even more important that we play smart basketball.

[GrowingHorns]

Lauri can play more consistently even with his current tools, if we really have good enough wing depth (Otto and Pat healthy at the moment, that's good), and if we have threat from guards to sink down threes (seems Coby is starting, that's a plus), it opens so much space. Prolly we'll have much better system building on too, than it was with jimbo.

That said,that more consistency alone doesn't likely ever make him max contract value deal, because his weaknesses will hinder the chances to fully exploit his best assets, so great teams can coach against him. So here's for hoping he can add some new stuff into his game. The new management is so much better now he can only kick himself if it doesn't happen (barring injuries).As a big Lauri homer, only thing I can do is hope and wait.

[PaKii94]

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.

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.

Bump. Timeseries trend analysis is a thing with Lauri.

A mostly healthy Lauri this season: (per36 mins) 23p/9r on 48/40, 64%TS, 23%USG
This is again, right in line with his "healthy" numbers from last year: 21p/7.3r on 50/41, 64%TS, 22%USG