GoBlue72391 wrote:You're kind of glossing over the fact that Lauri went from having the 2nd most touches on the team his first two years down to the 5th and 7th most the past two seasons respectively. He was at his best and most promising those first two years when he had those touches. He's been mostly disappointing the past two years as those touches have decreased. There is very likely a correlation there. It's not all about plays, it's about having the freedom to just play.
The team was awful those years, and Lauri wasn't particularly efficient in those years either. Lauri is actually in his most efficient year this season. Lauri has plenty of freedom to play, he lacks the capability to generate shots without the team building their offense around him. He's proven not to be a player worthy of doing such a thing.
What about bringing the ball up the court after a defensive rebound? He used to do this all the time earlier in his career and had great success with it. It was a big part of the whole FebruLauri thing. Now I can count on two hands the number of times he's done that the past two years combined. Has he willingly chose to eliminate that aspect from his game or was he told by the coaching staff to cut that out? I don't know.
When playing next to Lopez, he got a lot of free releases on rebounds because Lopez boxed out and allowed Lauri to grab a lot of boards. It's one of the things that makes Lopez such a positive player on rebounding despite limited rebounds. Lauri is now grabbing more contested boards and isn't getting as many free releases as he used to, you do see this occasionally, but I don't think it is a coaching staff thing or a Lauri thing per se, but the way the personnel has changed and opportunities have changed because of it.
Posting him up against mismatches is something we should do every time he has a smaller player on him, but we've done it less than 2 dozen times all season even though he's shooting nearly 70% from the post and nearly 75% on at the rim attempts.
Lauri is awful posting up mismatches though, that's one of his big problems. If he was skilled in this area it would be so helpful.
Running him off screens for 3s and cuts is good, I'm not saying we shouldn't do that. I'm saying we should supplement that with aggressively attacking mismatches in the post and letting him lead the break from time to time like he used to. Grabbing the rebound, looking for a guard to give it to, then finally passing it to the guard slows us down much more than just grabbing it and going when the opportunity presents itself.
I'm certainly fine, and would encourage Lauri to run when able after a rebound. I really, really doubt he is told not to do that. Attacking mismatches with him in the post almost never yields good offense for us, so I wouldn't set up my offense to make that a primary goal, but I would do it opportunistically.
That's how we're using him now, but that's not how we used him his first three years. At least not nearly to this extent.
Lauri's percentage of his 2 point FGs that were assisted by year
2017-18: 64%
2018-19: 53%
2019-20: 54
2020-21: 71%
True shooting percentage by season:
17/18: 55%
18/19: 55%
19/20: 56%
20/21: 62%
With this change he also went from a league average efficiency player to an above league average efficiency player, implying that he is well below league average when creating his own shot.
The goal isn't to get Lauri points / touches, the goal is to generate efficient offense and efficient defense. Lauri has been much more efficient on offense and more helpful in his current role than he was in his previous role. There are many things to unpack there though with his own personal growth, changes in talent around him, coaching staff, and other things, so it isn't purely 100% obvious cause and effect here, but my eye test says he doesn't do well creating his own looks and the numbers (both yours and mine) would point to the same thing.
Finally, I'd also note that per minute, Lauri's FGA per 36 / usage are:
17/18: 15.4 / 21.9%
18/19: 17 / 25%
19/20: 14.3 / 21.1%
20/21: 14.9 / 21.1%
He's basically getting the same share of shots/usage this year as he did in two of his three other seasons.
