Stats With Context: What Happened to Lakers Shooting?
The Lakers were elite in the regular season, but their shooting has been a problem ever since the hot start to the playoffs
I haven’t done a Stats With Context breakdown since the regular season, but while digging through playoff data today, trying to understand what exactly is happening with the Lakers offense, I ended up finding a couple of interesting trends.
So instead of keeping the notes to myself, I decided to bring the series back and put the findings into a simple stats-with-context storytelling format.
The Lakers haven’t been able to crack the 100-point mark in their last four games, including scoring just 90 points in Game 1 against the Thunder. That makes the offense one of the biggest storylines heading into Game 2 tonight.
The obvious explanation, of course, is the absence of Luka Dončić. As LeBron James bluntly said after Monday’s loss in OKC, missing a player who averages “34 [points] and nine [assists]” and is “that special” leaves a massive hole in the offense.
But I think the numbers provide a bit more context behind that trickle-down effect. And context is the whole point of these otherwise geeky breakdowns.
Today’s highlights:
Declining offense
Declining shooting
Did shotmaking or shot quality fall off?
Luka domino effect and the desperate need for Austin Reaves
Advice for Game 2: Avoid Chet Holmgren at all costs (🎞️VIDEO)
1-Declining offense
Chart context: The Lakers offensive rating has been declining ever since the hot shooting performance in Game 1, when they shot the lights out and surprised the Rockets to open the series. The trend hit its low point in the first game against the Thunder, when the Lakers scored just 90 points, or only 95.6 points per 100 possessions.
Apart from the fact that the Lakers are missing the NBA’s leading scorer in Dončić and were also without Austin Reaves for the first four games of the playoffs, there are a few other things worth mentioning here. The drop-off in scoring across the league has been massive, almost historic. Per Cleaning the Glass, teams are scoring 111.2 points per 100 possessions in the playoffs compared to 115.9 in the regular season. We’ve already seen several games, and even entire series, dragged into the 90s offensively. The other important factor is the level of defense the Lakers are facing. The Rockets finished with the fourth-best defense in the regular season, while the Thunder ranked first by a wide margin. That context makes at least some of the Lakers offensive struggles easier to understand.
