If you had asked any of the door greeters or my direct supervisor, they would have told you I was the hardest worker there. They told me as much. Unfortunately, door greeters don’t make personnel decisions at Costco. Over the course of a few weeks that summer, the manager of this particular Costco would periodically come outside to check on how things were going. As luck would have it, each time the manager came outside, he would find me at the water station getting a drink instead of in the parking lot pushing carts. At the end of the summer, Costco decided not to keep me on as an employee and, sure enough, the manager cited my penchant for water breaks as the culprit. As I left the building that day, my supervisor said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: reality is important, but perception is king.  

This principle certainly rings true in the NBA, which is monopolized by never-ending discourse among team personnel, media, and fans. While pockets of the conversation can be illuminating, the league is also no stranger to baseless narratives, prisoner-of-the-moment reactions, and flat-out bad analysis taking hold in the minds of its participants. Even so, these opinions tend to get refined over time and more accurately portray the reality, albeit with some lag. 

Perhaps no player in recent memory has been impacted by public perception more than Zach LaVine. This comes as no surprise; Zach is the highest paid player on a perpetually underwhelming Chicago Bulls team that hasn’t seen real success in a long, long time. Before that, he was with the Minnesota Timberwolves, a team that enjoyed its own stretch of futility. (As an aside, the other player that comes to mind is Karl-Anthony Towns, and likely for many of the same reasons.) 

Even so, there’s been a variety of negative opinions shared about Zach LaVine over the last year that have grown from a minority view to a suffocating consensus. One particular comment caught my attention from former player and New York Knicks executive Scott Perry:

During this period of time, the Chicago Bulls have been actively looking to move LaVine, and his trade market has been described in ways that no other player of his caliber has been subject to in recent memory. “Barren” and “nonexistent” have been terms used by Adrian Wojnarowski and others, with a growing consensus suggesting that the Chicago Bulls would not only not get positive value for him, but would need to actually attach assets in order to trade him. In fact, Bobby Marks recently said no team would take on LaVine’s contract even if the Bulls attached a first-round pick.  

As someone who has watched LaVine’s entire tenure in Chicago, it’s been both fascinating and terrifying to see the perception of him as a player and his trade value completely plummet over the last year, but many of the perceptions have persisted far longer than that. Whether it’s his defense, availability, contract, playmaking, or impact on winning, a lot has been said about Zach LaVine. How much of it is true? Instead of taking the consensus opinions at face value, I use film, data, and analysis to explore whether those perceptions match reality. In doing so, I want to shed more light on who Zach LaVine is as a player and determine whether the hesitation to trade for him is warranted.  

Defense

The perception: “Zach LaVine is a bad defender” has been perhaps the most widely-held and pervasive opinion throughout LaVine’s career. A poor defensive reputation is a difficult one to shed once it’s become lodged in the discourse (funny enough, it’s also hard to shed a good reputation on defense, with Dejounte Murry and Mikal Bridges as recent examples). In the 2020-21 season, for example, ESPN analyst Zach Lowe called LaVine “an enormously damaging defender” while discussing whether LaVine was deserving of his first All-Star selection. Lowe is not alone; national media routinely describe LaVine as a big negative on defense to this day, and if you search the words “LaVine” and “defense” on any social media platform, you’ll see the majority opinion is that he is considered a sieve on that end of the floor. 

An understanding of LaVine’s tools, watching copious amounts of film, and looking at advanced metrics can help determine whether this conclusion is accurate. As a disclaimer, it’s important to understand that defense cannot be fully encompassed by any data, and the best way to know if someone is a good defender is to watch an ungodly amount of film and really understand what you’re watching. I feel like I’ve met the criteria on at least the former, having watched nearly every Bulls game since the 2013-14 season (shoutout Jimmer Fredette), and I’d like to believe I have enough of the latter to get the dart throw close to the target. As always, I encourage you to watch the film yourself. But I digress.

If you know anything about Zach LaVine, you know he’s an absolutely elite athlete. His hard and soft athleticism numbers were exceptional in the NBA Combine. Whether it’s functional strength, verticality, change of direction/pace, pliability, balance, coordination, reflexes, or stamina, LaVine has it in spades. These natural gifts in proprioception give him an advantage even against other NBA athletes, allowing him to move with a speed and effortlessness all but a few can match. On the defensive end, this innate talent allows him to hang tough with most perimeter players in the league when guarding on the ball. Teams often hunt matchups on offense where they single out the other team’s weakest defender; for all his reputation as a sieve, LaVine has rarely been the one selected. Instead, the eye test reveals that Lavine’s on-ball defense has been consistently adequate to solid throughout his career. LaVine does lack some other tools that would make him impactful in that role, which I’ll get into shortly, but his hard and soft athleticism have given him a decent floor as an on-ball defender. It also helps that LaVine rarely takes on the toughest perimeter assignment. 

Where LaVine has legitimately struggled is as an off-ball defender. There are two major reasons for this, especially early in his career: first, young players often suffer from a lack of knowledge about defensive schemes and take time to commit them to memory and instinct; and second, Zach LaVine’s cognitive athleticism lags far behind his hard and soft athleticism. Cognitive athleticism deals with how players “think” the game, and encompasses traits like pattern recognition, spatial awareness, anticipation, and cognitive load. This athleticism is often referred to as “basketball IQ” or “feel,” but it’s critical to remember that it is not a measure of a player’s intelligence. Rather, it is a skill and, like all skills, these can be improved with time and repetition. Like hard and soft athleticism, however, there are just some levels of this athleticism that cannot be taught and can only be reached with innate ability. In my view, LaVine does not have the same elite natural ability in this type of athleticism, and has had to learn each of these traits the hard way. 

A good example of the juxtaposition between LaVine’s elite hard and soft athleticism and his lagging cognitive athleticism is LaVine’s screen navigation, where he is very good at recovering from being screened due to the former, but is often lacking in anticipation and positioning because of the latter. 

In other off-ball scenarios, LaVine has had countless examples over the years of ball-watching, missed rotations, wrong rotations, bad timing, or miscommunication. To this day, you can find clips from every game where LaVine is engaging in these bad habits.

However, LaVine has improved in consistency in each of these categories year over year. LaVine was indeed an “enormously damaging defender” overall from his rookie season (2014-15) through the end of his first season in Chicago (2018-19) due to the aforementioned failings. In the 2019-20 season, though, LaVine started making notable improvements in engagement and consistency on the defensive end and, every year since, has been trending a little better. As an overall defender, LaVine has managed to go from exceptionally bad early in his career, to simply below average, to creeping into “fine” territory in his most recent years. Despite the improvements in off-ball consistency, LaVine’s on-ball defense is still noticeably better than his off-ball defense, which undoubtedly remains consistently below average. 

I highly recommend following Stephen Noh on Twitter/X if you want great video breakdowns of Zach LaVine’s defense–just search “LaVine defense” on his page and it’s a treasure trove of good and bad. Here’s a breakdown Steph did back in 2021:

And another one this year:

Next, we look at whether the eye test matches LaVine’s statistical impact. As previously stated, no metrics are really great at measuring defense, but Estimated Plus-Minus (EPM) is very highly regarded and is among the easiest to understand. LaVine’s career defensive impact (listed as a percentile) according to EPM:

These percentiles line up fairly well with the eye test: LaVine was 20th percentile or below his first four seasons, took a noticeable jump his second year in Chicago, and has continued to improve over time. LaVine ranks 69th and 68th percentile in his last two seasons, which may be one indication that the reputation he’s been branded with on defense may not be entirely accurate. If we compare these numbers to some other seasoned, high-caliber guards* the last two years, and you’ll see that his defensive impact has actually been pretty run-of-the-mill for his position, at least in this metric:

Bradley Beal: 68th, 65th

Donovan Mitchell: 78th, 65th

Devin Booker: 44th, 43rd

CJ McCollum: 48th, 24th

Jaylen Brown: 91st, 83rd

Dejounte Murray: 52nd, 47th

Jamal Murray: 26th, 44th

(*I use the term “peers” to refer to this group of players throughout this article for convenience, not as a suggestion of LaVine’s talent. It’s simply a group of highly paid guards that have been All-Star quality or near it at points in their careers.)

Defensive metrics can get muddied by team construction, lineups, and role, so it’s just one piece to the puzzle. And there’s other metrics that rate LaVine less favorably across the years, but most agree he’s continued to improve over time and isn’t drastically different from his peers. 

Another important point to consider: Zach LaVine played the 3rd most minutes in the league over 77 games in the 2022-23 season and the Chicago Bulls finished 5th in defensive rating. And that’s despite spending a majority of those minutes next to DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic, who are also widely viewed as defensively challenged. Even though the Bulls continue to be better defensively with LaVine off the floor than on, which is unsurprising given Ayo Dosunmu is his replacement, it’s certainly encouraging that his presence hasn’t seemed to hurt their fortunes on that end in any significant way. 

The verdict: While Zach was indeed very bad defensively early in his career, he’s been below average at worst since 2019-20 and creeping towards just plain average, with fairly consistent improvement each year. Nobody will ever confuse LaVine with an impact defender, but the narrative among media and fans alike has been overstated for years. LaVine is a solid on-ball defender and below-average off-ball defender and, unless his backcourt partner is a worse defender, there should be little concern about his defensive impact in a team concept for the remainder of his contract. 

Availability and Injuries

The general sentiment that Zach LaVine is not reliably healthy has been one of the loudest and most widespread narratives this last season. Unlike defense, this one can be almost completely resolved with one objective criterion: total games played out of total available games. Without further ado:

2014-15: 77/82

2015-16: 82/82

2016-17: 47/82

2017-18: 24/82

2018-19: 63/82

2019-20: 60/65 (76/82 equivalent)

2020-21: 58/72 (66/82 equivalent)

2021-22: 67/82

2022-23: 77/82

2023-24: 25/82

Adding these up, through the end of the 2023-24 season, LaVine has played 580 games out of a possible 793, or 73% of available games played. There’s two injuries to point to throughout this time: first, Zach LaVine suffered an ACL tear in his left leg in February 2017. To that point in his career, Zach had played 206/214 available games, which is a whopping 96%. After being out about a year (and traded to the Bulls in the meantime), LaVine made a cautious return in the latter part of 2017-18, being fully healthy by the off-season. From that time through the end of the 2022-23 season, Zach played 325/383 games, which is 85% of available games. The second injury happened this last season in late November 2023, when LaVine suffered a nonunion Jones fracture in his right foot. He returned for 7 games before an ankle sprain aggravated the injury and eventually he underwent surgery, which ended his season. 

Other notable injuries/absences: 

-Missed 11 games in the 2020-21 season due to COVID protocols, and 3 more in 2021-22 for the same thing.

-Sprained his left thumb in October 2021, but played through it and missed no games. 

-Underwent arthroscopic surgery on his left knee in May 2022. He missed 5 games in January 2022 for swelling and discomfort in the knee, but played through it the rest of the season and postseason. He missed 5 games in the 2022-23 season as part of a conditioning ramp-up. He played the 3rd most minutes in the league that year and has had zero reported knee issues since the May 2022 surgery.

Putting all this together: before this season, LaVine had only suffered one major injury in his career that required significant missed time. That ACL injury is now more than 7 years old. A second knee surgery, although framed as a “minor scope” raises a red flag a bit, given the ACL tear, but it clearly wasn’t bad enough to prevent LaVine from playing through it for months. Nothing has been reported about his knee or the scope since, despite LaVine playing very heavy minutes the season after. Other than that, the biggest absence LaVine has had in his career prior to this year was 14 total missed games due to entering COVID protocols, which he did on three occasions. 

The nonunion Jones fracture is a fairly common injury and LaVine should make a full recovery; in fact, LaVine is already cleared for all basketball activities after just 4 months. But the injury couldn’t have come at a worse time for LaVine, as his reputation for being injury prone was already firmly in place. 

LaVine’s knee, however, continues to be the major concern among team executives, which makes the fact that LaVine has played 85% of his available games since fully returning from the ACL injury in 2018-19 extremely encouraging. To put it into perspective, LaVine’s 325 games played is the equivalent of 69.7/82 games per year between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 season. In that same stretch, his theoretical peers have played:

Bradley Beal: 289

Donovan Mitchell: 334

Devin Booker: 322

CJ McCollum: 324

Jaylen Brown: 322

Dejounte Murray: 275 (ACL tear October 2018)

Jamal Murray: 247 (ACL tear April 2021)

(Data obtained from https://www.basketball-reference.com) 

This means that in terms of availability, far from being unavailable, LaVine had been among the most consistent among his peers during that period, playing more total games than all but Donovan Mitchell. Put into perspective, LaVine’s significant absence this year has been the anomaly rather than the norm.

The verdict: The narrative about LaVine’s availability is curious when you look at all these together. LaVine has only missed 5 games total since 2017 due to knee issues, his athleticism has never taken any noticeable dip, and he’s played an average of ~70 games a season since then, but his knee continues to be brought up as a boogieman. While the clean-up procedure would certainly be a cause for concern, LaVine immediately followed it up with the heaviest minute load of his career and no medical issues. The Jones fracture he suffered this season is the only other significant injury he’s had during his 11-year career, and he’s already fully recovered for next season. For executives looking to take on the last 3 years of LaVine’s deal, there’s nothing to suggest that these past injuries will impact his availability, unless there’s a very bad medical report that has yet to be made public. LaVine’s injury history and availability should make teams wary of trading for him, but it shouldn’t be prohibitive. 

Contract

The perception: Zach LaVine is paid like a #1 option, and/or paid a lot more than he deserves, and/or his contract is one of the worst values in the league.

Zach LaVine makes a lot of money, there’s no doubt about it. Zach’s salary over the next three seasons is:

2024-25: $43,031,940

2025-26: $45,999,660

2026-27: $48,967,380 (Player option)

Always lost in these sorts of conversations is that LaVine is making this amount of money because he earned the contract and, if the Bulls had not been the one to offer it, another team would have. Regardless, a new contract always changes the value proposition of a player for the team employing him. LaVine was considered as an absolute steal when he was earning $19,500,000 in the 2021-22 season. Now, at over double that figure, the narrative has shifted not to LaVine’s value on the court, but rather to whether a team can afford to have him on the roster. 

The contract situation has been exacerbated by the recent changes to the CBA, which more heavily punishes teams that go deep into the tax or stay there for multiple years. While an excitable new owner might charge headlong into the second apron, consequences be damned, most teams do not have that luxury, and so roster construction involves an extra layer of stress. What’s more, the Phoenix Suns, who did the aforementioned charging by trading for an extremely highly paid 3rd option in Bradley Beal, have served as an example to other teams of what paying a few max players alongside an army of minimum contracts can look like. 

Given the context, it’s no surprise that teams are wary of adding Zach LaVine’s contract to their books. Zach LaVine was the 18th-highest paid player in the NBA this last season. The names ahead of him are mostly who you’d expect, aka #1 options: Curry, Durant, Jokic, Embiid, Giannis, Dame, Kawhi, PG , Jimmy Butler. Only two names seem out of place in the top 12: Bradley Beal and Klay Thompson. 

After this comes the next tier of contracts: Gobert, FVV, AD, Trae, Luka, LaVine, Tobias, Simmons, with Siakam, Kyrie, Jrue, Booker, KAT, and Porzingis all in that $36-41m range. Other than Luka, who has too few years of experience in the NBA to qualify for a contract with a higher percentage of the salary cap, the names in these categories are considered complementary pieces on a good team rather than the headliner. 

Booker may have the best argument among these names to move up to the next tier, and he and KAT’s contracts indeed jump from $36m to almost $50m the following year on their new supermax extensions. Anthony Davis also recently signed an extension that will pay him $60m starting in 2025-26. Jaylen Brown will also join the $50m tier next year on his new 5-year supermax. Every day this off-season, another extension or new contract gets signed that dwarfs the previous year’s numbers. It’s as important as ever to view contracts not through the dollar amount, but rather as a percentage of the salary cap. This is especially true with the cap expected to rise by the maximum of 10% per year as the NBA works out a new TV deal. The projected cap numbers over the course of LaVine’s contract are as follows, per Spotrac:

2024-25: $141m

2025-26: $155.1m

2026-27: $170.6m

LaVine’s percentage of the cap for those years on his “regular” max contract:

2024-25: $43m – 30%

2025-26: $46m – 29.6%

2026-27: $49m – 28.7%

Bradley Beal’s percentages are 35.6%, 34.5%, 33.4% during the same period, and even he got traded for well into positive value, despite being older and unhealthier than LaVine. LaVine’s contract is certainly still massive, but it looks worse than it is because of the context in which LaVine has been placed and his injury woes this season. More on that later, but we aren’t far removed from LaVine showing the caliber of player he can be in the right context on a playoff-caliber team.

The verdict: LaVine is paid like a complementary piece on a playoff team, but recent injuries, a punitive CBA, and poor team context have made the contract untenable for most teams looking to trade for him.   

Playmaking

The perception: LaVine is turnover prone, doesn’t have the playmaking chops to be a primary creator, and shrinks in crunch time. 

If there is one thing I could point to in all of my time watching LaVine that clearly differentiates his overall value from other All-Star caliber players, it’s not his contract, defense, or availability: it’s his decision-making. For some reason, people have made a lot of hay out of the former three topics when there’s far less to them than meets the eye. On the contrary, anyone who has spent time really evaluating LaVine as a player knows about the playmaking issue staring them straight in the face.

Let me be clear: LaVine is not a bad decision-maker or playmaker. He’s perfectly adequate to good at both for the most part, and the statistics back it up. Per Cleaning The Glass, LaVine has consistently rated very highly in assist percentage and, despite a sky-high usage rate, has maintained an above-average assist to usage ratio since joining the Chicago Bulls: 

Compare this to the assist to usage ratio of Jaylen Brown, another player with a negative narrative around his playmaking:

EPM tends to agree as well. LaVine can certainly make all basic reads and has gotten better and more creative over time. What ultimately prevents him from being great to elite in this category should be familiar by now: a lack of high-level feel compared to others of similar usage. In those comparisons, LaVine isn’t as intuitive or as adaptive a passer, and when he is under high pressure, his playmaking takes a big dive. For example, in the clutch, LaVine’s assist percentage plummets compared to his season averages:

2020-21: 6.3% in the clutch vs 22.5% season average

2021-22: 6.8% vs 20.8%

2022-23: 9.3% vs 18.6%

LaVine has, however, gotten much better at handling ball pressure in general, something I first noticed in the 2020-21 season when he would pass out of trap situations:

There’s other curious indicators. For example, from the eye test, it feels like Zach LaVine turns the ball over at a higher rate in the clutch than in other situations, but the numbers suggest the opposite:

2020-21: 9.4% in the clutch vs 13.8% season average

2021-22: 3.7% vs 11.0%

2022-23: 11.0% vs 10.6%

This may be a function of the previous statistic, however: LaVine’s turnovers are down in the clutch because he is likely passing the ball at a much lower frequency. To his credit, LaVine when healthy is an elite scorer, which also probably contributes to lower passing frequency in those situations. If there’s one thing Zach knows how to do at a consistently high level, it’s put the ball in the bucket.

But the cracks show up in other places. For example, LaVine has a much lower pass rate on drives than almost any other player of his caliber. In the 2020-21 season, LaVine had 12 drives a game but his pass rate was only 27.5% in those situations, the lowest of any player with 12 drives or more a game. There were 143 players in 2020-21 that averaged at least 5 drives a game, and LaVine’s pass rate was 134th out of 143. His pass rates were similarly tepid in 2021-22 (27.8%) and 2022-23 (31.9%). Once again, some of that is probably related to how good Zach LaVine is as a finisher at the rim, converting about 66% of all shots within 3 feet of the basket for his career. 

For someone with as high a usage as Zach LaVine, he leaves something to be desired in overall passing acumen. In 2020-21, LaVine had a 30.2% usage rate, 9th highest in the league among players with 2000+ minutes played, but 20th in percentage of team assists (trailing Coby White and DeMar DeRozan from his own team). 2021-22: 28.4%, 14th, 36th (trailing DeMar and just ahead of Ayo Dosunmu) 2022-23: 27.8%, 15th, 42nd (trailing DeMar).

The verdict: Zach LaVine is a good playmaker capable of all basic reads, but lacks the feel and consistency to weaponize his strengths to create advantages for his teammates at an elite level. For these reasons, he is far more suited as a secondary playmaker and finisher.  

Impact on Winning

The perception: Zach LaVine doesn’t impact winning, his teams are better without him, and his lack of playoff experience is largely due to him. 

Full disclosure: in general, this is one of the topics that creates the silliest takes on the internet. Nuance gets trampled, if it ever makes it into the conversation at all, in favor of wide platitudes and ringzzzz culture. A player’s impact on winning is so difficult to measure in all but the most obvious of cases, and for the vast majority of NBA players, much of their impact is based on factors that are varying degrees out of their control. These factors include: playing time, opportunity, role, teammates, coaching, organizational goals, lineup synergies, spacing, etc. But the short answer to the question, “Does X player impact winning” is a resounding yes in almost all cases. If a player has made it to the NBA, there’s probably a situation in which that player can positively impact his team’s success. For a multi-time All-Star and historically great scorer like Zach LaVine, let’s keep it simple: of course he impacts winning. The question, as with everyone, is determining when, where, and how he impacts winning. Let’s get into that nuance.

First, as a rule, team success is not achieved by one individual player. You can probably count on one hand the exceptions to that rule, but it’s extremely extremely rare for a player to be so transcendent as to drag an otherwise sorry roster to the playoffs, let alone have success in the playoffs. For everyone else, you need to have other good, talented players that fit well, are well-coached, and have a great culture. How much an individual player can impact winning is heavily tied to these factors. 

Let’s use an example to illustrate this concept. Klay Thompson is one of the greatest shooters of all time and, for much of his career, was a quality defender. On any team in the NBA, Klay would have been a great shooter and scorer and a solid 3&D wing. But what’s made him truly impactful and also given him 5 All-Star appearances is being in Golden State. Playing next to Stephen Curry, the greatest shooter in NBA history and someone with incredible gravity, as well as human Swiss army knife Draymond Green, has allowed Klay to focus on what he does best and mitigates all of his weaknesses. Klay Thompson doesn’t rebound, pass, or dribble much. He doesn’t create for teammates, doesn’t get to the free throw line, doesn’t consistently draw doubles. None of these are his strengths, and none of it has mattered because all Klay needed to do to help the Warriors be successful is shoot threes and play defense. He is a square peg that has been placed in a square hole. 

Has anyone, at any point during Golden State’s dominance, questioned Klay Thompson’s ability to impact winning? Of course not. But what if instead you had placed Klay Thompson on a rebuilding team and asked him to be the primary creator for that team? You’d expect that, over time, Klay would improve his playmaking and learn to draw more free throws. But having the ball in his hands so much would mitigate his ability to drill 3s at such a high rate, his defense would suffer, and the things that make Klay Klay would be muted. And even though that version of Klay would end up being a better and more skilled version of himself due to being forced into a role beyond his current capabilities, his ability to impact team success would be diminished. It’s funny to think about, but true: he’d be a better actual player and everyone would think he’s worse. 

We are seeing this play out in real time with Mikal Bridges. He was an incredible 3&D option in Phoenix as the #3-4 option. Now that he’s the #1 option in Brooklyn, his usage has spiked and his defense has waned and the Nets are not winning. Is Mikal a worse player than before? Quite the opposite; but the context has completely changed. Luckily, every executive has a relatively fresh memory of Mikal being awesome in Phoenix and his perception has not taken much of a hit, if any. Luckily the New York Knicks have resolved that issue by trading for him and placing him back into his previous role.

There are a lot of players who never get to be in the perfect context for their skills, let alone a great or good one. Zach LaVine is such a player. In fact, it’s hard to think of a player individually as good as Zach LaVine that has been placed in a worse role and team context for this long of a time in recent memory.

I’ve talked a lot in this article about Zach LaVine’s perceived and actual weaknesses, and rightfully so, but it’s important to remember and appreciate his strengths. For example, Zach LaVine’s ability to score the basketball is acknowledged by almost everyone at a surface level, but I don’t think people understand just how historically great he is at putting the ball in the basket at high efficiency.

Whether it’s drives, layups, dunks, cuts, drawing fouls, pull-ups, catch-and-shoots, off-the-dribbles, or stepbacks, there’s little in terms of scoring that Zach doesn’t do at a very high level. He’s a threat from anywhere on the floor and is so athletic compared to most NBA players that he can get to his spots effortlessly. Zach is also a passable to good on-ball defender, due in large part to that athleticism. Given these talents, most view the ideal role for Zach as an elite off-ball scorer and finisher that can take on secondary or tertiary playmaking duties. 

The problem for Zach and his perception is that for a decade, both the Timberwolves and Bulls have decided to put the ball in his hands and ask him to create for himself and others. The large burden he’s been asked to carry has made him a much better playmaker and decision-maker, but this role has not been natural for him. In addition, the pressure he receives from opposing defenses has made it more and more difficult for him to score. His off-ball scoring efficiency is really good but he rarely gets to showcase it – 48%, 46%, 41% C&S last 3 seasons but only 2-3 attempts per game – because his teams have failed to put any semblance of a point guard next to him at any point in his career. The one exception to this was the 35 games in which Lonzo Ball and DeMar DeRozan shared primary creation duties before Ball’s career-threatening injury. Other than that, LaVine has never been put in position where his elite skill set can be properly utilized. 

With a single playoff win in his 10-year career, Zach LaVine has been saddled with the dreaded “losing player” moniker. Is this fair? Consider that LaVine did not have an active teammate ranked in the top 100 by ESPN until March 25, 2021 (Otto Porter snuck in before, but was injured for all but a fraction of his Bulls tenure). That’s seven years into his career! LaVine also spent the first 7 years of his career on teams that were actively looking to tank, and LaVine suffered an ACL tear in the middle of that. When the Bulls finally did acquire a top-100 player in Vucevic, LaVine lost a month to Covid, which caused the Bulls narrowly missed the play-in tournament. 

The 2021-22 season finally saw the Bulls add quality players to their roster in DeMar DeRozan, Lonzo Ball, and Alex Caruso that, at least theoretically, complemented Zach LaVine. The result was that the Bulls held the #1 seed in the East until mid-February and Zach was named to his 2nd All-Star team. Unfortunately, significant injuries to key contributors Lonzo Ball, Alex Caruso, Javonte Green, and Derrick Jones Jr., as well as Zach’s own knee inflammation, caused the Bulls and Zach to limp into the playoffs with more than half their rotation missing or injured, and they lost 4-1 to the Milwaukee Bucks.

Zach’s only other facsimile of playoff experience was when Zach LaVine (and Demar DeRozan) willed the Bulls to a victory with 39 points over the Toronto Raptors in their first 2022-23 play-in game, and when, in part due to an uncharacteristically cold 6/21 shooting night from LaVine, the Bulls lost in the final minute to the Finals-bound Miami Heat in the second play-in game. 

I recount this history because the context is critical to understanding where Zach LaVine can have an impact. It’s hard to place the blame for losing seasons or mediocrity at LaVine’s feet. Ask yourself: if Zach is a “losing player,” which of those teams would have had significantly better fortunes had Zach been a “winning player?

If the organizations LaVine has played for have failed to bring in other quality players, or didn’t put him in the correct role, or groomed him as a #1 when he doesn’t belong there, or offered him a contract teams now find undesirable, why are these sins primarily laid at LaVine’s feet and not the Chicago Bulls? 

Like most players in a losing situation, the majority of LaVine’s lack of success is due to factors outside of his control. He’s developed into an elite scorer, good playmaker, passable defender, and great off-court person by all accounts. There’s no natural skill set he’s failed to unlock or laziness he’s had to shed: he’s reached his individual potential in almost every way. Everyone should know at this point what an ideal role for LaVine would look like. What is unique about LaVine’s situation is simply how long he has been enduring it, and perhaps that’s why it has given so many executives across the league pause. 

There’s also another factor to consider, which is Zach LaVine’s view of himself. Of course, most NBA players have high opinions of themselves, and Zach’s view has been reinforced by consistently being handed the keys to the various iterations of the Bulls during his tenure. It’s also caused some on-court friction with DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic, which you’d expect on a team with three complementary players who all believe they deserve more touches and aren’t winning. For this reason, it’s unsurprising that NBA executives fear that Zach’s perception of himself could impact his ability to accept an almost certainly lesser role on their own team. He’s been fed this worldview for a decade. 

There’s two salient examples that can give executives some relief on that front, though. First, I’d point again to the 2021-22 season, where Zach was in a less prominent role and the Bulls had significant success. Zach was part of every one of the Bulls’ best 3 lineups that season, which had net ratings of +20.6, 29.1, and 31.5 during that stretch over hundreds of minutes of data. The second example is when Zach LaVine played for the Olympic team with Team USA. In a role that didn’t require him to be a primary scorer or playmaker, LaVine showcased role acceptance and a defensive performance that drew the praise of coaches Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr.

Comments like the ones from Scott Perry lack all of the foregoing context. It’s certainly fair to wonder whether a team that does have the right role for LaVine would think it is worth absorbing his contract to put him in it, but it’s not fair to question whether LaVine can be an impact player.

The verdict: Zach LaVine can absolutely be an impactful, winning player in the right situation, but a decade of being placed in the wrong role has unfairly taken its toll on his reputation and caused executives to question whether he’d accept the right one. 

Whether fair or unfair, perception is king in the NBA. The wages of that perception have impacted Zach LaVine’s reputation and career, and created a difficult situation for him, the Chicago Bulls, and any team considering trading for him. Delving into the reasons behind the perceptions allows us a better understanding of who Zach LaVine is as a player and why he’s reached such a difficult crossroads. In the right context, LaVine can be far more than the perceptions that restrict him, but whether he’ll ever get that chance is more unclear than ever.  

The post Zach Lavine: The Wages of Perception appeared first on Swish Theory.

However, the truth of the matter goes much further and is far more damning: the Bulls never left their rebuild in the first place. In fact, it may be giving the Bulls too much credit to definitively say that they have actively been rebuilding since trading Jimmy Butler in June 2017.

While every path is a little different, there’s certain principles that guide every successful rebuild. Unsurprisingly, these principles also apply as the foundation to most successful basketball franchises. I’ve chosen four of those principles to focus on:

• Acquiring high value assets to maximize the chances of obtaining and/or retaining star-quality players
• Investing in talent evaluation and player development
• Creating the right environment for players to succeed
• Patience and consistency

Examining the Bulls’ decisions and whether they have followed these principles is highly instructive in explaining why, after nearly 7 years, they find themselves in perhaps an even worse position than when they started their rebuild. This synopsis and analysis is meant to serve as a guide for rebuilding, a cautionary tale to other NBA teams and, hopefully, a wake-up call to a storied franchise whose glory days are but a distant memory to even the oldest of its fans.

Acquire Assets

The most crucial principle for any successful team is to acquire and retain the best players. Very few teams have won a championship without a top-10 or even top-5 player in the league. There are three ways to obtain superstar players: draft them yourself, trade for one, or sign one in free agency.

The free agency path has almost completely disappeared in the last decade, as superstars rarely ever make it to free agency because the cost to the team is much too large to let them walk for nothing. The alternatives both require the accumulation of assets. To maximize a team’s chances to draft a superstar, they need to acquire as many draft picks as possible to improve their chances of finding one. To trade for a superstar, quality young players and a bevy of picks are required. Some common ways to improve a team’s asset base:

• Maintain cap space and trade exceptions in order to take on bloated contracts or problem players with draft picks attached
• Trade veteran talent to teams in need
• Trade back in the draft to acquire additional picks or players
• Lose a lot of basketball games to raise the value of the team’s own picks
• Sign players to deals that are easy to move or can be aggregated
• Develop the team’s own players to raise trade value
• Improve the team’s record to attract superstar talent

The “Process” Philadelphia 76ers and the Oklahoma City Thunder are prime examples of maximizing the acquisition of assets. As of today, the Thunder have 15 1st round picks and 22 2nd round picks available to them in the next 7 years. The vast majority of their talent acquisition has been through the draft, and they have given themselves multiple bites at the apple every single year since they started their rebuild.

In less than 3 seasons, the Thunder developed a young superstar talent in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, promising talent around him, clean books, and dozens more chances to acquire complementary help. Sam Presti has developed a systematic approach to sustainable asset acquisition and he’s stuck to it.

The Thunder have had misses in their draft record, but the importance of each pick is mitigated by the number they have acquired. They have diversified their asset base so that no single bad choice will sink them. They have never overpaid for a free agent during this time, were never tempted by an agitated star looking for a new team, and never prioritized instant financial gains over their vision for the future. As a result, the Thunder only had two sub-40 win seasons during the entirety of their rebuilding process.

The Chicago Bulls’ track record of asset acquisition over the 5-year period in which they had held the league’s worst overall record is stark in comparison. Their total asset acquisition during that period: one 1st round pick. They never took on any contracts for picks, never traded back in the draft, or never developed their own players enough to get assets back in a trade.

The Jimmy Butler trade did not net the Bulls a single 1st round pick – the Bulls moved their own 16th pick to move up to 7th and select Lauri Markkanen, in addition to acquiring Kris Dunn and an injured Zach LaVine. After drafting Markkanen, the Bulls kicked off their rebuild by selling their 2nd round pick to the Golden State Warriors for $3.5 million in order to build “equity” with the Reinsdorfs.

The Bulls acquired their first and only asset of the 5-year stretch when they traded Mirotic to the New Orleans Pelicans for a late 1st round pick.

The Bulls drafted the following players during the last 7 cycles:

• 2017: Lauri Markkanen (7) (swapped with own 16th pick in Butler trade)
• 2018: Wendell Carter (7) (own pick)
• 2018: Chandler Hutchison (22) (acquired in Mirotic trade)
• 2019: Coby White (7) (own pick)
• 2019: Daniel Gafford (38) (own pick)
• 2020: Patrick Williams (4) (own pick)
• 2020: Marko Simonovic (44) (own pick)
• 2021: Ayo Dosunmu (38) (own pick)
• 2022: Dalen Terry (18) (own pick)
• 2023: Julian Phillips (35) (acquired for two 2nd round picks)

The Bulls drafted 10 players over 7 years. Considering each team gets two draft picks a year, the Bulls were 4 short of their own allotted picks. These players have one All-Star appearance between them, and it didn’t occur until Markkanen got to the Utah Jazz in his 3rd stop. None of the remaining picks project to be All-Stars.

In the last 2 years of their 7-year stretch, the Bulls sent out three 1st round picks while acquiring one from the Portland TrailBlazers that will likely never convey. Two of those 1st round picks have already been conveyed in the lottery to the Orlando Magic, and the San Antonio Spurs have the Bulls’ top-10 protected pick for the 2025 draft. The Bulls also have traded several 2nd round picks, lost another one in a tampering fine, and do not own any 2nd round picks until 2028.

The Bulls’ continual failure to value asset acquisition has been the single largest contributing factor to their unsuccessful rebuild. During the years they intentionally built bad teams, they never picked higher than 7th. And because the Bulls did not acquire more darts to throw, each pick had outsized importance to the team’s success. Bulls fans have agonized over Lauri, Wendell, Coby, and Patrick’s every developmental setback and shortcoming because too much was laid to rest on their shoulders. The lack of quantity of draft assets made every draft pick’s job that much harder. Lauri and Wendell have both been on record about how their Bulls tenure was one of mental hardship, failure, and frustration, and given the current state of the team, it’s undoubtedly been Patrick’s experience as well. The fanbase has called for all four of these lottery picks to be traded at different points during their rookie contracts. And while none of these players should be free from fair criticism, the organization bears significant responsibility for it through failure to maximize their assets.

Invest in Evaluation and Development

It’s not enough for an NBA team to just acquire assets; the team needs to make each pick count. Investing in talent evaluation is a crucial way to improve a team, because the NBA is a zero-sum game: if one team doesn’t find the diamonds in the rough, the competition will. NBA teams are constantly on the lookout for the next big thing and employ scouts to scour the world at large as well as every high school gym to get the edge on their competition. By and large, they do a decent job: over the last 30 years, the higher the pick, the better the chance of becoming All-Star players.

Higher selections also have an element of self-fulfilling prophecy: teams are likely to invest more time, energy, and money into the 1st pick of the draft versus the 60th, and that investment tends to improve the odds that the player will reach their potential.

That investment in the development of players goes hand in hand with selecting the right players in the first place. If evaluators are doing their jobs right, the team is bringing in players that have NBA-level talent that can be honed through technique and repetition into consistent production. Once that player arrives, the honing begins. Player development staff should know how a player can contribute now, what he needs to improve upon, and should have developed a plan for doing so that is in concert with the coach’s on-court strategies and executives’ vision for the team. In addition, the existence of a viable G-League team is extremely useful for providing on-court opportunities and targeted development for young players. To properly develop multiple players over years of a rebuild, a team of development staff is required.

The Chicago Bulls founded their G-League affiliate team in 2016, becoming the 20th NBA team to do so. On the staffing front, however, until the 2020-21 season, the Bulls employed only one (1) person responsible for player development. Until this season, the Bulls did not employ a shooting coach (the Bulls ranked 29th and 30th in 3-point rate the last two seasons, per Cleaning The Glass). Most team observers were not even aware that an analytics department existed within the Bulls until 2020, which demonstrates its lack of importance to the franchise. The Bulls even skipped out on a scouting event in 2018 attended by every other team because they didn’t want to pay the entry fee. It is inexcusable that one of the richest franchises in the world decided to penny pinch instead of fully investing in their players’ success and development during a rebuild.

Creating The Right Environment

Also crucial to the success of player development is creating an environment that is conducive to each player’s growth. This includes important aspects such as:

• Hiring the right coaching staff
• Creating opportunities for in-game reps
• Signing veteran mentors
• Assembling a complementary roster of players
• Developing strategies and lineups that build on a player’s strengths and maximize their production
• Allowing for playing through mistakes
• Fostering the right habits
• Ensuring good nutrition and exercise
• Building camaraderie

For all but the most talented and driven NBA athletes, fit and opportunity dictate much of a player’s career trajectory. Understanding a player’s talents and properly utilizing them is essential to helping him find minutes on the court and making those minutes productive. Some teams have a strong track record of unearthing talent and then maximizing that player’s production on the court. One that immediately comes to mind is the Miami Heat, who has consistently found and developed great players relative to their draft position. Their strong organizational cohesion, great coaching, infectious culture, and high expectations of performance have consistently produced higher than average results.

Taking a look at the Chicago Bulls’ environment during the last 7 years, however, instability has been the most prominent feature. Starting with coaching, the Bulls fired Tom Thibodeau in 2014-15 and hired Hoiberg as the new coach, citing his ability to communicate with players and bring the offense into line with modern NBA standards. This proved to be a difficult transition that ultimately led to Jimmy Butler’s exit. Hoiberg only got one season to oversee the rebuild before being replaced for “lack of spirit” by Jim Boylen, who was, admittedly, full of spirit.

Unfortunately, Boylen proved to be very unpopular in the locker room, including an almost-mutiny within one week of assuming head coaching duties. During his tenure, Boylen discouraged players from taking mid-range shots, made wholesale substitutions for perceived failures, forced his team to use a punch clock, threw his players under the bus in the media, and consistently failed to take accountability for his coaching.

It’s hard to overstate how devastating Boylen’s tenure was on player development. Here are just a few examples:

• Wendell Carter, a young versatile big who could shoot, pass, defend, screen, and rebound all fairly well as a rookie, was used exclusively as a screener and rim finisher during Boylen’s tenure, being told not to take 3s and not included as a hub passer. Carter’s confidence as a player consistently got worse over time, and his mental struggles were widely documented by the media until being traded in 2021.
• Lauri Markkanen, a sweet-shooting 7-foot forward, saw his usage and role fluctuate wildly from his time under Hoiberg to under Boylen, being used mostly as a spot-up shooter by the latter. Lauri saw his efficiency dip both years he was under Boylen, only resurging after Billy Donovan was hired in 2020-21. Markkanen too was traded at the end of that season.
• Coby White only had one year under Boylen, but he was specifically told not to take any mid-range shots, despite that being an important part of his game.
• Even veteran Thaddeus Young was relegated to a corner 3-point shooting role; Young felt strongly that the way Boylen used him did not lend itself to his strengths, and even caused Young to consider retirement because basketball had lost its joy for him. He had a huge resurgence in production after Billy Donovan replaced Boylen.

The difference in quality between Boylen and Donovan was stark; Donovan put Coby, Lauri, and Wendell in positions that fit their basketball skills and complemented the team structure, challenged them privately but supported them publicly, and provided detailed analysis on his coaching philosophies. Rookie Patrick Williams was allowed to start and learn on the fly, playing through mistakes and taking on tough defensive assignments all year.

The only fly in the ointment was that the new duo of Karnisovas and Eversley came in with promises to bring a championship to Chicago and, after a few short months of actual development for the Bulls’ young core of players, unilaterally and prematurely decided that the rebuild was over.

As a result of that decision, Carter and Markkanen were traded, veteran contributors brought in, and White and Williams were relegated to support roles. Both immediately had expectations placed upon them to take big leaps in development, despite the heavily reduced roles available to them. Despite better coaching and teammates, both saw their ability to play through mistakes and to their strengths immediately diminished and their featured development sidelined in exchange for more immediate wins.

Williams’ tenure has been especially tenuous. The big wing who likes to protect the rim, play on-ball, and get to his mid-range pull-up found that there were too many on-ball mouths to feed between LaVine, DeRozan, and Vucevic, and that his preferred area of the floor was already crowded. His new role: shoot open 3s and defend the perimeter. To his credit, he improved in both areas significantly in his 3rd year after missing most of his 2nd with injury, doubling his 3-pt volume while knocking down 41%, and becoming an extremely effective isolation defender. 

The 4th pick has had a very atypical situation for a player picked so highly in the draft, however. Rather than being featured in the offense and allowed to play through his mistakes, Williams is expected to be a role player and to simply take advantage of the opportunities he can. And because the franchise’s decisions have effectively capped the team’s ultimate aptitude otherwise, Williams reaching his full potential immediately has become all the more imperative.

With the franchise unwilling to sacrifice current wins to focus on Williams’ and White’s development, the young players find themselves in a situation where their improvement is impatiently expected and actively stifled. Each criticism, even when fair game, has been heightened and made all the more dire because of the situation the Bulls have placed themselves in, and the ones paying the price are consistently the players.

Patience and Consistency

Developing a clear vision for the franchise, implementing those objectives, and being fully committed to them are hallmarks of successful rebuilds. Executives sweat over which players to draft, which star players might become available on the market, when to cash in their chips, and when to fold. Strong basketball executives understand that their guiding principles, along with good timing and a bit of luck, are crucial to executing their visions effectively.

Sam Presti and Darryl Morey immediately come to mind as executives that have put their stamp on organizations as shrewd negotiators and clear communicators. Although it’s fun to poke fun, Morey’s comfortability with being uncomfortable gives him a tactical advantage in negotiations, and Presti’s consistency and commitment to his goals have put the Thunder in great position moving forward. Of course, executives across the league enjoy different levels of time, finances, market, and ownership involvement, but those who have a proven track record of building competitive squads share the foregoing hallmarks.

The Chicago Bulls operate a little bit differently. John Paxson started as a Bulls’ front office executive in 2003, finally relinquishing his duties in 2020 (only to stay on as a senior advisor). Gar Forman started as a scout in 1998 and held the general manager title from 2009 to his firing in 2020. That’s a long time in executive years compared to most franchises, and “GarPax” enjoyed seeming full support from ownership throughout their full tenure. Their jobs were so safe, in fact, that Paxson had to proactively ask for a change to the front office to be made. Yes, that’s right: Paxson ultimately fired himself.

As only the third person to hold the title since 1985, Executive VP of Basketball Operations Arturas Karnisovas had long latitude from ownership to run basketball operations as he saw fit. Both ownership and Karnisovas have said as much throughout his tenure. Given the consistently cold seats both GarPax and “AKME” sat in, they had more opportunity than most to fully execute their visions for the franchise. However, both of their tenures have been marked by inconsistency and impatience.

After moving on from Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah in the off-season prior to the 2016-17, GarPax vowed to get “younger and more athletic” in order to put complementary pieces next to Butler and provide 2nd-year coach Fred Hoiberg with a roster more suited to his coaching preference. Neither happened. Instead of putting shooting and defense around Butler, the Bulls’ brass were distracted by the chance to put butts in seats and instead signed Rajon Rondo and Dwyane Wade. This deviation from their own stated goals armed Hoiberg’s squad with maybe the worst spacing in the entire league that year. That season’s failure ultimately led to the Butler trade and decision to rebuild in the first place.

As previously stated, once the Bulls decided to rebuild, they failed to fully commit to it. They didn’t acquire draft picks, sold another off, did not hire development staff, hired arguably the worst coach of the decade, etc. The Bulls were indeed bad over a 5-year period, but their suffering went mostly in vain as a result because all of the principles that go in to successful rebuilding were notably absent.

To their credit, when AKME replaced GarPax, they started implementing many of those principles. However, Karnisovas vowed not to skip any steps in the process of building a championship team. Instead, the Bulls started skipping steps almost immediately. After just 4 months of actually focusing on player development for the first time in 5 years, the Bulls decided they’d had enough.

Over the next few months, they shipped out young players Wendell Carter, Lauri Markkanen, Daniel Gafford, Chandler Hutchison, 3 lightly protected 1st round picks, and multiple 2nds to bring in a win-now squad that peaked as a 46-win, 1st round playoff exit. AKME promised in consecutive off-seasons to bring in shooting and rim protection and change the shot profile of the team. Neither happened.

The results of the Bulls’ lack of patience and their inconsistency between what they said they would do and what they did has gone exactly how you’d expect. They topped out as a sad 1st-round exit in their best season, watched Carter and Markkanen ultimately find success elsewhere, failed to develop their young players, and gave up valuable picks to the Orlando Magic and San Antonio Spurs.

Both GarPax and AKME failed to fully commit to their stated goals. For GarPax, they failed to take the necessary steps to acquire assets, invest in player development, and put their players in position to succeed. In AKME’s case, they went all-in too early without having even the hint of a franchise player on their roster, sacrificing promising young players and draft picks in order to raise their floor, but installing a hard ceiling on the team’s future outlook.

The Road to Nowhere

The Bulls show no signs that they have learned from their mistakes. With three specialist, ill-fitting stars on the roster, they’ve depended too heavily on finding the perfect 2-way role players in order to have any chance of success. With Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso in tow, they found lightning in a bottle for a few months, a fact AKME desperately cite as justification for continuing with this charade.

However, the Bulls are building backwards. Teams are supposed to find 2-way stars as their franchise pieces and then build around them with complementary role players. The Bulls have done the opposite, and it continues to blow up in their face.

Even now, the Bulls continue to double down on their flawed process. Longstanding rumors of the Bulls looking to trade Zach LaVine finally came to a head this week, with LaVine’s camp also reportedly now open to a trade. But the Bulls reportedly have no plans to take their medicine by beginning a proper rebuild. Not even close. The Bulls instead want to extend DeMar DeRozan, stick with Vucevic through his new 3-year deal, and from what I’m hearing, they intend to use any return in a LaVine trade to bolster their current roster and “remain competitive,” if they even trade LaVine at all.

Karnisovas stated in his initial press conference: “This is my dream. Our ultimate goal is clearly to bring an NBA championship to the city of Chicago. … A firm foundation is absolutely vital. I will build that here in Chicago. No skipping steps. There is a systematic approach to success.” If that is truly the goal, then it is impossible to reconcile that goal with AKME’s current actions and future plans.

The Bulls do not even have a top-30 player on their roster, let alone a superstar. They do not have the assets to acquire one. And they have no developing players who project to get there. AKME boldly repeated the same mistake, with the same reasoning, that GarPax made when they assembled the “3 Alphas,” only this time with “3 Betas” (h/t Zach Lowe) and a lot less draft capital.

The Chicago Bulls are further from a championship now than when they started the rebuild in June 2017, and every day they delay the inevitable only makes the path back to relevance that much more difficult. If building a championship team in Chicago has any hope of becoming a reality, the Bulls need to embrace the principles that provide the foundation for sustainable, winning franchises. Until they do, there’s no reason to expect different results.

The post The Road to Nowhere appeared first on Swish Theory.

This funny tactic forces the player setting the screen to either try and quickly set a second screen or to abandon the screen entirely and reset the action. The former often results in a moving screen violation because Caruso is already in movement as the second screen is set, attached to the hip of the ball handler; the latter shaves valuable seconds off of the shot clock. If the screen is legally set, Caruso’s hop allows him to get better position on the play and quickly negate any advantage created by the screen. 

Caruso’s hop is one of many examples that illustrate how defenders use something called cognitive athleticism to become playmakers, bending opposing teams to their will on the defensive end of the floor. Much like their offensive counterparts, defensive playmakers are adept at controlling the action around them to maximize each possession and prevent the other team from running their sets effectively. Yet despite defensive playmaking’s indispensable importance to winning basketball, the impact of its major component – cognitive athleticism – has largely gone under the radar. 

I want to explore why that is and illustrate how we can get better at recognizing cognitive athleticism’s impact on defense and defensive playmaking specifically. To do that, it’s essential to first discuss: the inherent difficulties in quantifying defense; what the goals of good defense are and how those are, at times, misaligned with the statistics that attempt to measure them; and how untracked or unique defensive traits that have an outsized impact on defense are often difficult to pin down or reproduce in data. 

Finally, I’ll examine what cognitive athleticism is, how it manifests, how it allows players to raise both the floor and ceiling of a good defense, and how we can get better at identifying it. I’m going to illustrate this largely through the lens of two players that demonstrate, in my estimation, elite levels of this athleticism – Alex Caruso and Nikola Jokic. 

The Problem with Quantifying Defense

The basketball world has gotten increasingly obsessed over the years with collecting and organizing data in ways that can accurately estimate the impact of individual players or lineups of players on winning games. You know, the “VORPs and schnorps” Zach Lowe loves to talk about. These various metrics are not perfect, nor are they intended to be, but significant strides have been made with offensive metrics in particular, such that they tend to provide a fairly accurate picture of who is doing good things on the offensive end and how they are doing it. Lagging far behind, however, are defensive metrics. Zach Kram at The Ringer had a great article last year about the inherent issues in attempting to create accurate defensive statistics, which is highly recommended reading. The gist, though, is that defense remains extremely difficult to quantify in any consistent and meaningful way, and the best path to learn a player’s impact on defense is still the long one: watch an exorbitant amount of film and develop a deep understanding of what is happening on the floor on each possession. For the foregoing reasons, highly impactful defensive players have always gotten a lot less shine than their offensive counterparts, if they are even properly identified at all. 

The art of defensive playmaking has remained especially underappreciated. When we discuss elite playmakers, for example, the context is always on offense. Players like Nikola Jokic, LeBron James, or Luka Doncic have the remarkable ability to survey the basketball court and efficiently process the movements of their teammates and opponents in real time. They master every angle, every eyeball shift, every foot movement to create just the right amount of space for an open shot or deliver a pinpoint pass at just the right moment. You’ve heard announcers and analysts alike rave about how these players always seem a step ahead of the defense and how they create unique advantages with that precognition. That same prescience – the ability to know what will happen before it happens – is the key skill with which players can become impactful defensive playmakers. As illustrated by the initial example involving Alex Caruso, defensive playmakers use cognitive athleticism to create game-altering defensive events that can completely transform a team’s defensive aptitude. To understand its importance, it is essential to understand what good defense is and what it looks like.

The Goal of Defense

At the risk of insulting your intelligence for a second, I want to lay out defense at the granular level in order to demonstrate that cognitive athleticism is at the heart of every good defense. As we know, basketball is a simple game: put the ball in the other basket and prevent the other team from putting the ball in your basket. Conceptually, then, winning a basketball game comes down to maximizing each possession and creating more possessions for your team while limiting possessions and making them inefficient for the other team. 

At its core, the goal of any team or player on defense is to end the opponent’s possession without surrendering any points. There’s various defensive events that can occur or be generated to help accomplish this objective, and the following major ones are currently tracked: turnovers, steals, offensive fouls, deflections, contests, blocks, and rebounds. Each of these events have varying defensive value:

• Turnovers: turnovers encompass multiple defensive events, such as steals or drawing offensive fouls, but also things like stepping out of bounds or bad passes or recovery of a loose ball. Turnovers are very valuable because they end the opponents’ possession without sacrificing points and often lead to transition opportunities or the accrual of fouls. 
• Steals: these are consistently the most valuable defensive events because they immediately end the opponents’ possession, sacrifice no points, have a demoralizing component, and often create a transition opportunity on offense. Over the last decade plus, offenses have scored 1.04 points per possession in transition versus 0.87 points per possession in the half-court. Additionally, with the new take-foul rule in place that grants a free throw plus possession for a foul in transition, steals will likely become even more advantageous on average.
• Offensive fouls: drawing a charge or illegal screen are the most common offensive fouls. Individually, they are generally not quite as valuable as steals because they don’t create transition opportunities, but their value can exceed steals as the opposing team gets into foul trouble and generates free throws (1.3 points per possession on average).
• Deflections: deflections disrupt opposing offenses, eat up valuable time, and often lead to steals and offensive fouls. 
• Contests: getting hands raised in front of a shooter can be valuable to alter shots or discourage players from taking them in the first place, and can also result in blocks.
• Blocks: blocks force a missed shot and can be especially valuable when the rebound is secured immediately afterwards. Blocks are also demoralizing and can be an effective way to coerce teams into taking less efficient shots.
• Rebounds: these end the opponent’s possession without sacrificing points and often lead to transition opportunities. 

While these tracked defensive events are often markers of a good defense, the statistics themselves do not always have meaningful probative value, as previously illustrated in Zach Kram’s article. Instead, understanding how these tracked events are generated is often more important than the event itself, and that is where cognitive athleticism manifests.

For example, you might have two players who generate a high number of steals and therefore rate favorably on various defensive metrics. Assume Player A generates steals because he consistently anticipates passes and intercepts them due to good positioning and anticipation, while Player B generates a lot of steals because he gambles on the perimeter and is often successful in getting possession of the ball due to his long arms. While both players generate steals, Player B sacrifices good positioning to do so and may create multiple disadvantaged possessions for his team between acquiring each steal. Defensive metrics struggle to capture this important distinction; all we see is that a steal was generated. 

Additionally, there are many defensive events that are not tracked at all or cannot reasonably be tracked, making the effects of cognitive athleticism even less visible to the untrained eye. A player who is consistently in the right position to create opportunities for defensive events, for example, may never generate a single steal, deflection, block, or turnover and yet can still be a quality defender. That’s because the impact of a player on defense is far more complicated to determine than simply looking at a box score. You have to understand the details of each and every possession – the offensive scheme, the personnel executing it and their effectiveness in doing so, the defensive scheme, the defender’s role in that scheme, and how effective all five players are at executing – which all must be taken into account. It’s a monumental task that requires both sophisticated basketball knowledge and a lot of repetition, and no one person has the bandwidth to do this across the entire league. Thankfully, there are physical and mental traits that can help us prognosticate a player’s aptitude and tendencies on defense across a variety of situations. Just as the trained eye can sense that certain offensive players are or will be gifted playmakers, we can identify gifted defensive playmakers by learning what to look for. 

Defensive Athleticism

Every player leverages three types of athleticism when they play basketball: hard, soft, and cognitive – as illustrated and discussed by Thinking Basketball’s Ben Taylor.

Hard and soft athleticism, often described as physical tools, are essential to be effective on both sides of the floor. In the defensive context, players who have long limbs, can jump high, can change direction and speed quickly while maintaining balance, are mobile and also immovable, and/or can be highly active for long periods of time are typically more likely to have a consistently positive impact on defense.  

That’s because defensive activity most commonly occurs in reaction to the opponent. And while defensive schemes are often pre-planned as a result of good scouting and coaching, players are put in positions to react to the others currently on the floor in order to maximize the team’s defensive impact against that unit. For example, players involved defensively in a pick and roll action react to the screen: the on-ball defender attempts to navigate the screen and regain defensive position on the ball-handler, while the screener’s defender either blitzes the ball-handler, or drops back as the screener rolls, or does whatever else may be called for by the defensive scheme and the offensive action being executed. Hard and soft athleticism are especially helpful in reactive defense, as they can minimize recovery time and allow for quicker rotations to diminish any advantages created by the offense. 

Cognitive athleticism, on the other hand, allows defenders to flip the script. Instead of just reacting on defense, defenders use cognitive athleticism to become proactive, anticipating the future to create defensive events. Cognitive athleticism is commonly referred to as “feel” or, more clumsily, as “basketball IQ,” though it has little to do with intelligence. Rather, according to Ben Taylor and SIS Hoops’ Evan Zaucha, cognitive athleticism is made up of four parts: pattern recognition, spatial awareness, anticipation, and cognitive load. Each of these combine and overlap to help a defender generate a “feel” for defense that allows them to accurately forecast what the offense is going to do and when. These same four parts apply for offensive playmakers as well. 

Pattern recognition is the ability to identify plays or actions and the tendencies of the personnel running them. While there are certainly players who naturally excel in this area, all players can develop their pattern recognition through repetition of actions and diligent film study. Prescient defenders will often know a play call before it is executed, an opposing player’s favorite spots to shoot, or what hand or side they favor on a drive. Players that excel in pattern recognition consistently study different players and actions so they can access that information in real time during a game. Here’s a simple example the internet had way too much fun with: 

And here’s Alex Caruso describing Jayson Tatum’s tendencies to JJ Redick: 

Spatial awareness is often described as court vision. It’s knowing where everyone is on the floor at all times and where they are going to be in the near future. This knowledge can help an offensive player know how fast to throw a pass or when to accept or reject a screen. Defensively, it allows a player to identify optimal positioning or recognize and call out an impending breakdown in a rotating defense. Caruso exemplifies this concept with his impeccable timing and positioning on this sequence:

Anticipation is the ability to expect or predict something that has yet to happen. This cognitive ability allows an offensive player to throw a pass to an empty spot on the floor that will soon be occupied by his teammate. Defensively, players use anticipation to know where they need to be positioned to intercept a pass that hasn’t yet been made to an off-ball cutter, or to avoid getting screened, or to swipe a hand at an opposing ball-handler: 

Finally, cognitive load is akin to mental stamina. It’s a player’s ability to maintain their processing speed throughout an entire game or series without significant dropoff. Just as physical conditioning is required to play sustained NBA minutes, great defensive playmakers require consistent exercise of their cognitive athleticism to maintain their prognostic bandwidth:

The havoc that Caruso creates every possession he’s in the game is a testament to this conditioning. Every second that he spends blowing up a screen, or negating a created advantage, or deflecting a pass, or getting between the ball-handler and their intended target, translates into less time to score and a less efficient offense for the opposing team. Basketball players play best when they are in rhythm; Caruso makes sure his targets never get comfortable by anticipating their every move. Caruso also impacts winning by erasing his teammates’ mistakes and allowing them to play more aggressively within a given scheme because of the additional margin for error that he provides with his elite blend of hard, soft, and cognitive athleticism. His 1st Team All-Defense award was well-deserved this last season.  

Cognitive athleticism can also help defenders who don’t possess more traditional physical athletic traits and are often overlooked or undervalued as a result. Nikola Jokic is a great example of a player whose defensive impact is difficult to pinpoint with available metrics and who does not pop off the screen on that end of the floor. Jokic is lanky, but he’s not especially bouncy or quick. He does, however, use his incredible cognitive athleticism to his advantage, using spatial awareness and anticipation to plod right into the correct positions at the right time, and using his pattern recognition to vocally quarterback the defense for his teammates. His coach, Michael Malone, describes how Jokic’s cognitive athleticism impacts his team’s defense:

Malone is right: a lot of this stuff isn’t readily apparent using the eye test unless you know what you’re looking for, nor does it appear on any stat sheet, so box-score-based defensive analytics cannot reliably predict it. Consider these two sequences where Alex Caruso guards Devin Booker; Caruso becomes an agent of chaos on defense for nearly 30 seconds, anticipating Booker’s every twitch and tendency to cause him to take two low-quality shots, but there’s no recorded defensive stat to reflect that reality:

That doesn’t mean the impact is not felt. Having an elite defensive playmaker on an NBA team roster can keep almost any team afloat defensively. Having two can completely transform it. The best recent example of this is the 2021-22 Chicago Bulls who, despite deploying the defensively milquetoast Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan, and Nikola Vucevic, had a league-best defensive rating when Alex Caruso and Lonzo Ball, both of whom are elite defensive playmakers, shared the floor with them or when both of them were on the floor with any other lineup. With them off the floor, the Bulls had the worst defensive rating in the league. Not only did they flip the script on defense, their defensive playmaking and pinpoint passing juiced Chicago’s transition offense to league-best efficiency in points per possession on transition opportunities. 

Identifying Cognitive Athleticism 

But far too often, however, the impact of cognitively athletic defenders is not adequately recognized by large parts of the basketball community. A center with hard and soft athleticism that racks up blocks, for example, may be commonly viewed as defensively impactful because he pops off the screen. But if he’s chasing blocks while being out of position, or if opponents get into the paint at a higher rate because he’s not rotating correctly, the impact metrics can sometimes be overstated or deceiving. A center who is constantly in the right spot or rotating with precision may not get the opportunity to block as many shots because opposing players are deterred from ever getting to the paint in the first place, which is far more conducive to winning but harder to pin down on paper. Having an awareness of these factors can help us understand why both people and defensive metrics are so split on the defensive impact of players like Nikola Jokic, or why the little things Alex Caruso does often go unnoticed or underappreciated for so long. 

Next time you watch a player on defense this season, try and focus on identifying traits of cognitive athleticism. Or when you scan for the aforementioned defensive events, identify how the player generated the statistic. For example, when a defensive player gets screened, look for their footwork and positioning before, during, and after a screen is set. When a player gets a rebound, watch that player’s timing, positioning, anticipation, and box-outs that lead to the rebound. Were they just lucky, or did they create the defensive event through their proactivity? As always, metrics and statistics can be incredibly useful in evaluation, but they should primarily be used as tools to generate good questions rather than provide definitive answers. If a player generally thought to be a poor defender rates highly in one or across multiple defensive metrics, that should pique your interest, and vice versa. Don’t just take numbers at face value, investigate them. 

As we learn to recognize how cognitive athleticism manifests on defense, we’ll be able to better identify good defenders at all levels of the sport. Perhaps someday soon we’ll have metrics that can accurately measure how well a defender anticipates a pass or avoids a screen, but until then, as Tom Thibodeau loves to say, the magic is in the work. 

The post The Mind of a Defensive Menace: Cognitive Athleticism’s Impact on Defense appeared first on Swish Theory.