Zach Lavine: The Wages of Perception

When I was 18, I spent a summer working for Costco. Most of my job involved collecting shopping carts strewn across the parking lot, stacking them up, and pushing them back to the front of the store for customers to use. Speed and efficiency were paramount during these summer months because of the heat, and I quickly found a system that worked for me: I jogged or ran rather than walked. Doing so allowed me to get the job done faster, which gave me the opportunity to hydrate at the water station or, better yet, take on additional duties inside the air conditioned warehouse.

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.