Baby Dirk, Do do, de, do, do

 The Cavs traded for the artist formerly known as Baby Dirk, and while nicknames are fun and early career comparisons are often terrible, why hasn’t Markkanen even come close to living up to that potential?  That is the question for today.

However the question here is not ‘why didn’t Lauri become Dirk-like’, because that is a very obvious simple answer, Dirk was one of the greatest mid range shooters in history and he used that elite (as in how elite should be used, nearly unparalleled) skill to force defenders into positions where they would foul, and then he cashed those FTs in at an 87% clip. That is the difference between Dirk and most other good shooting bigs, he could draw contact in the midrange the way that most bigs could only do at the actual basket.  The combination of traits that it took to produce that outcome (not the least being the IQ to recognize how to work the situation and the willingness to exploit it on every damn possession in the half court) are what sets Dirk apart.

The question here is why didn’t Lauri become an all-star level player when his physical skills/traits and his first two years of production pointed in that direction.  To recap quickly Markkanen’s first year was solid for a rookie, he scored on solid volume and efficiency for a rookie and rebounded acceptably well, while doing little else and generally being poor on defense.  In year two he maintained his efficiency as a scorer while increasing his volume (usage rate jumping from 22% to 25%, TS and TO rates unchanged) and improved his rebounding numbers a bit.  While he failed to add any notable shot blocking or steal numbers his advanced defensive metrics either improved or stayed flat but from a much better than traditionally thought rookie year rate depending on which metric you choose.  

From this type of base it is pretty clear that 95% of good outcomes are going to come from Lauri being a higher volume higher efficiency scoring big who plays good team defense.  However his path to higher efficiency was a bit narrower than a lot of young guys.  First off he already had very good shot selection.  Now there is a lot of opinion fluff out there that says he doesn’t score at the rim enough which is sort of true but mostly misleading.  Because he came out as a high volume 3pt shooter from day 1 his % of shots at the rim was always going to be low for a big man.  In his 2nd season with a 25% usage rate he was taking 67% of his shots from either 3pt range or at the rim, and that doesn’t leave a huge amount of room for converting poor shots into good shots.  He peaked at a combined rate of 84% each of the past two seasons, but both seasons were on lower USG (21 and 20%) than even his rookie year, and not maintaining his usage or preferably increasing it.  His rebound rate also dipped a fair amount from his first two years. 

There isn’t an obvious cause for this shift in role looking at team composition, but there is one potential partial explanation.  Lavine played in a larger % of his teams games in ‘19/20 than he did in ‘18/19, and the two shared the court in 68% of Lauri’s mins in his sophomore year and 82% in year 3.  This is a substantial jump in sharing the court with a high usage/low assist* player.  This isn’t definitive though as this past season Markkanen only played with Lavine in 58% of his mins and his usage was at a career low.  The addition of Vuce does seem to have all but eliminated Lauri’s impact on the offense though, as his USG dropped from ~22% to <18% after the midseason trade.

So far this is all descriptive as to what happened but doesn’t explain why it happened. Why did Chicago take one of their best prospects, arguably their best prospect, and cut his usage, his effectiveness and then dump him 2 years later?  Are there good reasons for this or are they just a garbage organization currently?  

The evidence for Chicago as a poor organization is reasonably strong.  Since hitting on the Jimmy Butler selection they have a series of poor to awful moves around draft picks.  These include trading the rights to what ended up being Nurkic and Gary Harris so they could draft Doug McDermott, they dumped Portis early in his career (off court stuff), failed to get anything out of the Carter Jr selection, and have now buried Coby White on the bench behind DDR, Lavine and Ball.  In short there is some hope that they just screwed the pooch on this series of moves and dumped a player that they should have kept as a building block.  

What then is the upside potential for Lauri with the Cavs?

Its hard to put it at all-star level, it really takes some mental contortions to project that he adds currently unseens skills to his game.  Such as developing a strong post move he can exploit to force mismatches, or improving his face up game by a large amount.  But if we take the best of what he has shown so far in the league we can put together a nice looking player.

If we take his highest usage season, his best shooting percentages and his best rebound rate we get best case line of

21.7/9/1.5 with 1.5 steals+blocks, on >60% TS.  

I would put that line down as very optimistic, his 2pt% rose as his shot attempts from mid range fell, and his 40.3% 3pt rate in his best season is well above his 36.6% career rate, and also his highest rate of corner 3 attempts.  

However pushing back on those limitations is the guard play he has seen with Chicago vs what Cleveland has this season, and frankly speaking for off ball players the PG position with the Bulls has been at the bottom of the league for years.  Both Garland and Rubio could claim to be the best passing PG that Lauri has played with on day 1 of this season, and while the Cavs were at the bottom of the league in terms of 3pta rate, their 3s were more heavily weighted to off ball players, in terms of attempts per 100 they were lead by Love, Osman, Wade, Dotson and Prince while the Bulls were lead by Lavine, Valentine, Markkanen and White.  The Cavs two primary guards, Sexton and Garland were 7th and 8th on the team in attempts per 100 (>500 mins) while Chicago’s lead guards were 1st and 4th.  If the Cavs committed to generating looks for Markkanen then he could plausibly get up to the 13-13.5 attempts per 100 that Duncan Robinson and Davis Bertans have reached in previous seasons, or just the 12-12.4 that Kevin Love has hit in his short stints over the past few years.

There is of course a lot of uncertainty here, which is why this particular player was available.  I look forward to this season more every day though, it certainly should be interesting. 

  

*I know, I know, Lavine has improved as a passer over the years, but for a guy dominating the ball as much as he has they are still low totals especially with as many off ball players as the Bulls have had around him in this stretch.