LeBron James has spent his career by comparison. He is the poster of the Age of Scrutiny: applauded at 17 for preserving the collaborative legacy of Magic Johnson, denigrated at 34 for the lack of last-minute cold-bloodedness of Michael Jordan, measured annually against Carmelo’s contemporaries Anthony to Giannis Antetokounmpo. In just the past few seasons, he has handed down his reputation and returned as the best player of the game too many times to count. It is fitting, then, that the final stages of his career found James in Los Angeles, where he faces two challenges. The first is to win a championship with the Lakers. The second is to do this in a way consistent with the requirements of a renowned provincial fan base – to win it, in other words, like Kobe Bryant.
The arrival of Anthony Davis in James’s second LA season has made a title more likely; after a loss of Game 1 to the red-hot Trail Blazers, the Lakers managed to take a 2-1 lead. Davis’ presence, though, has made the comparisons indelible as well. In the broadest sense, the two superstars fit the mold of Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal; one is a generation-wing creator, the other a great league man. But what makes them powerful in the modern game – their versatility and awareness, a shared habit of pretending the selfish play for the good end – also earns them a dose of local suspicion. Kobe and Shaq hit heads, did their own thing, got baked and won three rings. There’s a tribe of Lakers fans (best summed up by this guy) who sees the deep catalog of today’s squad of pick-and-roll variations as unnecessary for the task at hand.
The intelligentsia of the hoops has for the most part the case for hero ball roads and ruled against it. But behind the nostalgia of the Kobe-Shaq partisans may be a point. Much has changed in the past two decades of the NBA, but the ability to work out and work out remains a useful postseason tool. And if the new Lakers match their predecessors, they may have to fall back on some of their old go-it-alone tendencies.
By current scoreboard-spinning standards, the offensive ratings drawn up by the Lakers of the early 2000s (107.3 points per 100 possessions in 1999-2000, 108.4 in 2000-01, 109.4 in 2001-02) are not significant; 19 teams improved these markets this year. But in the slow follow-up of the Jordanian era, those markets stood near the top of the league. LA at the time seemed to depict the full future of the sport, marrying the midrange stylings that were iconically created by MJ (the fadeaway Kobe inherited) with the post-central approach that came earlier (Shaq’s drop -step, pressure-testing by everyone from Hakeem Olajuwon to David Robinson). Opposing teams had a hard time dealing with O’Neal on the block of Bryant at the elbow, let alone weigh both.
It was brutalist basketball, dealing less with maximizing efficiency – the word then brought economics of motion to mind, not shooting charts – than with deploying advantage as simply as possible. Over the course of their championship seasons, Bryant and O’Neal used 29.8 and 31.5 percent, respectively, of the Lakers’ possessions and to devastating effect. Bryant averaged 25.4 points and 5.1 assists on a .547 true shooting percentage; if he was not inclined to chase the most analytical sound, he made the less recommendable with remarkable provision. O’Neal averaged 28.6 points and 12.4 rebounds per game, leading the league in Box Plus / Minus in all three seasons. “We are … the most dominant one-two punch, small-sized, ever made in the game,” O’Neal said.
Much of their effectiveness came, counterintuitively, from the little they needed each other. (Some of the friction between them probably came from the same source.) Sure, they took advantage of each other’s presence – Bryant, stationed on the wing, discouraged teams from hurling double teams at O’Neal; O’Neal loved defenders to help in Bryant’s path – but they were, at heart, independent scorers. Synergy’s system for tracking iso-games and post-ups no longer goes out after the ‘Roundball Rock’ days, but the two held on to archetypes so quickly that the numbers would be almost irresponsible. Pull every movie up from its three-turf run and it will show more or less the same things: Shaq in the post pivots in undisputed spring hooks and mashing his way to massive slams, Kobe works his jab steps and crossovers in 18-foot pullups as attacks on the edge.
The modern NBA includes challenges and expectations that the Lakers have never addressed, of course: overloads of strengths, expanded skill sets, the prioritization of space and pace. Where Kobe and Shaq did moreover, LeBron and AD treat each other in multiplication. This season’s usage rates for James and Davis (31.5 and 29.3 percent, respectively) are similar to those of peak Bryant and O’Neal, but the two play more in tandem. The plays James has refined a career – the defensive-collapsing urges and precognitive passes – find natural outlets in Davis’ catch-and-shoot acumen and gummy-armed lob finish. Per PBP statistics, no assist combination has been more fruitful this season than James after Davis, both in sum totals and mandrels on the edge. (In 2001-02, Bryant-to-Shaq finished 38th in the league in total assists; Rick Fox added more assists to O’Neal.) “He does everything,” James said last week of his All-Star teammate. “He handles the ball for us, he puts up, he’s on the perimeter, he’s the Defensive Player of the Year.”
How LeBron and AD stack up against Kobe and Shaq
Regular season stats for LeBron James and Anthony Davis in 2019-20 vs. Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal from 1999-2000 to 2001-02
| Per game | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Playing | Min. | Pts. | Rebs. | Asts. | 3P% | eFG% | USG% |
| LeBron James | 34.6 | 25.3 | 7.8 | 10.2 | 34.8% | 55.0% | 31.5% |
| Kobe Bryant | 39.1 | 25.4 | 5.9 | 5.1 | 29.4 | 48.3 | 29.8 |
| Difference | -4.5 | -0.1 | 1.9 | 5.1 | 5.4 | 6.7 | 1.7 |
| Anthony Davis | 34.4 | 26.1 | 9.3 | 3.2 | 33.0 | 53.6 | 29.3 |
| Shaquille O’Neal | 38.7 | 28.6 | 12.4 | 3.5 | 0 | 57.5 | 31.5 |
| Difference | -4.3 | -2.5 | -3.1 | -0.3 | 33 | -3.9 | -2.2 |
The formula has worked well enough; even after a slick run in the seed games, the Lakers maintained the best record of the Western regular season, at 52-19. In a statement-winning win over the East-leading Bucks in March – a reportedly loaded potential example of Finals – James and Davis combined for 67 points, 17 rebounds and eight assists (that’s all James’s). Away through 6 with at least three minutes left and looking for the game to ice, the Lakers turned their preference for the game: the James-Davis ball screen, which they ran almost twice in the course of the regular season, per Second Spectrum . One trip yielded a layup of James who missed but picked up defense; Davis cleaned it up with a tip-in. The next coaxed a double team from James, and Davis jumped free for a wide-open elbow jumper. The sequence summed up the binding of the two putts defensive works in: Both players provoke overreaction so that one comes loose.
But playful statistics and the overall record have masked the kind of small deficits that could become important in the deep rounds of the playoffs. The synchronicity of James and Davis is currently at the expense of a single measure of individual excellence. James averaged 0.90 points per possession on 300 games of isolation this year, down from 0.97 last season and his lowest mark since 2015-16. Davis averaged 0.90 points per possession on 321 post-up plays, representing a similar dip from last year and was his lowest average since 2016-17.
To judge James and Davis solely by their one-on-one insight is reductive in the extreme. However, recent history has expressed the idea that, at certain nodes after the season, squaring and working out is the best option. The Raptors won last year’s title due in no small part to Kawhi Leonard’s ever more accurate Jordan impression; the last four finals, MVPs have scored at least 0.94 points per possession in iso situations in the playoffs. The figures reflect a leading line of thinking about postseason basketball: that seven-game series tends to break the sport down to its simplest variables – namely who can score on whom.
Exceptions spring to mind. The 2013-14 Spurs defeated LeBron’s Miami Heat through a kind of basketball hivemind, and the pre-Durant Warriors play equal, just 10 extra feet off the court. But the current Lakers, like their ancestors, lack the grid depth to do so. In each of the Lakers’ championship seasons from 2000 to 2002, there was on average only one player named Bryant or O’Neal with no more than 10 points; twice it was Derek Fisher, on just 11 points per game. This year’s Lakers also have only one consistent threat with double figures outside of James and Davis – Kyle Kuzma. If defenders face the option to keep James-Davis pick-and-roll straight up or fall in and allow 3-pointers from Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Alex Caruso, the decision is easy.
The good news for Lakers fans is that James has put a lot of practice into taking the necessary solo turn. His 45-point elimination-missing outing against the Boston Celtics in 2012 found him further in the Kobe-Jordanian tradition, canning turnaround fadeaways and blowing past one-on-one defenders. More recently, during the 2018 postseason, his last in Cleveland, James shrugged more than his preference at the bailout of playmaking, and his 9.7 iso possessions per game in the playoffs was second only to James Harden’s 12.9. James’ effectiveness in these situations, in which he scored 0.99 points per possession, helped drag one of the least qualified rosters in recent memory to the Finals. And although Davis placed a negative plus / minus without James on the court during the regular season, a 31-and-11 outing when James struggled with his shots in the Lakers’ Game 2 victory over the Blazers on Thursday offered hope that Davis might shoulder a bigger post season load and rely less on James. On Saturday, the pair became the first Lakers duo since Bryant and O’Neal in 2002 to record 25 points and 10 rebounds in a playoff game.
On the whole, of course, Lakers fans will be happy when they have the luxury of debating the merits of various championship methodologies in a few months. But the most idiosyncratic among them can also feel a kind of erection. If James is going to win his fourth championship this season and Davis wins his first, then they should just do it the old-school way.
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