This week’s NBA mailbag takes a closer look at two of the early surprises from different ends of the spectrum. On the pessimistic side, we consider Damian Lillard‘s slow start, which has seen him shoot 33.7% from the field and 21.7% from 3-point range over the Portland Trail Blazers‘ first nine games of the season.
Are officiating changes a factor in Lillard’s struggles? How about the NBA’s much-discussed change from using basketballs manufactured by Spalding to ones from Wilson?
More happily, the Chicago Bulls‘ defense has exceeded expectations thus far. After addressing that topic briefly in this week’s piece on whether early surprises are real or not, let’s take a deeper look into how Chicago is succeeding defensively with multiple starters who are considered below-average defenders.
How long until it’s Dame Time again?
“How concerned should we be about Damian Lillard’s poor start to the season?” — Tristan
The way Lillard has shot thus far is certainly unusual.
As I noted on Twitter earlier this week, Lillard started the season with one of the worst eight-game stretches of his career, with only two others in 2015 and 2016 in which he posted a worse effective field goal percentage (eFG%) over that kind of span. His struggles continued Friday night with four points on 2-for-13 shooting and 0-for-6 from deep, albeit in a Blazers win over the Indiana Pacers.
The good news is Lillard bounced back from those previous slumps and was just fine. In 2016, just after that stretch, Lillard helped the Blazers defeat the LA Clippers for a playoff series win. So it’s certainly plausible this is the same thing and no further explanation is needed.
I’m encouraged by the fact Second Spectrum tracking data doesn’t suggest a dramatic change in Lillard’s shot quality. His quantified shot quality (qSQ), which measures the expected eFG% for an average shooter on the same kind of attempts, has dropped only modestly from 48.6% in 2020-21 to 48.1% so far this season. His actual eFG% has dropped from 55.4% to 41%, indicating the issue is shot-making rather than getting good shots.
Based on that, we can mostly rule out officiating as a primary factor, much as we did with James Harden in last week’s mailbag. Even secondary effects of Lillard having less space to operate on the perimeter without defenders as fearful of a shooting foul don’t seem to have affected his shots much.
The change in basketball providers is a plausible explanation for the change in Lillard’s shot-making but not the only one. My colleague Seth Partnow of The Athletic wrote earlier this week that the leaguewide 3-point percentage (34.3% through Wednesday’s games, down from 36.7% in 2020-21) actually isn’t out of line with what is typical early in the season.
Using Second Spectrum data, we can get more granular. Accuracy on both pull-up 3s and catch-and-shoot 3s is about 95% of what it was during the full 2020-21 season. However, accuracy on deep 3s (from 25 to 40 feet) is only 90% of what it was, declining from 35% in 2020-21 to 31.4% so far in 2021-22 — the worst at this stage of the season since 2015-16, when these shots were attempted less than half as frequently.
It’s worth monitoring whether Lillard and other deep shooters continue slumping.
How sustainable is Chicago’s top-10 defense?
Entering the season, my statistical projections had Chicago with the league’s 24th-best defense based on a combination of three-year luck-adjusted RAPM from NBAshotcharts.com and my SCHOENE player projections. Instead, the Bulls are sixth in defensive rating thus far and it looks sustainable. Opponent shot quality is the fifth lowest in the league, according to Second Spectrum qSQ, and Chicago hasn’t been especially fortunate in terms of opponent shot-making on jumpers.
Zach LaVine has indeed improved his luck-adjusted defensive RAPM (regularized adjusted plus-minus) over time, although partially because he was starting with the league’s second-worst rating as recently as 2014-15 through 2016-17. Both LaVine and newcomer DeMar DeRozan were in the bottom 50 in luck-adjusted defensive RAPM for the most recent three seasons, a big reason the Bulls were projected so poorly as a team.
You’re right, Nikola Vucevic hasn’t gotten enough credit for his defense. Although Vucevic has never blocked many shots (his career-high is 1.1 BPG), he’s consistently rated as a strong defender by luck-adjusted RAPM because of his elite defensive rebounding and tendency to rarely foul for a center.
Beyond that, I think Chicago fans were correct that improved defense at the point of attack from newcomers Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso would help. Per Synergy Sports, the Bulls are allowing 0.85 points per chance on plays with a pick-and-roll, the league’s third-best mark, after ranking 24th in this category last season.
Chicago coach Billy Donovan also deserves a lot of credit. Given a variety of different defensive personnel over his five seasons with the Oklahoma City Thunder and first with the Bulls, Donovan has never seen his team finish worse than 11th in defensive rating.
If Chicago indeed stays in the top 10 this season, Donovan will deserve serious Coach of the Year consideration.
Why don’t more teams sign players to front-loaded contracts?
The key issue is that year-to-year declines are limited, same as raises. When players are signed from another team, that’s a maximum of 5% of the first-year salary either way, so it’s not realistic to create that kind of trade value out of nothing.
There’s a bit more flexibility with the maximum 8% raises/declines on contracts for players extended or re-signed using full Bird or Early Bird rights. Over a long-term contract, that can add up.
We saw that with the recent extensions for the Orlando Magic‘s Wendell Carter Jr. (whose salary will decline from $14.15 million in 2022-23 to $10.85 million in 2025-26) and Memphis Grizzlies‘ Jaren Jackson Jr. (from $28.9 million to $23.4 million over the same span). Particularly in an environment where the cap is expected to begin rising more rapidly, those players will be far better values later in their contracts.
The main reason teams don’t utilize descending contracts more frequently is pretty simple: They want to be able to accumulate as much talent now as possible. Whether it’s the salary cap specifically, the luxury tax or simply a budget from ownership, there’s typically a limit to spending.
The more a player is paid up front, the less available for others. As a result, descending contracts remain the exception to the rule.
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