Los Angeles Lakers regular season grades: Backcourt players

The Los Angeles Lakers season has come to an end. Let’s give each qualified Lakers guard a letter grade for their performance during the 2018-2019 season.

The Los Angeles Lakers organization is laying on the ground with a broken jaw and bruised ribs, pulse beating at a low murmur.

Many factors have contributed to the Lakers critical condition. Bad management, horrible injury luck and a bad in-house culture are all partly responsible, but a few of the players are also guilty.

In this article, I’ll grade the seven guards who played 25 or more games for the Lakers and finished the season on the Purple and Gold. (This list doesn’t include Andre Ingram, Scott Machado, Reggie Bullock, Isaac Bonga, and Sviatoslav Mykhailiuk.)

To avoid any prejudice, I’ll use three all-purpose defensive metrics:

ESPN’s Defensive Real Plus/Minus: a positive score shows a player is a valuable defender and a negative score shows he’s below average.

Field-Goal percentage differential: a negative score shows that a defender holds the player he’s guarding below his normal shooting percentage, while a positive score shows that he’s allowing the player he’s guarding to shoot above his normal percentage.

Defensive Rating: it shows how many points a defender allows per 100 possessions.

I’ll also use two all-purpose offensive metrics:

Offensive Rating: it shows how many points a player scores per 100 possessions.

On/Off Offensive differential: a positive score shows that a team performs better on offense with a player on the court and a negative score shows that a team does worse offensively with a player on the court.

Finally, I’ll show each qualified Laker player’s traditional stats such as points per game, rebounds per game, assists per game, and field goal percentage.

Without any further ado, lets hand out some grades.