Los Angeles Lakers Regular Season Grades: Forwards and Centers

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

In this article, I’ll grade the five forwards or centers who played 25 or more games for the Los Angeles Lakers and finished the season on the Purple and Gold. (This list doesn’t include Jemerrio Jones, Mike Muscala, Johnathan Williams, Michael Beasley, and Ivica Zubac.)

A list was compiled breaking down the seasons of the backcourt players already, which you can check out here.

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, let’s hand out some grades.