1. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope
3-and-D specialists are the hottest commodity in the NBA right now, so why didn’t KCP receive a lucrative offer from another squad? It’s because KCP used to be a good 3-and-D player, but now he’s just a guy who doesn’t shoot well from deep and who doesn’t play defense.
It’s rare to see an NBA player dog it on D as hard as KCP did for the Lakers last season. He finished 99th out of 111 shooting guards in ESPN’s defensive real plus-minus, he came in 354th in NBA.com’s defensive rating metric, and the Lakers were 4.5 points worse on defense when KCP was on the floor.
There were two reasons why KCP was so bad on defense last season:
- When he got switched onto a bigger player in the post he stood like a flag pole and put up no resistance as his assignment scored over him.
- He didn’t want to waste energy closing out on shooters behind the 3-point line.
We’ve discussed KCP’s defense, now let’s move onto the “3” part of the 3-and-D specialist.
People like to discuss how Kyle Kuzma was one of the worst high-volume 3-point shooters in the league last year, but KCP wasn’t much better.
He shot 31.7% on his “open” 3-pointers (a player is within 4-6 feet) and he averaged 30% on his 3-point attempts when a defender was within 2-4 feet from him.
The Lakers had already signed Danny Green, Troy Daniels and Jared Dudley-three solid wings who have proven that they can score in bunches from distance-before they inked KCP. Why then did Rob Pelinka give him a two-year, $16 million contract?
It doesn’t make sense, especially considering Marcus Morris was still available and he ended up signing for just $2 million more per season with the Spurs.
Rob Pelinka had a great offseason for the Lakers, but the contract he gave KCP was awful.