(Photo: LetsGoWarriors.com / Ryan Brown)
The narrative has been there since last year’s playoffs: the Warriors are better without David Lee. This season it’s gone from a slight murmuring to an outright crescendo.
Lee’s play has been analyzed in newspaper columns, radio shows, blogs and Twitter. The last game I attended at Oracle, all I could hear were groans and criticism after each Lee post-up or mid-range shot.
Here’s a look at his struggles:
Scoring:
This year, Lee’s efficiency is at career-lows at 48.2% from the field and just 54.2% true shooting, which factors in free throws and three-pointers. Diving into the numbers deeper (per nba.com/stats player tracking) it’s even worse.
Inside the restricted area he’s shooting 54.8% v. 63% last year and being blocked nearly one in four attempts. Even more troubling, his mid-range jumper is only going down 27.8% of time v. 43% last year.
Just look at a comparison of his shooting chart between last year and this year:
| 2012/13 | 2013/14 |
|---|---|
 |
 |
This doesn’t even look like the same player!
Rebounding:
While he’s averaging 9.3 rebounds per game, he’s only collecting 32% of contested rebounds, which would rank him below the undersized Draymond Green and in the bottom tier of power forwards who play over 15 minutes per game. Lee’s never been the best at boxing out, and he is a bit undersized, but the diminishing returns on the glass as he ages are equally as worrying sign.
Defense:
Everyone knows Lee’s defense is limited at best. There have been many studies which show it such as this Grantland piece last season.
Mostly he’s always been slow on help defense, but at least last season he was a competent man to man defender. However with the weight drop from last season, even that seems to have disappeared. He’s regularly bullied in the post.
Players like LaMarcus Aldridge have scored 30 points on him, and what’s more troubling with that game was the 19 trips to the line allowed because of his blow-by’s or bullying of Lee. Nothing has been more symbolic of Lee this season than this clip v. the Charlotte Bobcats.
Lee tries to be a leader and then proceeds to get completely out of position and leave his team out to dry. Lee can say all the right things, show positive leadership on the court, but when the production isn’t there it just doesn’t matter.
Conclusion:
As all players age (he’ll be 31 by the end of the season), with limitations in terms of skillset, decline is inevitable.
For this team to go farther, it’s likely going to involve either moving Lee and his increasingly albatross-like contract to clear money for a better player or going deep into the luxury tax to compensate.
The luxury tax part might not be even feasible, as you’d have to be able to find a better player on a bargain basement price because of the rules of the CBA. The truth is, that’s unlikely to happen this year. Not with the new CBA and his contract escalating to over $15 million a year till 2016.
So the real question becomes, what can the Warriors do in the short term to continue winning games and get some productivity out of Lee?
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