Only four years ago, Kevin Garnett and the swirling, almost malevolent defense of his 2008 Boston Celtics helped make Pau Gasol look the part of a child lost in a labyrinth, keenly aware of the snarling beast that awaits at every corner, causing Gasol to tiptoe and over think just about every move until rendered ineffective. In 2012, somehow this image of Gasol remains somewhat branded into the memories of the more casual NBA viewers, those who still use the words “soft” and “European” interchangeably. For the rest of us, though, we’ve seen what the big man can do. We saw the following two Finals in which Gasol looked every bit the part of the Finals MVP, posting ridiculous numbers in both series and even dispatching Garnett himself in 2010′s seven-game bloodbath of a rematch between the Lakers and Celtics. Including his MVP-like start to the 10-11 year, Gasol has given NBA fans plenty of reasons to respect his versatility and toughness since that initial failure in Los Angeles, easily placing himself among the league’s 15 best players; given all of that validation, the Houston Rockets’ fanbase’s reluctance to accept him as a franchise player in proposed trades leaves me wondering, “Why don’t Rockets fans trust Pau Gasol?”
The most commonly posited thoughts about a proposed deal shipping Kevin Martin and Luis Scola, along with some sort of melange of picks and bench assets (Jonny Flynn, we knew ye so little), for Gasol state that while Gasol might present an improvement over the existing Rockets team, the improvement would not be major enough to lose key contributors and/or take on his massive contract (which will pay him almost $40 million over the next couple of years, years in which he’ll be 32 and 33 years old). What could Gasol bring that either would improve or fail to change a Rockets team that seems to have less glaring holes than in recent years? There stands the obvious uptick in defensive efficiency, a marker of which the Rockets have been perilously close to the bottom leaguewide until this season, where Houston lands smack dab in the middle as the 15th best defense in the L; Gasol’s Lakers, of course, have done remarkably well on the oft-forgotten end of the court, posting top 10 finishes every year since his arrival, peaking at fifth in 2008-09. While many might attribute that to the added benefit of wing defenders like Trevor Ariza and Ron Artest/Metta World Peace/Tru Warier/my favorite human and another giant presence in Andrew Bynum on the interior, no proposed deal for the Spanish giant has dealt the Rockets’ recently acquired paint protector Samuel Dalembert, making the interior in Houston likely to be similarly formidable.
Photo courtesy of Philipp Klinger via Flickr
While that gives an overall idea of what the defense might improve to with Gasol helping to man the paint in Houston, we should look more carefully at the man he’d likely be replacing at the power forward position, Scola; while Scola’s production this year has plummeted and later risen back up to respectable levels of scoring and (somewhat respectable) rebounding, his deficiencies on the defensive end have always matched up nicely with those of the Rockets, and this year has been no different. On the block, Scola’s lack of height and foot speed make him an easy target to push around, predictably making him the 107th best post defender in the league, giving up 0.91 points per possession (PPP) on post-ups, a group that makes up more than 30 percent of the plays Scola’s defended this year. Spot-up shooters, those pesky open men who are just waiting for your team’s big man to collapse on a penetrating point guard or wing so that they can clean up on a kick-out pass (something Scola himself is particularly adept at doing, even if the stats don’t bear that out), make up the other heaviest portion of Scola’s defensive workload, accounting for 39.3% of his responsibilities on that end, and his stats are predictably middle-of-the-road there, ranking as the 97th best defender of the play in the league. While spot-up shooting defense actually surprises as a strong point of the Rockets defense (12th in the league), post-ups compose one of the many Houston vulnerabilities inside, where the Rockets rank 18th in the league at guarding such plays.
Gasol’s Lakers unsurprisingly, with their massive frontline, dominate the paint on the defensive end, as even slowed down veteran defenders like World Peace, Matt Barnes and Kobe Bryant can funnel their offensive charges directly into the walls of Bynum and Gasol; on one-on-one post-ups, the Lakers’ towers rank even better. The team as a whole plays the sixth-best post defense in the league, but Gasol himself is no slouch; his numbers guarding post-ups, 35.7% of the possessions that he handles, ranks as 13th-best among all defenders, giving up a minuscule 0.59 PPP. While guarding the man headed toward the basket off of a pick-and-roll doesn’t happen nearly as often for Gasol (only 7.6 percent of his defensive possessions), he also stands among the best in that department as the fifth-best inhibitor of such plays, ones which have consistently given the Rockets trouble all year (Houston gives up 1.03 PPP guarding he roll man, the eighth-worst mark in the league).
Though generally more concise and informative than defensive stats, offensive marks for both Gasol and Scola seem like unfair marks given their respective down years on that side of the floor, both taking huge dives from last year’s numbers (dives that hopefully have nothing to do with age-related entropy). For a good guide on that side of the floor, we turn to adjusted plus/minus numbers that let us know exactly how much better their teams are offensive when they’re on the floor as opposed when they’re not; using this stat, Scola’s +.02 mark is slightly better than Gasol’s -.94 one, but the difference is negligible. When factoring in PER, though, Gasol’s 21.12 is still All-Star worthy, while Scola’s 14.03 makes him a blow-average NBA player on the year.
Important to remember in this discussion of how much of an improvement Gasol makes over Scola is that Martin would also be sent out in this deal; equally important might be the fact that those minutes will not just be given to a vacuum and that Courtney Lee would almost certainly eat those up. Martin’s production has taken a furious tumble from last year’s All-Star level offensive numbers, but rather than this year being an aberration, it rather looks like a return to the norm. His PER of 17.4 sure looks a lot more like the 17.1 and 17 numbers that he posted in the two years preceding the last one than the 21.4 he posted last season. Of course, he also posted similar efficiency ratings in the 20′s when younger; Lee, for his part, really has never had a season other than his second, a run in New Jersey for one of the worst teams in NBA history, when he got consistently big minutes; still, his efficiency numbers have number quite demanded such playing time. He’s posting his highest offensive rating and PER this year, but Lee’s already 26, pretty old for a fourth year NBA player, and unlikely to go through transformative offensive changes in the next couple of seasons, though he’ll likely sustain his current improved pace, if not slightly better it. More importantly, his on-the-ball defense ranks far superior to that of Martin, making that proposed starting line of Dalembert-Gasol-Parsons-Lee-Lowry look that much more dangerous when guarding opposing offenses.
Most of this disregards the most important, usually immeasurable aspect of having a player of Gasol’s caliber and utility: the star effect. Players will have to double team him, and his passing ability has been well documented while helping run the Triangle under Phil Jackson. His outside shooting can make a Lowry/Gasol pick-and-roll look damn near unstoppable when Lowry’s shooting well, and Samuel Dalembert could be looking at a lot ore bunnies inside if he’s ready for those beautiful touch passes that Bynum’s greedily enjoyed over recent years. Add to this the actual positive direction in which this will send the Rockets’ cap situation, and this deal seems like a no-brainer, at least on Houston’s part. A star, and no matter what the doubters have still lodged in their brains from years of media training or one miserable tango with Kevin Garnett years ago, he is a star, can change everything for a team; when that team is already just one game out of the number three seed and looking at a very cushy end of the season schedule, a star might even turn a little-outfit-that-could into a title contender.
