As we all know and appreciate, on Wednesday Zion will make his regular season debut for the Pelicans. That means that the pre-Zion phase of the year is over, and we'll be moving into the second phase of our season, pretty much at the half-way point. Things will be different after he's back, both positively and (in some ways I'll mention later) worse. So, it's as good a time as any to take stock and ask ourselves: how have we done so far?
We have played 42 games without him, and in the course of those games we have gone 17-27, for a win %age of about 40.4%.
Listed below are the team's stats, and their ranks league-wide at this 42 game point.
Points per Game: 114.4 (5th)
Opponent PPG: 117.6 (29th)
Pace: 103.1 (5th)
Offensive Rating: 109.7 (18th)
Defensive Rating: 112.7 (25th)
Assists per game: 25.5 (8th)
Rebounds per game: 45.9 (11th)
Steals per game: 7.3 (22nd)
Blocks per game: 5.2 (11th)
FG%: 45.4% (18th)
2PT%: 51.5% (20th)
3PT%: 37.0% (5th)
FT% 73.7% (27th)
To me that looks pretty good in some areas (ppg, apg, 3pt%, for example) and pretty dreadful in others (Oppnt PPG, DRtg, 2pt%, ft%). So the question for me is this: is Zion likely to help us in the areas we need help most?
Well, luckily enough, I think the answer is yes.
Interior Scoring
We are 20th in the league in 2pt attempts, shoot relatively poorly on them, and we take less than 35% of our shots at the rim: this is the reason that despite our high 3pt% and volume, our offense is still a little subpar. Zion is going to help out in this department massively; he is a monster in the paint, and finishes at a ridiculously high efficiency. By removing some of the less optimal mid-range and 3pt shots and re-locating them to the paint with Zion, we should see our at-rim volume and efficiency soar. And of course, more of the most valuable shots in basketball will reflect well on our ORtg.
Defense, Deflections, Steals.
Another area that we aren't super strong is in forcing turnovers; bottom 10 in steals, our opponents only average 14.6 turnovers per game. This may sound fairly good, but it's actually pretty mediocre; about 16th in the league. Jrue leads the league in deflections per game and is top 10 in steals, so him being missing for a while has contributed to a slight drop in these categories, but Zion is no slouch either: in college, he posted a pretty ridiculous 3.9%STL, and averaged about 3 deflections per game (that statistic comes from my own measurements, it's not listed anywhere). His pre-season STL% of 2.3 was also impressive. He will take a little while to get up to speed in terms of team defense at an NBA level, rookies almost always do, but he will be a solid point-of-attack defender pretty quickly, and should force more than a few turnovers.
Rebounding
The final area that I think Zion will help us most notably as soon as he returns is defensive rebounding. Now, as listed above, our overall rebounding is pretty good: 11th in the league. But that's an inbalanced statistic; our strong offensive rebounding (8th) is boosting the numbers a little for our unimpressive defensive rebounding (14th). In college, Zion posted an 18% DREB, a number he matched at 18.9% in preseason, which would immediately make him one of our top 3 most effective defensive rebounders (assuming the number translates directly, which it may not). In fact, Zion's college overall REB% was 15.5%, a number which would be second only to Derrick Favors on our team if he were to able to directly recreate it. Even if he can't reach quite those heights, he should easily slot in as one of our top 5 rebounders and help out on the defensive glass.
Conclusion
So, given that this a very likely impact of the dude we've missed all year so far (I wouldn't be surprised if Zion ended up with a PIPM of around +1.5, which would be insane for a rookie), how have we done? Especially considering our murderous schedule thus far? You know, I think we've done okay. Not great (no time-span in which you lose 13 consecutive could be great) but okay. We've done okay! What are your thoughts? How would you rate our pre-Zion success? I'm going with 6/10. Could have been far better, but given the injuries and the schedule I still give it a positive rating (5/10 obviously being dead average).
Now it's time for phase 2.