Houston Add Lou Williams To The Arsenal
Is there such a thing as too much shooting in today’s NBA? The Houston Rockets are on a season-long quest to find out.
If there’s one thing you can’t have too much of in the NBA, it’s shooting. The Houston Rockets have made it their top priority to accumulate shooters, and they added to their prolific stockpile on Tuesday night when they acquired Lou Williams from the Los Angeles Lakers for Corey Brewer and their own 2017 first round draft pick.
This was the first transaction for the Lakers’ new president of basketball operations, Magic Johnson, after a tumultuous afternoon in which a large swath of the front office was swept out. In a lost season, this trade ensured the Lakers will get a first round draft pick in one of the deepest drafts in years as the Philadelphia 76ers will get their pick if it falls outside of the top three in the lottery.
While the Lakers had to take on Corey Brewer and the $15.6 million he’s due over the next two seasons, it was a reasonable price to pay to ensure a draft pick. It also downgrades their talent significantly as Williams was by far their best player this year, and does so for a reasonable cost. If the Lakers want to have a chance to keep their pick, they’ll be best served by losing as many games as possible and Johnson showed some savvy by going this route.
As for the Rockets, they’re sacrificing what will be a late first round pick as they have the third-best record in the NBA thus far, and they’ve identified three-point shooting as their best bet to put the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors to the test in the playoffs. They also rid themselves of Corey Brewer, who might be among the worst rotational players in the NBA. Brewer has a PER of 7.6 while playing an average of 16 minutes per game and shoots 23.4 percent from three-point range while taking almost four threes per 36 minutes.
Lou Williams will step onto the floor for the Rockets as one of the best shooters in the lineup right off the bat. Williams is in the midst of a career year, but it’s not so much better than his last few seasons that we can assume it’s unsustainable. His true shooting percentage is 60.9 this season, but over the course of the past three full seasons he’s posted a true shooting rate of 58.4 percent.
Williams is also posting his career best PER by a long shot. This season he has a PER of 24.1 which is 14th best in the NBA and ahead of such players as Stephen Curry, DeMar DeRozan, Kyle Lowry and Blake Griffin in the top 20.
43.1 percent of Williams’ field goal attempts have come from three-point range this season, more than adequately filling the Rockets desire to add more long range shooting. His three-point shooting percentage is another career high as he’s currently hitting 38.6 percent from the perimeter.
With the memory of the debacle that was the DeMarcus Cousins trade between the Sacramento Kings and the New Orleans Pelicans so fresh in our minds, it’s easy to assume that former NBA players with no basketball front office experience may be nothing but fresh meat to seasoned general managers around the league. While this is just the first move on the first day in the office for Magic Johnson, this is a promising start for the Hall of Fame point guard-turned-executive.
The Lakers successfully made themselves worse for a two-year stretch where they are likely to want to lose as much as possible (whether they dare to admit it or not) for a menial financial cost and acquired another draft pick while their own pick is at risk in the lottery. The Rockets added one more weapon to their already potent arsenal, saved $1.6 million over two years, rid themselves of the worst player in the rotation and did so for the cost of a draft pick likely to fall in the last 3–5 picks of the first round.
Sounds like a win-win deal to me.
