Lonzo Ball is a Phantom Limb

It’s easy for the idea of Lonzo Ball to make you giddy and captivate your thoughts, especially on a team like this current iteration of the Pelicans. Standing at a comfortable 6'6, Ball represents the low usage, intangibles merchant who’s sales pitch would have you believe he can fit into any lineup on any team, the ultimate utility guy with star power. But in practice, none of the selling points that the promise of Lonzo Ball suggests hold up.

The prestige and buzz he generated as the NBA’s 2nd overall selection in 2017 coupled with the fact that such a unique player found his way to southern California created a mystique around the point guard that some people have a hard time sifting through. Before he even walked across the stage and became a Los Angeles Laker, the Church of Ball had put down roots. Lonzo is not the first player to have fervent fans that ignore context, stats, and sometimes what they see to preserve the rose-colored imaginary fastbreaks and game winners in their mind, but the scale has tipped so violently towards the player that he is that there needs to be a real conversation if the player he could be will ever exist, no matter how low you set the bar.

Let me say in no uncertain terms: Lonzo Ball is playing very, very, very badly. There really isn’t any dimension of his game that isn’t a huge struggle for him right now beyond some good moments of hand checking. The shooting, which has been under a microscope for years and said to be much improved after working with jump shot shaman Fred Vinson, is not there. The playmaking that had people salivating about his role as the potential triggerman for the modern reboot of Showtime has all but vanished; more boogaloo than 2.0.

Under Alvin Gentry, the Pelicans were cleared for takeoff playing some of the fastest basketball the sport had ever seen, where Lonzo could hypothetically excel. New Orleans finished near the top in Pace, but turned the ball over a spine-shivering amount of times, didn’t play defense and ultimately gave up on Gentry by the time the Pelicans stay in the bubble had popped. Lonzo enjoyed some success when it came to his counting stats, but still underwhelmed. Shooters still gave him space and were not punished for it, he seemed to become an even worse finisher and his decision making did not suggest a basketball savant.

On a podcast with Zach Lowe and Stan Van Gundy, then a commentator for TNT and still a few months away from becoming the Pelicans head coach, were both skeptical of Lonzo’s current role. Stan had a rather creative solution that made quite a bit of sense on the whiteboard. Instead of deploying Lonzo as the fulcrum for which the entire offense flows out of, racking up assists to shooters and lob threats, they could take some pressure off of him and shift him to more of a wing. Players have shifted roles to suit ultra-specific skills before. James Harden was a complete non-factor on defense for years until coaches realized that he was actually exceptional defending the post, and so Houston changed their defense to put him in a position to succeed and it paid off in countless ways for the Rockets and Harden growing into an MVP mainstay. Why not put Lonzo in a similar situation?

For all his warts, Lonzo is a phenomenal advancer of the basketball in transition. At first glance, Lonzo had worked himself into an average three-point shooter last season, but his shot selection provides a clearer understanding of those numbers. Off the dribble, while creating a shot for himself, Lonzo punished rims with the least aerodynamic ‘doesn’t-have-a-prayer’ bricks you will see. From a standstill, however, Ball was able to knock down catch-and-shoot three’s at a very respectable rate.

The plan was coming into focus: Lonzo grabbing a rebound and running like mad in transition to set up easy baskets. After misses or when the defense got back, he could transition to a more secondary or tertiary playmaker, making smart decisions and knocking down jump shots and attacking closeouts. Mitigate the things he’s bad (or underdeveloped) at and play to his strengths. It was easy to fall back in love with the allure of Lonzo even after he was a collapsed building in the bubble, shrinking under pressure and playing some of the worst basketball of his career and not looking particularly engaged while doing so. New coach, new era of Pelicans basketball, new Lonzo.

The first leg of this shortened NBA season is approaching its end, and Lonzo has taken yet another massive step backward. It’s concerning for him, but his struggles are not limited to its own container; his failure is loudest, not in terms of national attention or how bad the miss is for the New Orleans front office, but in terms of how dangerous he is to be around. He stymies and stunts the other four players on the floor (and those on the bench) and the team has suffered for it.

Every component that makes up Lonzo, right now, is a fallacy. It’s well worth it to examine each individual sprocket and see just how bad the damage is.

Firstly, Lonzo’s reputation as the ultimate selfless playmaker and straw that stirs the drink is prone to random shutdowns. Part of what makes a pass-first point guard so maddening to defend and so fun to play with is unpredictability. Ricky Rubio never became a + shooter and few would say he’s great around the rim, but with an incredibly crafty handle and a willingness to masquerade as a driver or shooter opened things up for others. Against a set defense, Lonzo is incapable of manipulating defenders. Whether it’s a fear of shooting free-throws, where he is a greek tragedy shooting about one foul-shot per game and bricks it about half the time, or a stiff, uncomfortable handle he still hasn’t mastered, defenses respond to Lonzo as if they’ve had weeks to study and prepare for him. Defenses don’t collapse to stop Lonzo because he almost never drives to score, only to pass. This leads to better closeouts by the defense, short shot clocks after a re-set and yet more turnovers (He’s turning the ball over on roughly 17% of his possessions). The only game where Lonzo read the defense and made them pay was against the San Antonio Spurs, where a healthy diet of wide open mid-range shots were just what the doctor ordered. But taking the right shots are only a piece of the puzzle, albeit a massively important one. He’s got to make the shot after he makes the right decision.

He is not making shots. For as many triples as Lonzo casts (Roughly 60% of all Lonzo’s shots are three-pointers, a 3 Point-point-attempt-rate ahead of snipers like Bradley Beal, Kristaps Porzingis, Jamal Murray and Joe Harris), he is not in the same galaxy of efficiency. Despite taking more three-pointers than specialists who are paid only for their floor spacing abilities, he’s connecting on only a mind-blowing 28% of them. Not to pile on Lonzo, who I think everyone would like to see succeed, but his misses aren’t even particularly close and often clank off the rim and turn Pelicans games into Stomp on Broadway upon contact with the hoop.

Let’s talk about spacing for a moment. Shooting is king in the NBA, but it’s not everything. Chemistry, decision making, shots at the rim, defense, and tempo all play a valuable role in winning in the NBA, and those skills travel in the playoffs, whereas shooting often doesn’t. The Pelicans have a spacing problem, certainly. Steven Adams and Zion Williamson (at this stage of his career) are non-shooters, and Bledsoe and Lonzo are poor shooters. That puts an awful lot of burden on Brandon Ingram in the starting lineup, and the trickle-down effect is palpable. And yet, Ingram and Williamson are still playing exceptionally well. Their skills in isolation offense as well as their unique physical profiles (Ingram’s only now seems to have realized his arms stretch for eternity, Zion is a one-of-one physical specimen able to fling stout centers flying like shrapnel, and his quick burst and second-jump are closer to teleportation than dribble-move at times) are enough to keep pace with teams for stretches, but never for long, and usually not enough to win. When the driving lanes shrivel to foxhole sized crawlspace, players like Bledsoe, Hart, JJ struggle mightily. The Pelicans simply do not set up easy looks in the halfcourt offense, getting few easy baskets for their stars while role players wither on the vine.

The problems just cascade from there. No easy baskets, clunky offense, turnovers piling up (as a result of forced decisions because of a late shot clock caused by futile drive-to-pass possessions, stretch passes without a prayer, and a smattering of unforced decisions that can’t possibly be explained. This is not a problem exclusive to Lonzo by any means) and a tough pill to swallow as far as the math. Tuesday’s game against the no.1 shooting team in the NBA in the Utah Jazz is a damn near laboratory setting for testing the limits of the Pelicans current offense. Even with a great game from Zion, the Pelicans were at arm's length nearly the whole night because so few three-pointers are being made from an already small pool of three-pointers taken. Defense, smart reads, and the foul game will keep the Pelicans competitive most contests, but if they continue to shun modern shooting trends, it will not matter how sharp the Pelicans bayonets are when they are blown apart by tank fire. Can New Orleans close the gap slightly by improving their close-outs and rotations, which are a mess? Absolutely. They won’t be able to do it significantly till they can fire back with any consistency.

Lonzo is hardly the first high-draft pick to get a longer leash long past what’s reasonable (both the eye test and numbers suggest a non-NBA player, let alone a star) but the problem is made more evident by the Pelicans duo of young guards in Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Kira Lewis. In Lonzo’s brief hiatus as he sat with an injury, Stan Van Gundy was forced to go to his bench more, and the results were eye-opening. The Pelicans weren’t winning those games, but Alexander-Walker played exceptionally well, highlighted by 37 timely points against the Clippers and Kira went from getting DNP’s to orchestrating an NBA offense as a true teenager, directing traffic and playmaking for others in a way that nobody on the roster had really been able to do with any consistency to that point. The Pelicans no longer looked like a broken team, they looked like a young, inexperienced team, which was written on the masthead of this Pelicans 2020–2021 campaign and should come as no surprise. NAW and Kira both project to be quality shooters and playmakers, and even played competitive defense when the game slowed down enough. Simply put, they have juice. Which made it all the more frustrating when Lonzo was inserted back into the lineup and the offense slowed to a painful crawl yet again.

Enough time has passed to make a call on Lonzo. In an offense tailor-made for his strengths under Gentry, he still struggled mightily. Under Stan, where the focus has shifted to defense-defense-defense and playing through two stars (quite common around the NBA), Lonzo has gone from not-enough, to not-worthy altogether. The Pelicans are staring down the barrel of burning an entire year of development (while at the same time, should be within spitting distance of the play-in game all year) to evaluate Lonzo when the logjam of guards behind him has already shown to be staggeringly more effective than what Lonzo could realistically bring to the table at this point. There should be no obligation to hold onto Lonzo because of the Anthony Davis trade, especially in a contract year where you run the risk of paying a player that is actively hurting the team with his play. There is an absolute nonsense sentiment that Lonzo’s value to the team is as a guy who can “unlock” Zion with halfcourt lobs and transition trickiness, but that is a bald-faced lie, and even if it were true that Lonzo is the only one capable of throwing that pass, he’s not connecting on them anymore and he’s not close to being good at enough other things to justify his play.

The idea that the Pelicans as an organization (as well as fans) are rooting against Lonzo is such an insane premise, crafted by only the most fervent Paladins of the church of Ball, it almost doesn’t deserve to be acknowledged. But this is where the disconnect between the perception of what Lonzo is and what he could be resides, as simply as I can put it: Of course a selfless playmaker who plays defense and spaces the floor would be fantastic as a third major ingredient to the Pelicans core, but he is the opposite of all of those things. Where he should make things easier for teammates, he in fact makes them harder. He has shrunk his shot profile to an unworkable and frankly unjustifiable amount (16% of Lonzo’s shot attempts come at the rim) in favor of the shot he shoots the least efficiently. There is nothing standing in front of Lonzo’s way, as the organization has given him more than enough to work with, and opposing defenses have given him all the practice shots he can eat. There is no shotmaking, there is no playmaking, there is simply famine. The half-court offense is so clogged with what is not happening, watching the Pelicans play is like a fever dream, bursting at the seem with non-events that it is completely bloated by nothing at all. Lonzo’s role on the team is a phantom limb, wherein the Pelicans are constantly tricking themselves, reaching for things they have no hope of attaining because they cannot admit they lack the facilities.

Options for the Pelicans are all drastic, but all preferable to letting this play on. The Pelicans could trade Lonzo, but it would have to be in a massive package. After the bubble, GM’s were talkative about how poorly Lonzo looked, and the idea that a team would trade for him outright is extremely unlikely to happen, especially with the start he’s had. Including him in a larger deal would open up space for the Pelicans other guards (if they aren’t moved as well) while also bringing back a significant piece to help this team. A pick in 2027 does little to get Zion to his second contract in New Orleans or help the team now, so it could be argued that the time to strike is now if the right deal approaches.

The other option is to unambiguously bench Lonzo. His defense, salary and status within the team probably makes dropping him all the way down the pecking order is unlikely, but handing the baton to the future in NAW and Kira now would not only expedite development but also, in my estimation, make the team more competitive at the same time. We are at the point where Lonzo’s role presents only downsides for the team, and if I may set aside my GM glasses for a moment to write thoughtfully into a moleskin journal like a fan, benching him would make the team fun again. The Pelicans star two unique, stylish, and dominant players that people want to see, yet so far the team has been one of the most boring watches on a nightly basis. It’s a staggering feat. The last thing I want to do is ruin all credibility near the finish line and say something mean-spirited and fan-oriented, but Lonzo Ball is a thief of joy on the court. He is the least entertaining player in the NBA.

Lonzo is more barren wasteland than box office right now, and it seems the more they whittle away to shape him into a useful player, the less fundamentally sound he becomes. To say it’s not a good sign is being kind. If the Pelicans are going to become anything of substance, their success will not just stem from the macro decisions made (Trading the #4 pick, whether they will package their future picks for another star, paying a steep price for stability in Steven Adams) but also the micro ones (picking strategic moments to try Zion at the 5, making sure JJ and Hayes play a lot of minutes together). Making the decision to divorce from Lonzo sooner rather than later, could end up having a butterfly effect that launches the Pelicans into success. Bet on the inverse at your own peril.