Tremendous Upside
Well-Known Member
It's interesting that Lauri has been much more of a perimeter spot up shooter this season. His FT attempts are way down and he's putting up a career high 10.6 three pointers per 36 (up from 8.1 last season). He's also making them at 44%, so it could be argued that he should be shooting even more. Not sure it's feasible with this personnel though.
Right now the long balls are dropping, but I'd like to see Markkanen go to the basket more to mix it up. Putting constant pressure on the D was a major part of his success last season. To an extent, I expected the arrival of Collins to push Lauri more to the perimeter (even more so now that John hasn't been making his own 3pt shots), but it's never good to be one-dimensional in the NBA.
IMO it's obvious that Collins' days of playing in the middle are gone. He's undersized as it is (with a bad wingspan), and his athleticism isn't what it used to be. He's been playing well in a kind of hustling jack-of-all-trades role, but it's critical that he starts hitting 3's for this team at some point. Teams are still keeping an eye on him when he floats to the corner, but that will stop at some point if he keeps shooting 29% – almost exactly the same percentage as last season BTW, and similar to what Vando shot last season (albeit at a lower volume).
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