Old Age Really Is Killing The Lakers

When Kobe Bryant was asked earlier this month to pinpoint the cause of the Lakers' struggles, his response was to the point. "We're old as s---," he told reporters.

Bryant clearly does not think that the Lakers are too old to win basketball games. He is, however, facing the reality that their abundance of seasoning requires some sort of contingency plan to remain competitive on those increasingly frequent nights when their bones display some inevitable weariness.

To judge by the punditocracy, however, it's hardly that simple. The team's splashy off-season acquisitions—which included the planet's best center, Dwight Howard, and future Hall-of-Fame point guard Steve Nash—were supposed to push Los Angeles into the rarified air of LeBron James and the Miami Heat. Instead, even despite Bryant's best season since 2008-09, the Lakers are, at 19-25, the third-best team in California. The explanations people have come up with are varied:

• ESPN's Chris Broussard said that "Bryant's offensive blitzkrieg is actually hurting ... more than helping," pointing out that the Lakers were, at the time he wrote it, 4-11 when Bryant topped 20 shots in a game, but 8-3 when he didn't.
• The Los Angeles Times cited chemistry, saying that this is not a team "that plays together."
• Bill Simmons called out inappropriate play-calling, writing for Grantlandthat if "your system is telling you, 'I should play Earl Clark more than Pau Gasol,' you need a new system."

The Lakers themselves pinned at least part of the problem on head coach Mike Brown, who was fired after only five games. When the struggles continued under new coach Mike D'Antoni, GM Mitch Kupchak chimed in, saying in an ESPN Los Angeles report that the team simply doesn't care enough, and that he'd "like to see better effort on the court." For Howard, it's all about negativity.

As it turns out, significant analytical effort could have been saved on all parts had folks just listened to Kobe. Sure, contributing factors include the ill fit of D'Antoni's system, Howard's back problems, and Gasol's unease with his increased usage outside of the post. But the Lakers actually have a positive point differential (4,506 scored vs. 4,445 given up, through Monday), which projects to a 24-20 record instead of the 19-25 at which they reside. Bryant's play has been better than average, and they've received solid contributions from Metta World Peace and Antawn Jamison.

So how to explain the slide? It's impossible to attribute percentages of blame to any specific factors, but a big-picture analysis of what has happened since last season tells us all we need to know.

For that, we turn to David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University and the author of The Wages of Wins, who developed an overarching metric to measure how much a given player is worth to his team over the course of a season or on a per-game basis. To do this, he weights every line item in an expanded box score—stats relating to gaining or extending possessions, like rebounds and steals, rate positively, as does scoring; stats related to diminishing possessions, like turnovers and inefficient shooting, are negative—to come up with an overarching number called Wins Produced.

The way Berri explains it, an average NBA player produces one-tenth of a win (0.100) per 48 minutes—five players on the floor equal half a win per game, which is what an average team accumulates—while a star performs at twice that rate, or 0.200 WP48. Players' overall WP tells how many victories they were worth over the course of a season.

(Berri's is not the only system to use such measurement—John Hollinger's Player Efficiency Rating is probably the best known of them—but it is demonstrably close to what actually happens on a basketball court: Teams' cumulative WP stats are, on average, within about two wins of their actual results. Visit Berri's website for a full explanation.)

A look at last year's Lakers tells us that they were a good, but not great, team. Unfortunately for them, they lost four of their five most productive players in the off-season, to free agency (Matt Barnes, Ramon Sessions) and trade (Andrew Bynum and Josh McRoberts were given up in the deal that netted Howard from the Magic). Note that only one holdover, Gasol, was above average last season.

Table One: The LA Lakers in 2011-12

Los Angeles lost more than 20 wins' worth of player performance, but added nearly 27—primarily via Howard and Nash.

Table Two: The Veteran Players the Lakers Added Before 2012-13

These are last year's statistics, of course, and don't account for age, injury, and the currently awful play of Jodie Meeks. A comparison between this year's team at the season's halfway mark (extrapolated to a full schedule) against last year's squad confirms what we already know: Bryant has been much better than last year, while Howard and Gasol have declined in significant ways.

Still, the overall results are nearly the same. We can also see that even if the team's stars were performing like they did last year (Column 5 below), the Lakers would be sitting just outside the playoffs in the West. (When Howard was completely healthy last season, he was still only marginally better than Bynum. Based on the current season's performance, in Column 7, the team is on pace for a seventh seed.).

Table Three: The Lakers after 44 games

These numbers, of course, reflect the myriad injuries the Lakers have suffered, primarily Howard's back issues and a leg injury that cost Nash 24 games. (Backup point guard Steve Blake has also missed nearly the entire season with an abdominal issue.)

It's a ready excuse, but there's more to it than frailty. Even had everybody remained healthy, at the per-game minutes they're currently playing Los Angeles still projects to only 53 wins on the season (assuming a nine-player depth chart, which is extremely optimistic). This is good, but hardly at the level of the Thunder, Spurs, or Clippers, who are all on pace to approach or top 60 wins—and far from the championship-caliber play people expected when Howard and Nash came on board.

Table Four: What if Injuries Never Happened?

On top of all this, there's yet one more way to look at the Lakers, which brings us full circle, back to Bryant's initial assessment: They're old as shit.

Nash is nearly 39, Bryant 34, World Peace 33, and Gasol and Blake are 32. Jamison, who has played the sixth-most minutes on the team, is 36. Add Howard's back problems to the mix, and it should be no surprise that the Lakers' ideal starting lineup has rarely seen the floor together. (Never mind coaching decisions like starting Earl Clark over Gasol.)

This is the point at which two immutable NBA truths start to shine: A minority of a team's players produce the majority of its wins, and a player's performance tends to peak in his mid-20s. For an example of this, look to Oklahoma City, which has 36.5 Wins Produced as a team (and 34 actual victories as of Monday). Eighty-seven percent of those 36.5 Wins Produced—31.6—are attributable to the top five players on the roster, who have an average age of 25.6. The Clippers are not far off, age-wise.

Table Five: Comparing the Lakers to the Top Teams in the West

Even the Spurs, while markedly older, boast a 21-year-old—Kawhi Leonard—as their fifth-most productive player.

In contrast, the Lakers have only two productive players younger than 30: Howard (playing hurt) and Jordan Hill (lost for the season at the beginning of January). It is inevitable; regardless of performance, being old means dealing with injuries, which Los Angeles has done plenty of.

It may be obvious even without the stats, but the numbers prove that the Lakers' slide is not about chemistry, attitude or coaching. They are old, and they are thin, and that is a lot for any team to overcome.

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