The Third-Year Decision: T-Rob & Leonard

[Haakzilla]

...this article seemed to have an interesting take on comparing the options with T-Rob vs Leonard -- The eye test makes me choose T-Rob all day, every day...but the money situation might hamper our options?

by ZACH LOWE

Thomas Robinson and Meyers Leonard, Portland Trail Blazers

Portland’s cap situation is among the hardest to project, with three starters — LaMarcus Aldridge, Wesley Matthews, and Robin Lopez — all heading into free agency. They could stay over the cap, or suddenly find themselves with more than $30 million in space.

Aldridge is the only indispensable player among those three, and he has already said he plans to sign a five-year contract with Portland after this season. The Blazers need his Bird Rights to go the full five years on that deal, and that means Aldridge’s massive $20.6 million cap hold has to sit on their books, eating into their potential cap room.

And there’s the rub: Portland could open up max-level cap room in a jiffy, even with that Aldridge hold, by renouncing both Matthews and Lopez — and declining the option on one of the Robinson/Leonard duo. That’s a scenario Portland would likely want to keep in play; one of these guys is probably a goner.

Robinson needs to be most wary of the ax, if only because his $4.66 million option is about $1.6 million higher than Leonard’s. That could be the difference in Portland carving out space for a max-level offer.2

Robinson is strictly a power forward, and any backup at that spot has a pretty low minutes ceiling behind Aldridge. Robinson and Aldridge shared the floor some last season, and Robinson’s furious rolls to the rim mesh well with Aldridge’s midrange game. But Aldridge prefers to play alongside a true center, even if smaller lineups have generally done well going back a half-decade.

League rules also allow the Blazers to decline Robinson’s option next month, but still offer him any salary in free agency this summer up to the exact option number of $4.66 million. If Robinson can’t find a bigger offer on the open market, Portland would have a shot to bring him back that way. Chris Kaman’s partially guaranteed deal for 2014-15 also provides the Blazers a nice hedge in case they decline the option on either young big.

Both Robinson and Leonard are total NBA unknowns, and Leonard lost nearly all of his minutes last season to Robinson, Lopez, and Joel Freeland. But we can be certain Robinson has at least one plus NBA skill: He might be the fastest power forward in the league, excluding small-ball combo forwards like LeBron James and Kevin Durant. Dude is a lightning bolt running the floor, crashing the offensive glass, and bull-rushing his way to the rim on the pick-and-roll.

He’s so anxious to get near the basket for dunks that he doesn’t even really set screens; he moves into the general area where a big man interested in setting a pick might do so, and then, before coming to a full stop, veers 90 degrees on a hard line to the rim. That technique, known as slipping picks, is effective for a speedster like Robinson — Amar’e Stoudemire made a living off it early in his career — but it’s also the M.O. of someone who views the pick-and-roll solely as a path toward scoring.

Robinson rarely sets picks that help his point guards, and when they pass him the ball on the roll, he’s going up with it — even if he encounters multiple help defenders at the basket and sees open shooters spotted up around him.

Robinson’s a rugged player, but it’s a selfish kind of ruggedness. There might not be a single player who chases offensive rebounds with the same aggression; Robinson gets primed before a teammate releases a shot, like a dog ready to pursue a thrown Frisbee. He rebounded 13 percent of Portland’s misses, a monster number, but he immediately pogo-sticked into no-chance putbacks instead of resetting things. He’s also been too eager to show off a jumper that isn’t ready for public consumption.

Robinson hasn’t played with the same maniacal effort on defense, and he’s so undersize that he has no chance against post-up bullies. But defense is where his speed should serve him best. Robinson should be like a situational relief pitcher against stretch power forwards who love to pick-and-pop — the Ryan Anderson and Channing Frye types. There are very few bigs fast enough to leap out at a point guard darting around an Anderson or Frye screen, wall off that point guard’s dribbling path, and scurry back to that Anderson or Frye type before he can launch an open jumper. Robinson has the wheels for that.

That speed, plus his general motor and explosiveness, deserves a continued look from someone.

Leonard is tall, which is nice, but he hasn’t been able to stay on the floor much. You hear whispers of Leonard dominating offseason workouts against more accomplished NBA players, but it doesn’t matter until it translates into games.

The problems have mostly come on defense, where Leonard has looked overwhelmed trying to multitask at NBA speed. He gets turned around trying to contain ball handlers on the pick-and-roll, and I mean that literally: There are possessions on which Leonard ends up with his back to the ball, confused as to where it is and what is happening. He has happy feet, he’s super-vulnerable to any fake, and he fouls at an astronomical rate in desperate attempts to reach out and stop a play that has gotten beyond his grasp. Leonard averaged five fouls per 36 minutes as a rookie, and 7.7 last season, and you just can’t play in the league that way.

The Blazers are in the process of teaching Leonard and Freeland the Roy Hibbert art of verticality, but it will take lots of repetition to get the timing down.

Leonard improved his rebounding in limited minutes last season after failing to box anyone out as a rookie. He’s still just 22 and arrived in the NBA with only one year of experience against high-level competition. He has a nice midrange touch, and the Blazers have tried to turn him into a floor-spacer who drags a big-man defender away from the rim and leaves the paint for Aldridge, Robinson, and others. They’ve even run honest-to-god pindown plays for him:

He’s a good passer, nimble for a true seven-footer, and he’s explosive around the basket when he has space to get revved up; he did shoot 54.5 percent from the floor as a rookie, after all. But experiments with the 3-pointer have yielded zippo, and he just hasn’t defended well enough to stay on the floor.

If the salaries were equal, this would be an interesting choice: raw size against raw speed. But the salaries aren’t equal, so Leonard should be more optimistic about renewing his lease in Portland for another year.

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[jlprk]

Zach Lowe is quite an analyst about Robinson. I'm saving that half of the above excerpt. But he wastes his time calculating that we might renounce half the team if a max level player wants to come here.