The Lakers are hunting Rudy Gobert on the perimeter and it isn’t working as well as they seem to think

Rudy Gobert is the best rim-protector of his generation. That is just about the only thing people tend to agree upon when it comes to his defense. The debate, the criticism, the mocking from Draymond Green, all of that stems from his work on the perimeter. “Can Rudy Gobert switch?” is one of the most divisive topics in all of basketball.

The numbers are a bit mixed on a year-to-year basis. That tends to happen with small sample stats like isolation defense, which can swing pretty wildly on shooting luck. But generally, he’s been quite good. According to Synergy Sports, he rates in the 34th percentile in points per possession allowed in isolation. That’s obviously not good, but in his four Defensive Player of the Year seasons, he rated in the 81st, 66th, 90th and 69th percentile. He’s not, say, Evan Mobley or Bam Adebayo when it comes to perimeter defense, but he’s far from bad.

But it’s the bad moments that tend to stick. The Terance Mann game in 2021 may have ultimately been what killed the Gobert-Donovan Mitchell Jazz. The math says not to expect a 3-point barrage from a second-year pro averaging fewer than 19 minutes per game. It happened. The Clippers tortured Gobert by putting five shooters on the floor at once and forcing him to choose between protecting the basket as he had all year for the sake of the putrid point-of-attack defenders in front of him or close out to the corners to challenge Mann. The result was a humiliating upset. Speaking of humiliations, you surely remember the game-winning 3-pointer Luka Dončić dropped on his head at the end of Game 2 of last year’s Western Conference finals.

Gobert does. Yet he leans firmly towards the numbers. “Obviously they’ve seen that clip of the stepback a thousand times. So did I,” Gobert said between the end of the regular season and the beginning of the playoffs. “That’s one clip amongst a lot of other defensive possessions. I know a lot of people don’t like the numbers, but over a long period of time, the numbers speak more than eye test … Let’s see what happens over the course of hundreds and hundreds of possessions.”

Well, the Los Angeles Lakers seem to be treating Gobert’s opinion as a challenge. They haven’t gone at him quite for “hundreds and hundreds of possessions” so far in their first-round series, but they’re coming as close as is reasonably possible in the tiny sample of a single playoff series. Through two games, but especially in Game 2, the Lakers have devoted a pretty significant chunk of their offense just to switch-hunting Gobert on the perimeter.

In Game 2, the Lakers had 83 half-court offensive possessions, according to Synergy Sports. They used 15 of those possessions to directly attack Gobert on the perimeter. For the sake of clarity, we are being pretty strict about our definition here. These are not pick-and-rolls in which a Laker driver attacked Gobert in drop-coverage or attempted a shot against him out of necessity. These are plays in which Laker ball-handlers directly sought out Gobert either because of an advantageous cross-match in transition or for a perimeter switch and went at him one-on-one. Those 15 plays represent around 18% of the half-court possessions the Lakers had in Game 2, or 30% of the 50 half-court possessions Gobert was on the floor for in his 29 minutes of action. Put more simply, when Gobert was on the court, the Lakers used almost one-third of their half-court possessions switch-hunting him.

Going through each of those possessions one at a time with a fine-tooth comb would subject us to some of the individual play-related bias that has overwhelmed this narrative in the past, so in the interest of honoring Gobert’s belief in the macro numbers, we’re going to avoid a play-by-play breakdown. However, a compilation of those 15 possessions can be seen below.

So, what do the numbers say? They’re not especially kind. If you don’t count offensive rebounds, the Lakers scored 13 points on 15 possessions. If you count the two points LeBron James scored on a putback of one of those misses, it’s 15 points on 15 possessions. Either way, that’s not good offense in the grand scheme of things. The average NBA offense scored 1.145 points per possession this season, according to basketball-reference.

The Lakers generated four free-throw attempts out of these possessions (and made them all) and turned the ball over once. They shot 1 of 6 on 3-pointers and 3 of 6 on 2-pointers. James was the ball-handler for only one of these possessions. Austin Reaves used three. The other 11, predictably, came from Dončić.

Dončić, by all appearances, seemed to think this offense was working for him and the Lakers. After one particularly exciting highlight shot over Gobert in the second quarter, he seemed to signal to the Timberwolves bench that they should pull Gobert out of the game.

Moments like this encapsulate the entire flawed nature of this debate. Yes, there were highlights like this one. Reaves had a few as well. If you just look at the tape of those moments, you’d assume Gobert was incredibly vulnerable, and if you’re wondering why Dončić is so eager to go at him, it starts with the muscle memory that forms on plays like that. But part of the reason I shared all 15 clips in a single video was to emphasize that moments like that represent only a single play. A highlight bucket still counts for only two or three points, and those plays should get buried amongst the less notable ones. Taken as a whole, this offense isn’t really working.

Put those numbers from these specific possessions aside for a moment. It’s not as though 15 possessions is a reasonable sample, after all. One more of those 3-pointers goes in and they look entirely different. But think about the Laker offense as a whole through two games. They won Game 2 scoring 94 points. They lost Game 1 scoring 95. Yes, the series is tied, but it would be hard to suggest that their offense is responsible for that. Their regular-season offense scored 115 points per 100 possessions. So far in this series, they’re down to 107.4, putting them ahead of only the Wizards and Hornets among regular-season teams. That number plummets down to 99 when Gobert has been on the floor.

Some of that has to do with the switch-hunting that the Lakers are doing, but just as important are all of the things they aren’t doing. The Lakers averaged 290.2 passes per game during the regular season, but they’re down to 253 in the playoffs. This has never been an especially movement-heavy offense, but their offensive players ran an average of 9.44 miles per game, according to NBA.com tracking data, yet they’re down to 8.61 in the playoffs. The Lakers are so fixated on seeking out and challenging Gobert that they’re running a stationary offense. The ball isn’t moving and neither are their players.

This is where things start to get more complicated. The playoffs, to some extent, demand more one-on-one basketball. That is especially true later in games and especially later in series. The game slows down as very good teams start to get to know one another. Part of what makes the Lakers such a fascinating possible contender is that they are perhaps the only team in the playoff field with three ball-handlers who can both generate easy shots and make hard ones at an All-Star level. They are designed, to some extent, to play this way.

But think of Minnesota’s 3-point shooting exhibition in Game 1 and just how easy it all felt. They were making simple reads and taking what the defense gave them. The Lakers showed too much help to Anthony Edwards. He responded with nine assists, almost all to open shooters, who made 21 of their 42 3s. As badly as you want your superstars to make the hard shots, you also need their presence to generate easy ones. That isn’t happening if the entire offense is seemingly built around finding a four-time Defensive Player of the Year and challenging him one-on-one. These isolations aren’t generating advantages for the Laker offense at nearly the rate they need to for this to work.

That’s challenging for the Lakers right now because of their personnel. I wrote about the issues that not having a center has created for them after Game 1. All of that still applies. Dončić would much rather be running pick-and-roll into drop-coverage against Gobert and killing him with lob passes right now than forcing the issue one-on-one. As incredible as the Game 2 game-winner was a year ago, his two-man game with Daniel Gafford and Dereck Lively was his bread and butter. That isn’t available to him right now. He’s making due with what he has. Right now, that might be five reliable teammates offensively. James and Reaves are stars. Rui Hachimura can do a bit of self-creation. Gabe Vincent and Dorian Finney-Smith can make catch-and-shoot 3s. Jarred Vanderbilt is such a bad shooter the Timberwolves don’t even really guard him. Jaxson Hayes looked unplayable on both ends in Game 2.

So to some extent, the Lakers are going to have to keep playing one-on-one offense just to get by. They don’t have the depth or the adaptability within their roster not to. But as Gobert suggested himself before the playoffs, the Timberwolves can live with the offense that style creates over a longer sample. He might wind up looking foolish on some highlight tapes, but if the Timberwolves keep holding the Lakers below 100 points, they are going to win this series. The task now is figuring out what other matchups might be exploitable, and how they can go about doing so in a way that keeps the entire offense engaged rather than just one player at a time.