D’Angelo Russell on first-year flak: ‘Jesus still gets criticized’
Mere days after being benched for what head coach Byron Scott seemed to view as an unacceptable overabundance of confidence, Los Angeles Lakers rookie D’Angelo Russell offered a perhaps-slightly-aspirational turn of phrase to describe his mindset as he continues to deal with criticism during a difficult first professional season. Even in the midst of getting low, the 2015 draft’s No. 2 overall pick still sets his sights pretty high.
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After missing seven of his 10 shots in Friday’s 12-point loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, Russell responded by saying he’s aware of the critiques of his play — you’d imagine they’re hard to miss, coming as they do from within his own locker room — and that he’s trying to keep his head up by remembering that he’s far from the first person subjected to slings and arrows. From Mike Bresnahan of the Los Angeles Times:
“Any time anybody says anything bad about me, that means I’ve got to work,” he said. “LeBron [James] still gets criticism. Jesus still gets criticized.
“My family is my biggest critic and my boys that I keep in my circle, my brothers that live with me. They’re the first ones to tell me, ‘You stunk it up tonight.'”
Russell was more disappointed with his defense Friday than his three-for-10 shooting.
“Don’t take plays off on the defensive end and on the offensive end, don’t be nonchalant,” he said. “No player in this league is nonchalant. They might be really, really good and they look like they’re playing nonchalant but they’re not. Me at this point, I tend to be nonchalant at times.”
Including, one might argue, in invoking Jesus’ name as a reference point for the struggles he’s enduring during the first year of a career during which he’ll earn many millions of dollars for playing professional basketball, thus carrying on a proud tradition of former No. 2 overall picks out of Ohio State.
Religious connotations aside, Russell’s self-assessment came, to some degree, as music to the ears of Scott. On multiple occasions, the coach has curtailed and monkeyed with the rookie’s minutes for failing to get with his program; whatever your thoughts about the viability and long-term prognosis of that particular curriculum might be, Scott seemed pleased to hear Russell acknowledge that he hasn’t come far enough to earn more opportunities right now, according to Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News:
Russell argued he does not deserve the Lakers’ starting nod at point guard because of both his inconsistency and his turnovers (2.4 per game). Scott saw that as “a sign of him showing maturity and growing up.”
“It’s always good when you can look at yourself first,” Scott said before the Lakers played the Clippers in a designated road game at Staples Center. “Everybody should do that. I do it. I have to as a coach.” […]
[…] with Scott likely to start Russell at some point after NBA All-Star weekend (Feb. 12-14), the Lakers’ coach argued Russell’s self-accountability could spur his development. Scott has often critiqued Russell’s fancy passing and defense, while also recently suggesting that he acts too cocky at times.
“That’s relatively new for him to self-check himself and look in the mirror sometimes,” Scott said. “That’s a big key of growing up as a basketball player.”
There is, however, a flipside to the “self-check” and “maturity” that Scott sees coming in Russell, who entered the NBA with an evident flair for dramatic playmaking and enough confidence to talk about helping this year’s Lakers team make the playoffs. What if, y’know, he’s not actually getting better amid all the shuffling, sniping and losing?
After committing five turnovers with just one assist in L.A.’s 101-82 loss to the Charlotte Hornets on Sunday — the Lakers’ franchise-record-tying 10th consecutive defeat, dropping them to a dismal 9-41, the second-worst record in the NBA behind only the Philadelphia 76ers — Russell openly questioned whether anything’s actually getting better for him:
D’Angelo Russell on his season: “I feel like I was improving. Now I feel like, I don’t know, not really as much.”
— Baxter Holmes (@BaxterHolmes) February 1, 2016
Russell’s assessment is supported by his on-court performance since Scott’s benching last week, according to Harrison Faigen of Silver Screen and Roll:
The rookie guard has taken 4 less shots per game since the late benching, resulting in his usage rate dropping from 23.5 to 19.1. He has also been less accurate, shooting just 31.8% in those three contests, down from 41.3% on the year. The percentage of Russell’s teammates baskets on which he assists while on the floor has bumped up from 18.8% to 22.6%, but so has his turnover ratio, from 13.8% to 22.6%.
Three games is an exceedingly small sample size on which to make definitive judgments, but the numbers don’t paint a pretty picture. Neither does the eye test. Since his latest public spanking, Russell has looked more passive on offense after having recently tried to seize control of the reins. He has often been content to bring the ball down, make an initial pass, and then serve as a floor spacer rather than looking to create. […]
Russell’s scaled back usage has also coincided with a drop in the Lakers’ offensive efficiency, from an already second to last in the league 96.6 points per 100 possession to 89.8 over the past three games, which would be historically awful if prorated over an entire season.
Some of Russell’s struggles seem to stem from a couple of inevitable pain points, like trying to adjust to playing point guard full-time after splitting time off the ball throughout his basketball-playing life to date, and trying to adjust to NBA competition as a teenager lacking the innate and overwhelming physical gifts possessed by someone like LeBron. Some of them, though — and this latter-day crisis of confidence, especially — seem to issue from the way he’s been handled, a “tough love”/”real talk” approach that looks to have proven as foolish as many feared.
So Aldridge just said D’Angelo has no idea what to ask Byron in order to improve and is completely lost as a point guard currently. Amazing.
— Drew Garrison (@DrewGarrisonSBN) January 29, 2016
From Ian Levy of the Sporting News:
There are plenty of games left and […] there are some encouraging indicators. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that Scott and, by proxy, the organization’s lack of support for his development could be undermining the process. Scott has clearly chosen a strategy of negative reinforcement for dealing with Russell and it’s hard to argue that it’s worked so far. He also has kept him coming off the bench, which means Russell’s passing ability often is used with second-string players on one of the NBA’s worst teams.
Having a rookie admit, halfway through his season, that he has no idea what his coach would like him to improve on should be an enormous red flag that this is a poisonous situation for player development. Problem areas like turnovers and shot selection are certainly obvious to Russell, but not knowing what areas will actually affect his playing time or have him criticized in the post game presser puts everything else on shaky ground.
It’s one thing for the Lakers to approach this season as little more than a grand farewell to a franchise legend. It’s quite another to do so to the detriment of the development of the young players who will be responsible for helping carry the franchise forward, and to do so in a fashion that helps cripple the confidence of arguably the most important such piece to the puzzle. (Or, at least, the most important one already on hand and in uniform.)
This is the path that the Lakers’ decision-makers have chosen, and with the team just one loss away from setting a new franchise record for futility and Russell seemingly miles away from terra firma, Scott now acknowledges that he’s concerned about the team’s lack of self-belief, according to ESPN.com’s Baxter Holmes:
Confidence is an issue at the moment, Scott said.
“We’ve got a lot of guys in [the locker room] right now with a lack of confidence, and we have to somehow get that back,” Scott said.
He later added, “With our guys now, once they see that it’s starting to go south a little bit, they lose all hope and confidence, and somehow we’ve got to rally together and try to get that back.”
It remains to be seen what kind of solution Scott attempts to employ in that pursuit, but here’s hoping it involves deciding to get out of his own (and everybody else’s) way a bit and empowering Russell to try to be himself for a while. Maybe it won’t alter the Lakers’ fortunes overnight, but for a team that needs to build rather than destroy, it’ll still be worth it if it allows the kid to rediscover the sense of self that led him to namecheck Jesus in a post-game interview.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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