Davis was really good. It was he who successfully resisted the wild bombing of Boyang’s three-point goal and let the Lakers win the last battle of the six Eastern expeditions. After conquering Detroit with 124-117, the Lakers ended the expedition with 3 wins and 3 losses, reaching the goal planned before leaving.
The piston is a weak team, but in NBA, any weak team can jump a few times, and a little slack will be inextricably involved. And each team has a scoring master. For example, the piston has Bojan Bogdanovic, the man who scored an average of 19.8 points in 40 minutes of the European Cup.
According to the rhythm of the first two sections, the Lakers should win the game more easily, because the piston has not won the first prize in 16 games, and only veteran Boyang is the one who can score the most, however, he was obviously not positive enough in the first half and only got 8 points.
Who knows that at the beginning of the third quarter, Boyang started to attack like chicken blood, especially if there is God’s help in his three-pointer, he will score five in a row. The Lakers just let him interrupt a round receive the ball tossing. Boyang still entered the Fifth Third Point. By the end of the third quarter, the Lakers had only one point left for the 13-point advantage, this section of Boyang takes 25 points and 41 points for the piston.
The reason why the Lakers were able to bear the Boyang bombing was Davis’s strong response. James attacked fiercely in the first two seasons. Davis stood at the bottom corner of the weak side for many times to open the space. It was difficult to get the back of the basket to be in place, not to mention turning over the river, so he only had 12 points in the first half, james scored 19 points.
Before Boyang started the three-point mode, Davis had already started to attack the basket, successively taking Beverly two passes and throwing the basket and turning and hooking, and also broke through the completion of 2+1. The Lakers led by 13 points, just after Davis took a step back and jumped. Davis scored 9 points in 2 minutes 13 seconds.
Next, the three-pointer ball of Boyang flying all over the sky fell. When he dropped into the first one, Davis took the legend of Wei Shao to dunk back and was replaced by Thomas Bryant, which had the next four points. Coach Ham changed Davis back. Seeing that the score difference was reduced to 4 points, Davis even took the penalty and regained the advantage to 7 points. This strong response made the Lakers never be caught up by the piston, even if Bo Yang managed to catch up with only one point by three penalties.
Davis scored 17 points in a single session, which is an important guarantee for the Lakers to stay ahead. In any game, this is a domineering performance, but it is not obvious in front of Boyang’s 25 points in a single session.
In this game, Davis and James met each other with 35 points and 34 points. Davis also had 15 rebounds and 7 assists.
After 23 games, Davis’s average score has reached 27.8 points, which is only 0.2 from the highest 28 points in Pelican’s career in 2017. After calculating the Knight’s goal, on that day, he had a fever and got 1 point after only 8 minutes. If he didn’t count that, he now averaged 29.0 points. As for the rebound, Davis’s 12.4 are already a career high.
It can be predicted that Davis will become one of the hot candidates for MVP this year if the score of the Lakers can climb to at least sixth in the West.
Obviously, Davis and the past two seasons are different, and the changes are all-round, completely returning to the playoffs in Orlando bubble in 2020. At that time, he was really rolling under the basket, and the jump shot was definitely amazing. At that time, the hit rate of the mid-range jump shot reached 55%, and the three-point shot stabilized at 38%.
We compared Davis’s playoff data that year with the data of the last three seasons, and we can find that except for the three-point goal, almost all other items have returned to 2020.
Davis’s performance comparison in recent years
What is the reason for this? To sum up, there should be three aspects:
1. Play number 5 in the Lakers small lineup.
Second, it has a connection with James and Wei Shao.
Third, the hit rate of jump shots has recovered significantly.
Davis didn’t like to play number 5 before, because after all, he was born as a defender and didn’t want to fight with those tall Insiders. He was more willing to show the guard skills. At his side, there was always a center of origin to block bullets for him, such as asique, cosins, Howard, little Gasol, Drummond, little Jordan, etc. He usually appeared on position 5 in the last 5 minutes. This season, Davis was almost alone in the center position.
But Davis had no choice but to accept it, because the basketball style has changed and needs more space. Coach Ham persuaded him to accept this new role, which actually greatly expanded the offensive space for him, nothing more than the more tired defense. Davis has a variety of ways to hold the ball and attack. The large space allows him to play the guard skills he practiced when he was a child. In this respect, no one has compared with him in the current number 5 player.
Of course, Davis in position 5 needs someone to feed him the ball, so James and his second fight became one of the most killing combinations. When the attack efficiency needs to be emphasized at the last moment, often there is no need to draw complicated tactics, just need others to pull away, they both play two. This season, James averaged 10.3 Games per game to Davis, 2.1 of which formed assists, accounting for 38% of all assists. You should know that James gave a lot of rights to Wei Shao this year, and the average assists dropped to 6.3 times. It can be said that he focused on feeding Davis the ball. These two figures have dropped to 5.2 passes and 0.6 assists last season.
Weishao accepted the substitute role and gave up the pursuit of scoring data. Instead, he opened another window, especially for such an excellent insider star to pass the ball. Excellent defenders would also be easier and more creative. At present, weishao delivers 9.2 times to jevis on average, forming 2.2 assists.
The biggest difference between Davis and the past two seasons is the change of receive the ball position.
In the past two years, because there was a big center in the same game and Davis had shooting skills, Vogel’s arranged that he would always be at the elbow receive the ball, which was the two endpoints of freethrow line. The advantage of doing this is that he can attack in front of the basket and give full play to his fengshui ball and shooting strengths. The disadvantage is that once the hit rate does not come up, the attack efficiency will be extremely low.
Coach Ham changed his position of receive the ball, making him more at the two sides of the basket to be in position and receive the ball, playing low like a real center. On the one hand, Davis is closer to rim and can use his steps to attack the basket. On the other hand, if he meets a center taller than him, he can turn back and shoot.
In a word, compared with Davis’s shooting points in the past three years, we can find that COSCO’s shooting has become less and less, and it is more concentrated in the basket, while the rebound of the shooting rate of Cosco is the result of his own efforts in summer.
Davis is approaching another dream-when MVP, his first dream is to win the championship, which has been realized.
Of course, if you want to be an MVP, you need to meet many conditions. In addition to your good performance, the team’s performance also has a bottom line. Although there are no written regulations, there are jokiki and weishao’s hoops, at least they have to get the sixth in the West.
This is exactly the responsibility of Davis. This Lakers team, James is getting older and older, and Wei Shao is not allowed to shoot. There is a group of unknown little people around him. The Lakers want to do something big, and there is only one way, that is, Davis is going over the river.
He had to go over the river and the sea, and he couldn’t stop.