Carving Out An Appropriate Role For Pau Gasol

Despite averaging 16.5 points, 11.0 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 2.0 blocks a contest, the eye test and, more importantly, Pau Gasol’s impact on winning, do not match his gaudy statistical output.

Hindsight is 20/20.

It’s always easy to play Monday morning quarterback and pad your own back on predicting the utter misfit between the Chicago Bulls‘ roster makeup and first-year head coach Fred Hoiberg‘s pace-and-space system — after all, the incumbent roster was built to adhere their former coach’s, Tom Thibodeau’s, grit-and-grind, slow-tempo style of play.

With that in mind, however, most prognosticators still projected the Bulls to finish somewhere within the top four of the Eastern Conference.  And on paper, their respective credentials alone merited such high regards.

Jimmy Butler was coming off a breakout season — emerging as one of the top two-way wings in the game — Nikola Mirotic was the hipster’s choice for Rookie of the Year last season, while Pau Gasol was aging like fine wine.

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This season, though, Chicago has suffered yet another injury-riddled season.  Both Butler and Mirotic have missed long stretches of time, and the team has plummeted down the Eastern Conference standings over the second half of the year.

Through it all, Gasol is still putting up some staggering numbers — good enough to earn him an injury replacement nod for this year’s All-Star Game.

He’s had some eye-popping games — his 22-point, 16-rebound, and 14-assist triple-double performance in late February, accomplishing it without three of Chicago’s five of intended starters no less, immediately comes to mind.

But yet, despite averaging 16.5 points, 11.0 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 2.0 blocks a contest, the eye test and, more importantly, his impact on winning do not match his gaudy statistical output.

On a per-minute basis, Pau has never blocked as many shots nor dished out as many dimes as he’s had this year at age 35.  He ranks fifth among all centers in PER, fourth in BPM and third in VORP.  Statistically speaking, you could make a case for him being the best center in the league this season.

When digging a tad deeper, however, you’ll uncover an entirely different story.  Gasol is one of the more higher usage 5s in the game despite scoring on a rather mundane 52.6 TS% (below the league median).

More alarmingly, his plodding gait generally holds the Bulls and Hoiberg back from they intend to do: run.

As Trey Kerby of the Starters fame put it in their latest podcast, “Pau can’t run; and when he does, he doesn’t run fast.

The thing is, in spite of his efforts of extending his range out to the 3-point line over the recent years, inherently, Gasol’s game does not fit coherently with the modern NBA game. Fit-wise, your team would ideally need an ultra-quick, rim-protecting stretch-4 in the mold of a Serge Ibaka to make Pau as your starting 5 work.

Such specimens are few and far in between (unicorns, as Kevin Durant would describe them). For that reason, it is why the Joakim Noah and Gasol froncourt pairing was such an offensive spacing nightmare last year, even though Noah’s strengths defensively theoretically hid Gasol’s deficiencies.

Pau’s ideal role at this juncture of his career may be to serve as a back-to-basket, traditional 3rd big off the bench, ala Enes Kanter. Having him spearhead a team’s second unit efforts to curate fruitful looks, either off of pick-and-roll play or just straight post-ups, for short five to ten minutes stints should be Gasol’s calling going forward.

Of course, his ego and prior history of refusing to accept a lesser role may ultimately prevent this from happening.

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But, if Pau Gasol still has championship aspirations, whether with the Chicago Bulls or another contending team as he enters free agency this offseason, he has to begin to negotiate with father time and open the doors to a new, more-suitable role.