Nate Robinson has proven to be a bargain for the Chicago Bulls this season, putting together his best season in four years while helping the banged-up Bulls to a surprising showing in the NBA playoffs.
Robinson averaged 13.1 points and 4.4 assists per game for Chicago this season, playing in all 82 games and starting 23 of them.
Nate Robinson has been undeniably big for the Chicago Bulls in the playoffs. (NBA.com photo)
But it’s been in the playoffs where Robinson has been special. He’s scoring 17.4 points a game, averaging 4.3 assists and shooting 47.8 percent while filling in for both Derrick Rose and Kirk Hinrich. Rose hasn’t played all season after tearing his ACL in the first game of the 2012 playoffs and Hinrich has missed six straight playoff games because of a calf injury.
The Bulls signed Robinson to a one-year deal worth a little more than $1.1 million last summer and he’s been worth every penny.
But with the year Robinson has had, particularly in the postseason, some team out there will throw an unnecessarily large pile of cash Robinson’s way. And that would be/will be a mistake.
Why is that, you may ask? Three words: regression to the mean.
Robinson is one of the streakiest shooters in basketball and he’s hit one of those hot stretches during the playoffs, when all eyes have been on him.
Against the Brooklyn Nets in the first round, Robinson shot 50.5 percent, including 36.4 percent (12-for-33) from 3-point range and scored 17 points a game while leading the Bulls to a seven-game upset.
Included in that mix was a 34-point effort in a triple-overtime win in Game 4, a game in which Robinson scored 23 points in the fourth quarter to ignite a Chicago rally from 14 points down with three minutes to go in regulation.
Robinson was also a significant part of Chicago’s Game 1 win over the Miami Heat to open the Eastern Conference semifinals, particularly down the stretch.
This isn’t to say Robinson can’t be a great addition to some team this offseason. But that will only be the case if the price is right.
The 47 percent shooting is part of it. Robinson is a career 42.7 percent shooter. He’s never shot better than 43.7 percent over the course of a full season and that was in 2008-09 with the New York Knicks, when he mostly came off the bench and averaged 17.2 points a game.
Since then, he’s been a bit of a basketball vagabond, moving from the Knicks to the Boston Celtics, on to the Oklahoma City Thunder before going to the Golden State Warriors. The Bulls were Robinson’s fifth team in the last four seasons.
He’s also 28 years old, so at this point you have to think that Robinson is simply what he is—a high-energy, high-risk, sometimes high-reward sparkplug best used off the bench. He will have nights when he is unstoppable, such as his Game 4 masterpiece against Brooklyn. But he will also have nights when his own coach may want to throw a lasso around him in order to drag him off the floor before he can do any more damage.
That would have been the case in Game 2 against Miami, when Robinson went 33 minutes and was 3-for-10 with two assists and four turnovers.
Robinson’s contributions are almost entirely on the offensive end and if he’s not getting it done there, he’s essentially valueless to a team. Generously listed at 5’9”, Robinson is almost a non-entity on the defensive end.
For his career, he has a defensive rating (DRtg) of 110 (points allowed per 100 possessions). That’s … not good. In the playoffs this year, for all of Robinson’s offensive fireworks, his defense has been even worse as his DRtg has shot up to 113.
After all, Basketball-Reference.com evokes names such as Lester Conner, Gerald Henderson and Foots Walker as the players who Robinson most closely resembles, according to his statistics.
No team would want to overpay any of those three players were they to suddenly become available as free agents in the primes of their careers.
Just as no team should be willing to overpay Robinson at this stage of his career. But this is the NBA, where misguided contracts happen, so Nate Robinson will likely find himself the recipient of a hefty pay raise this summer.