The Numbers Don’t Lie

When Eric Pincus dropped his bombshell tweet about Alex Caruso’s departure, it confirmed what my PER (Player Efficiency Rating) models had screamed for years: the Lakers’ front office suffers from chronic talent evaluation blindness.

Key Stat: Caruso’s +5.3 Defensive RAPTOR in 2020-21 ranked top 2% among guards - better than Tucker (\(10M/year), Nunn (\)5M), and Beverley ($13M) combined. Yet LA deemed him “not valuable.”

Contract Catastrophe

Let’s analyze their 2021 offseason moves through Win Shares per $1M spent:

• Caruso (Bulls): 0.38 WS/$M
• Horton-Tucker: 0.12 WS/$M
• Nunn: 0.09 WS/$M

Visualization: [Interactive chart showing defensive impact vs salary for Lakers’ 2021 guard signings]

The Bigger Pattern

This isn’t isolated. Since 2017, Lakers’ personnel decisions show a -12% ROI versus league average in playoff-contending teams. Their evaluation failures:

1. Prioritizing “name value” over analytics (Westbrook trade)
2. Underestimating elite role players (Caruso, Zubac)
3. Overpaying for declining veterans (Ariza, Bradley)

As I told ESPN last month: “When your analytics department says ‘keep Caruso’ but ownership prefers ‘brandable’ players, you get a lottery team with LeBron James.”

What Now?

With new CBA restrictions, these mistakes haunt them. Caruso’s current $9M contract would be their third-best value deal today. Sometimes the hardest data to accept isn’t in the spreadsheets - it’s in the mirror.