Ghost in the Machine

Anyone who has read this blog or knows me personally knows that I do not like Sasha Vujacic.  I do not like his game, I do not like how he acts on the court and I am sure if I ever met him in person, I wouldn’t like him on that level either.  That is why this is so hard for me to say.  The Lakers really need Sasha Vujacic to figure out why he sucks so bad this year.

Not exactly working hard, but at least he isn’t flopping and/or whining to the refs.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Machine is totally broken right now.  His hasn’t been able to shoot for over a year now and has finally fallen out of the Laker rotation.  Things have gotten so bad for Sasha that even his trademark unjustified uber-confidence has dissipated almost completely.  In other words, Vujacic is now totally useless.  The problem for the Lakers though is that given their financial constraints, they can’t afford for Sasha to remain so very useless.

Yesterday, I expounded upon all the dangers of LA continuing to use an eight-man rotation and one way to remedy that problem would be to get Sasha back to being a regular part of that rotation.  But that isn’t the only problem Sasha can address.  As it turns out, Sasha isn’t the only Laker who can’t shoot anymore this season, specifically from long distance (where Sasha is actually still moderately respectable).  Derek Fisher and Kobe Bryant are both struggling from beyond arc and Jordan Farmar and Shannon Brown are doing the best they can, though neither is exactly lighting it up.  The net result is that the Lakers are a very mediocre three-point shooting team and they’d be positively awful if Ron Artest hadn’t caught fire recently.  For a team that relies so heavily on post-up players and Kobe driving into the paint, being able to space the floor is crucial to their long-term success and that is only going to happen if they improve their three-point shooting.  Since Artest, Farmar and Brown are probably doing the best they can from three-point land as it is, the only real room for improvement the Lakers can get is from Vujacic (well, Fisher too, but I am assuming he is just a corpse from this point forward).

The only way Sasha is going to shoot better is by actually shooting.

The real question is how exactly did Sasha suddenly forget how to shoot?  Vujacic has really never had nice, shiny shooting percentages, but that has always largely been attributable to his infamously awful shot selection.  But now trigger-happy Sasha is so concerned about his faulty jumper that even he has gotten gun shy and that right there is the problem.  So what you want about his shot mechanics or how flat it is, but any shooter will tell you that it is all about confidence and the only way the Lakers are going to rebuild Sasha’s confidence is by getting him in the game, not in ego-deflating garbage time minutes, and putting him into a position to succeed.  That means biting the bullet and adding Sasha back to the regular rotation and even deliberately drawing up plays for him.

That statement made me throw up in my mouth a little bit, but that doesn’t make it any less true.  For Sasha, this should be a welcome challenge.  He clearly still feels like he can succeed, he just needs a chance to prove it (or not).  At least this way the Lakers can find out sooner rather than lately if he is even a salvageable commodity.

Tags: Analysis, Derek Fisher, Jordan Farmar, Kobe Bryant, Ron Artest, Sasha Vujacic, Shannon Brown