Lakers’ Andrew Bynum Playing Well; Must Be Due For An Injury Soon

At least we’re getting into a routine.

Andrew Bynum starts the season for the Lakers looking like the NBA’s next great dominant center and Kobe Bryant’s counterpart in the middle. Then he goes out for the rest of the season with some tragic injury—and we gripe about his untapped potential, his massive contract, and generally work ourselves into a Bynum-themed lather.

It’s happened two years in a row, and frankly I won’t know what to do if Bynum doesn’t go down with an injury pretty soon.

Andrew Bynum is easily the most talked-about center in the league, compared to how much there actually is to say. He’s played one season’s worth of games over the last two years, and talk of Bynum has all the same references to “ceiling” and “upside” that we typically reserve for rookies—when in reality he’s in his fifth season.

We treat fellow fifth-years Chris Paul and Deron Williams as seasoned veterans, and expect production as such. But Bynum, well, we’re fully willing to give him a pat on the back for just making it onto the floor. Andrew Bogut, the #1 pick in that same draft, is labeled at times as a draft bust even with career numbers significantly better than Bynum’s.

The difference? He plays for the Milwaukee Bucks, not the championship-winning Lakers.

But back to Bynum. His numbers this season, at least so far, are realer than Real Deal Holyfield. Bynum has averaged 20.8 points, 11.8 rebounds, and 1.9 blocks so far in the season’s first eleven games—ranking him 20th in the entire league in PER at 22.55.

But just being serviceable isn’t good enough for LA fans, or anyone who’s bought into the Bynum frenzy—anything short of being the next Shaq, or at least the next Dwight Howard, is a disappointment. If he really is to rank among the game’s best big men, his numbers have to stack up with those he’s so often been compared to.

The last ten years have been dominated in the middle by Shaquille O’Neal and Tim Duncan. Both led several teams to championships, and each once did so in a 4-0 sweep: Shaq with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2002, and Duncan with the San Antonio Spurs in 2007. Shaq averaged 27.2 points, 10.7 rebounds, and 2 blocks that season with a PER of 29.7; Duncan put up 20, 10.6, and 2.4, with a 26.1 PER.

Layering all three onto a Spider Graph (click here if you’re unfamiliar with Spider Graphs) shows that they’re definitely worth comparing, in statistical output and style.

Bynum’s only played in nine of the eleven games this season, which is a sample size much too small to extrapolate to an entire season. But his stat line is nonetheless impressive, and especially so on a team that already features Kobe Bryant as its primary offensive threat, and with fallbacks like Lamar Odom and Ron Artest.

And the Lakers sure have appreciated his production with Pau Gasol warming el pino. Gasol, the team’s second-leading scorer, hasn’t played a single game yet this season thanks to a strained right hamstring—and there seems to be a lot of uncertainty on when he’l be taking the floor again.

At any rate, Bynum has been magnificent. At the risk of sounding redundant, he’s looking like one of the NBA’s next great dominant centers. And Kobe Bryant’s counterpart in the middle.

Dang. I told myself I wouldn’t say that all again.

Shaq is, in a roundabout way, the reason the Lakers were able to secure Bynum as the 10th pick in the 2005 draft. O’Neal had been traded to the Miami Heat following the 2004 season and the Lakers’ loss to the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals. The team fizzled without him, and only won 34 games in ‘05—enough to miss the playoffs and earn such an early pick in the draft. Since then, they’ve been on the Bynum rollercoaster.

We’ve even been taken for a ride already in this season. Bynum suffered a strained right elbow in a win over the Houston Rockets on November 4th, and missed two games.

Ultimately, a player can only be injured so many times before we call him injury-prone.

The moral of the story is that if Andrew Bynum packages together an entire season playing at this high level, then he’ll finally be living up to the hype he’s gotten for the past several years. He’ll make himself worth the $12.5 million he gets paid this year (by comparison, the Oklahoma City Thunder and Detroit Pistons both have total payrolls of less than $50 million). He really will join Dwight Howard, Al Jefferson, and a healthy Yao Ming among the elite pivots in the NBA.

But for me? I can’t help expecting to see him limp off the floor pretty soon.

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