The Effect of Kobe Bryant on The Lakers’ Play

Much has been said about the effect that Kobe has had on the Lakers this season. Byron Scott has been limiting his minutes at times, and at times has played him almost the entire game. There have been times this season where analysts and fans of the Lakers have claimed that the team actually plays better without Kobe. We decided to look at these ideas from a statistical perspective.

We looked at a whole bunch of data of Kobe’s play this season (courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com), and compared his individual play to whether the Lakers win games or not. This is what we found.

In this first classification tree, note that ‘Y’ denotes when the Lakers are expected to win, and ‘N’ denotes when they are expected to lose. What we found is any time that Kobe shoots at least 44.95%, the Lakers can be expected to win. If he shoots less than this percentage, then the only way the Lakers can win with Kobe still in the game is if he has less than 3 personal fouls, shoots less than 36.65% from the 3PFG% line and attempts more than 6-7 shots in the game.

From a statistical perspective, the Lakers can win many more games if Byron Scott optimizes the Lakers offense to get Kobe the ball in high-percentage shooting areas of the floor, i.e., closer to the basket than further away from it. Certainly, from a statistical perspective, Byron Scott’s way of allowing Kobe to play “freestyle” basketball is hurting the Lakers’ chances at winning games. 

The second classification tree analysis that we did was to look at the whole debate over how many minutes is optimal for Kobe to play. What we found was that if Kobe plays less than 31 minutes in a game, the Lakers can expect to lose that game, while he is on the roster. If he plays more than 31 minutes, and has more than 7-8 assists, the Lakers can expect to win. The only other possibility for the Lakers to win games in this context is if he plays more than 31 minutes, has less than 7-8 assists, makes more than 6-7 of his shots, and plays less than 34-35 minutes a game.

Our previous analysis showed that the Lakers have the best chance of winning consistently when Kobe shoots a high percentage. This analysis shows that it is optimal for him to play between 31-35 minutes a game if he has less than 7 assists, but anytime he has more than 7 assists in a game, the Lakers can be expected to win. Therefore, from an offensive strategy perspective, the Lakers need to play more team-oriented basketball centered around Kobe. In hindsight, which is supported statistically, Kobe and the Lakers would be much better off in a post-oriented offense that promotes distributing the ball, high-percentage shots, and a slow pace. All of these three seem to be completely opposite to how Byron Scott has managed this team this year, and we feel that is why the Lakers have the record that they do!