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It can be difficult to adjust expectations within a season. A player enters the year with a certain set of anticipated outcomes, and our priors can be a little slow to move in the face of new evidence. This is, in general, a good thing. It prevents over-reacting and recency bias, and it keeps our expectations from becoming a carousel based entirely on primacy. It can, however, make us a little slow to shift the baseline against which we evaluate a player.
Some of this applies to Serge Ibaka’s 2017-18 season, which was largely disappointing. Not all of it does, though, as the expectation level for Ibaka’s ninth season were artificially inflated, anyway, thanks to three factors.
The first is that, based on the evidence available in things like pre-season player rankings and the general discourse around the team, expectations for Ibaka tailed a little behind what 2016-17’s evidence might suggest. Ibaka’s decline started in earnest before this year, perhaps even as far back as the injury he returned from so quickly and dramatically while with Oklahoma City. When the Toronto Raptors acquired him from the Orlando Magic, though, the thinking was that Ibaka’s declined play had as much to do with situation – the Magic were a mess, their frontcourt a cast of ill-fitting and uncomplementary pieces – and that he’d rebound with better fit and motivation. And he did, a bit, giving the Raptors a late-season defensive spark and turning in a solid, if unspectacular playoff run highlighted by his series-changing move to center against the Milwaukee Bucks. The larger body of evidence suggested a decline, but still just 28, there was room for optimism that Ibaka could be something between his Orlando and Oklahoma City levels for the near future.
That the Raptors dealt assets to get him is the second factor that may have raised expectations too high. Terrence Ross and a first-round pick is still a reasonable price to have paid – Ross would have, ironically, been a pretty good fit with how Toronto played this year, and you just know the Raptors would have completed their assembling of Utah Utes by taking Kyle Kuzma with that pick – and it at least feels like Toronto’s extended chase for a power forward to play alongside Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan overstated Ibaka’s potential impact. The Raptors needed a third star and a floor-spacing four, and Ibaka was ostensibly that, just well after he would have fit the definition more suitably.
Really, it was the contract that kept expectations afloat. Raptors president Masai Ujiri faced a tough decision over the summer to keep the core together or blow everything up, and it would have made little sense to trade for Ibaka and then decline to retain him while keeping everyone else together. Patrick Patterson was never coming back, and while you can certainly suggest P.J. Tucker would have been a better fit (he would have been!), the Raptors offered him more money than Houston already, anyway. There were no clear means of replacing Ibaka if he walked (the likely recourse would have been keeping DeMarre Carroll, in retrospect a reasonable enough play, albeit one that would have left Toronto very small), and so Ujiri opted to retain him. Which is fine. Ibaka was and is still a good player. It’s the price tag that signaled that the Raptors thought more of Ibaka than his play had maybe suggested, and perhaps signaled he was still a “third piece” type. Three years and $65 million seemed like only a slight overpay at the time – the type of overpay you live with when a player shares an agent with the star you’re trying to retain, and when Tucker just walked away for less money elsewhere – and it looks significantly worse (unmovable, even) now that there are two years and $45 million remaining.
And this is the issue with Ibaka, really. It’s not that he’s not useful, because he is. It’s that the Raptors are paying him like their third-best player and like a third star in the open market in general, while he’s really just one of the guys on a team that, yes, has two All-Stars, but is really a depth team that should be making rotation decisions based on matchups, game flow, and performance rather than a perceived hierarchy of status. Ibaka’s play didn’t fall off a cliff – again, he really was fine overall – he was just paid like and often treated like a borderline star, which he no longer is. (Nor is he good enough to justify jettisoning Jonas Valanciunas in order to play Ibaka at center more; he’s fine there, but the Raptors rebounded poorly like that, were more than fine with the Ibaka-Valanciunas pairing, and Valanciunas is better and cheaper.) The Raptors can’t change his salary for the next two seasons, but if they change how they operate around him, Ibaka can still be a helpful piece. The salary is a sunk cost – I don’t think they’ll be in the business of attaching picks or other assets to unload salary again, as that’s a very risky way to maintain success in the long run – and Ibaka as a functional, non-star rotation piece is still a nice player to have.
To wit, Ibaka’s production was mostly in line with 2016-17 on a counting basis. He scored almost the exact same per-minute rate, shot a little worse on threes but much better on twos and, because of the volume of each, saw his true-shooting percentage nudge to its highest mark since 2013-14, and kept his rebounding and shot-blocking rates mostly in tact (his block percentage decreased slightly, which wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t the sixth consecutive year it happened). The only real qualitative change in Ibaka’s game was that he eventually grew a bit more comfortable putting the ball on the floor and creating for himself with those high-paint push-shots – Zach Lowe noted in April that Ibaka improved more as a ball-mover this year than in his entire time with the Thunder – though his assist and turnover rates didn’t move in any meaningful way. It’s possible the statistical change comes eventually, as the team’s culture reset was more difficult for Ibaka than any other player, given his skill set and previous roles. There’s still a lot of room for growth in that area, and he could stand to improve his footwork when setting screens so his roll/pop decision is less telegraphed and he presents himself better for pocket passes (he was in the 40th percentile finishing as a roll man and the Raptors’ lead guards scored less effectively with him as the screener, especially in the playoffs). Ibaka was also in the 85th percentile in terms of volume of long twos, per Cleaning the Glass, and while that short-roll jumper is a big part of his game and he stuck 49 percent of them, the Raptors figure to want to cut down on those looks further.
In terms of overall performance, Ibaka more or less who he is. He posted 5.1 Win Shares, the same as the year prior (in 229 fewer minutes), his VORP was the same (with a slightly better Box Plus Minus), and the Raptors outscored opponents by 7.2 points per-100 possessions when he was on the floor. (He also had the team’s third-best playoff Net Rating, though his performance seemed subjectively much worse than that would suggest.) Jacob Goldstein‘s Player Impact Plus Minus is probably my favorite of the publicly available attempts to capture a player’s performance, and Ibaka comes out looking decent there, too – he jumped from 0.2 points added per-100 possessions last year to 0.7 this year, grading as a slight positive on both ends of the floor. That’s within the expectation band for a starter, and while it’s nowhere near Ibaka’s peak – he graded like an All-Star three times in OKC – it leaves him on the bubble as a top-100 player still.
(An aside to double back to expectations: Real Plus-Minus was way out of line for predicting Ibaka before the season and he drastically under-performed through that lens. RPM predicted him to be worth 1.4 points per-100 possessions and he came in at 0.6, the biggest negative “miss” on the Raptors outside of Norman Powell. Given how consistent he was in most other metrics, this would seem to be more of a criticism of RPM than Ibaka.)
So again, Ibaka was entirely serviceable. A lot of the hand-wringing about his play had to do with timing, expectations, and the fact that almost every one else on the team over-performed, so his occasional struggles and statistical stagnancy stood out as worse than it was. Ibaka’s contract still looks bad with the benefit of hindsight, but Ibaka himself is not bad, and he’s still at a point on the aging curve where he can be expected to maintain roughly this level of play (perhaps even nudge it forward if his role is reduced and his shot spectrum improves further). The salary is what it is, and Ibaka clearly is who he is at this point; those things aren’t impossible to marry if we enter 2018-19 with better expectations for him.
