With the Finland and Utah Jazz superstar picking up a much deserved NBA Most Improved Player award, Emmet Ryan on the inevitable rise of Markkamania
The timing felt like everything. On the eve of EuroBasket, Lauri Markkanen’s time in Cleveland was over and he was being shipped to Salt Lake City as the Utah Jazz blew it all up and went full rebuild mode. Right then, in early September, whatever fire needed to be stoked went from embers to a sea of flames that could be seen across continents. Lauri Markkanen was going to get the world’s attention, wherever he played.
The stuff you already know
Markkanen ran wild at EuroBasket, ending a more than 50 year wait for Finland to make it to the quarter finals and entering god mode on the floor whenever he wanted. By the time he was done in Berlin, it wasn’t so much that he might be a piece that Utah would want to keep long-term but how quickly it would take eyes in the US to realise that the Jazz would be crazy to not have him as a key part of the rebuild.
The Jazz, of course, lost a lot but far less than anticipated and Markkanen impressed mightily throughout the season, with his unique style including being the first player to make 100 dunks and 200 threes in the same season. From the off in SLC, there was no doubt that Lauri had become the star he was meant to be after lingering in the odd spot of being the last starter with the Cavs. He got the All Star nod as expected and Utah enters this off-season with one bona fide key man before it starts using the extraordinary pile of draft assets it has built up.
The stuff you really ought to know
The I in most improved often gets a weird rep because how much do we really gauge improvement and how exactly do we define it? Fortunately, Markkanen made it as easy as possible to understand what a year to year improvement looks like through both the eye test and the raw numbers.
We’ve been over the former but he raised field goal percentage from 45 to 50 per cent this year, 3P% to 39 per cent from 36 per cent, even his free throw average was almost up a point at 88 per cent. Rebounds? Up from 5.7 to 8.6 per game, assists from 1.3 to 1.9, and points from 14.8 to 25.6 per game. All of this while his minutes only rose from 31 to 34 this season.
That’s a leap and then some. Markkanen joins some great company amongst Europeans with Gheorghe Muresan (1996), Boris Diaw (2006), Hedo Turkoglu (2008), Goran Dragic (2014), and Giannis Antentokounmpo (2017) the other Euros to previously win the prize.
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A quick note on SGA
I genuinely have to give the dude some props because I remember being surprised when I saw Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was even on the shortlist, mainly because I figured he couldn’t have improved that much. Dude already looked like a star last season.
My bad and then some as he really did some extraordinary work numbers wise getting to new levels this season and made the type of gains that are difficult to make in raw stats after the prior year he had. Good work SGA, this was just the wrong year to be in the running.
Now back to why you’re here
So what’s next for Markkanen? Well the bad news is that the Jazz aren’t going to be among the elite next year but they have already outperformed expectations and effectively played their way out of the play-in conversation at the tail-end of the season. If someone had told you in October that Markkanen’s team would be doing the same thing as Dallas at the end of the season, would you have believed them? That’s the wild world the Jazz find themselves in now.
They should realistically be, at the very least, in the conversation for the 7 or 8 slots next season and the right move here or there could have them sniffing an actual playoff berth earned in-season not through the play-ins. That’s going to involve a whole lot of things going right but we’ve already seen that Markkanen can make things right. The dude has found the baller he was meant to be. Once he gets back from military service, expect him to be focused squarely on getting even better.
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