NBA Hater Report: Lakers' LeBron James is a negative player (on paper), Paul George is the new Tobias Harris?

Welcome to the NBA Hater Report: A breakdown of some of the players, teams and trends around the league that are drawing the ire of yours truly. If you're not a fellow pessimist, proceed with caution. 

Negative LeBron?

It's hard to hate on a 40-year-old who is one of two players in the league averaging at least 23 points, nine assists and seven rebounds while leading his team, which was widely predicted to be a cellar dweller, to a top-five seed in the Western Conference entering play on Tuesday. 

Yes, we're talking about LeBron James, who was just named an All-Star starter for the 20th consecutive season, and the Lakers, who have more than kept their head above water, even if they have done so by beating up on bad teams (16-2 against sub-.500 opponents). 

All of that notwithstanding, there is one number that pops out more than perhaps any other on LeBron's ledger: minus-2.7. What that means is the Lakers are losing the minutes that LeBron is on the court this season by an average of 2.7 points per game.

This is just the third time in James' career that he has not led his team to a positive point differential in his minutes. It happened back in 2021-22 with the Lakers -- who won just 33 games while employing the likes of washed Carmelo Anthony and the worst version of Russell Westbrook. That season, LeBron appeared in just one lineup alongside Anthony Davis that played more than 100 possessions together, per Cleaning the Glass. 

Before that, you have to go all the way back to to LeBron's rookie year, when the 35-win Cavaliers finished the season with a minus-144 point differential in LeBron's minutes, which neared 40 a game. What LeBron did what he did with that team as a rookie was a basketball miracle. He finished top 10 in MVP voting as a teenager for crying out loud. That negative point differential has no business in this conversation. 

Point differentials always require lineup and opposition context. But for 20 of the last 21 seasons, James, regardless who he was playing with or against, has been able to lift his team to (usually extreme) positive outcomes. If he was on the court, his team was winning. 

But entering play on Tuesday, the Lakers have lost his 1,430 minutes by 110 points this season. In non-garbage time minutes, that comes out to a minus-3.7 per 100 possessions; two of the three lineups with which LeBron has logged at least 100 possessions are negative units. Even alongside Davis the Lakers are losing LeBron's minutes.

Does this mean that LeBron is a negative player? Of course not. It just means, at least as of right now, he's no longer a guaranteed link to a scoreboard surplus, even with box score numbers that still look amazing. And for a Lakers team that continues to want to fool itself into the idea that it is "one player away" from contention precisely because they have LeBron James, that is, to say the least, concerning. 

Lakers' trade deadline will be defined by one question, and there's a candidate who might make everyone happy

Sam Quinn

In the NBA, any honest player evaluation has to be contract-relative. Take the five-year, $180 million deal the Sixers were gave Tobias Harris in the summer of 2019 after trading for him at the February deadline. 

Harris was far from a great player for the Sixers, too often disappearing in the Sixers' time of most need and never really growing as a player. He was a lot like watching paint dry. He just did the same mundane things over and over that never added up to nearly as much as his acceptable box-score numbers would indicate

Still, he wasn't a bad player. He was just bad relative to that contract. Which brings us to Paul George and the season he's currently having for the disastrous Philadelphia 76ers after signing a four-year, $212 million deal in the summer that the Clippers -- who look pretty damn smart right now -- refused to give him. 

Over 30 games with the Sixers, George, who is now out with another injury this week (he jammed his pinky on Saturday and won't play Tuesday against the Lakers), is averaging 17.1 points on 42% shooting, including a positively average 36.5% from 3. It's outright startling how similar George's numbers look to those of ... wait for it ... Tobias Harris. 

Is that a trip or what? Those numbers are damn near identical. It's true that numbers can be deceiving and anyone who knows anything about basketball knows Paul George is a better player than Tobias Harris, but people ... look at this! George is going to turn 35 this May and he's making $49.2M this season. That goes up to $51.6M next year and $54.1M the year after that. There's a very real possibility that the Sixers will be paying a 38-year-old George $56.6M in 2028. For 17 points per game?

Save all this talk about how George wasn't signed to be the go-to player and without Joel Embiid it's impossible to properly evaluate his production. He is making forty-nine million dollars. You want me to get excited because he's been better of late, averaging 20.6 points on 44.7% 3-point shooting across 10 games in January? Yeah right. Harris had plenty of decent stretches in his time with the Sixers, too. 

Last December he shot 42% from 3. Two years ago he was sensational in a first-round playoff sweep of the Nets, averaging over 20 points on 57% shooting. That season he was damn near a 50-40-90 scorer over 26 games in February and March. Don't act like Harris was never a good player. 

He just wasn't good enough for that contract, and right now, neither is George. Not even close. Unless you are a world-class rim protector, banking over $200 million to score fewer than 20 points in over two thirds of your first 30 games with a team that is absolute desperate for star production is a heist. 

And to think, this is supposed to be the best George will be for Philadelphia. He's only going to get older from here, and that contract is only going to get worse. There was a built-in understanding that George would have to pay off majorly at the front end of this deal for it to have any chance of being a valuable signing. If shelling out for Tobias Harris numbers on a 17-27 team that will be lucky to make the play-in tournament is paying off, I'm even worse at math than I thought. 

One more negative note...

Hawks stuck on average: Looked at individually, the Hawks have a lot of reason for optimism. Trae Young is leading the league in assists. Dyson Daniels is going to make first-team All-Defense. Jalen Johnson is going to be an All-Star in the near future. DeAndre Hunter is having a career year. Among East teams, only the Celtics and Cavaliers have won more games against above-.500 opponents than the Hawks' 12, which matches the Knicks' number. And yet, here Atlanta is with a 22-24 record. This team is simply stuck on average. Give or take a few games, they have been a .500 team for since their 2021 Eastern Conference finals run. Quin Snyder. Nate McMillan. With or without Dejounte Murray. Doesn't matter. Something is just in the DNA there. And it's not a winning gene.