Season-In-Review: Brook Lopez

Lopez may have missed (nearly) all of that season, but that doesn't he can't rebound in the 2012-13 campaign

This post, along with the other posts I will do in the Season-In-Review series, will take a deeper look at how all the Nets did last season on the court and possibly off of it. We continue with Brook Lopez. Deron Williams was covered last.

Ah, Brook Lopez, the Nets' most endearing enigma.The 7'0" center was injured for the first time in his short career last season and boy did he miss games. Brook played in just five of the Nets' 66 games last year due to a broken right foot and the team certainly suffered without the talents of their true center who, in years prior, served as a menacing defensive stud down low and put up 20-point performances on the reg. However, Lopez has definitely had his share of problems, especially regarding rebounding, and he may not be the player he was pre-injury this season in Brooklyn.

From 2008-11, his first three years in the league, Brook played in all 246 of the Nets games in that span and played pretty well, increasing his points per game output from 13.0 in '08-'09, to 18.8 in '09-'10, to 20.4 in '10-'11. Even though Brook's scoring throughout his career has been consistently good, his rebounding has been far from and that was shown in the five games Brook did manage to play last season. In those games, he averaged 19.2 points per but just a mere 3.6 rebounds per, something that is unacceptable for a player of Lopez' size and importance to his team.

More after the jump on the Stanford grad:

This lack of rebounding that Brook displayed is something that has been going on since the '09-'10 season, in which he nabbed a career-high 8.7 rebounds per game. Since then, his per-game rebounding averages has dropped from 8.7 to 5.9 to 3.6 in each successive season. Clearly, as his scoring has gone up, Brook's rebounding has gone down. Normally, for scoring-challenged NBA squads, that trade-off isn't terrible and could potentially be a good thing. Not for this new-look Nets team.
 
The acquisition of offensive-minded Joe Johnson this summer to be one of the Nets' premier players cemented the team's identity as "offense-first, defense-second". That certainly doesn't bode well for a team that has a starting center who flat out doesn't rebound. We all know that rebounding, especially defensive rebounding, is beyond crucial for any NBA team's success and even watchability on a day-to-day basis. When the opposing team is allowed to have free reign on any defensive boards in a NBA game, that game tends to be very lopsided in the favor of the pro-rebounding squad.

Brook Lopez is going to have to make a full 180' in his prowess on the boards from last season and the one before that as well if the Nets are going to be a relevant contender in the East this year. With this newly-constructed and defensive-challenged team, Brook has little margin of error in that aspect of his game: He's going to have to step it up, or remain terribly inept on the glass and watch the Nets' record plummet faster than Johan Petro's field goal percentage.