MILWAUKEE – Ty Lawson remembers the moment vividly three seasons ago, his coach livid with him over a step-back jumper he took. In that rookie season, Lawson made that shot, and yet George Karl was fuming and gave Lawson a stern message on his way back to the Denver Nuggets’ next huddle.

“You can’t do that!” Karl shouted.

“[Karl] was pissed,” Lawson says now. “He didn’t want me shooting anything but a layup or a three. But I’m like: In the year 2013, that’s when I know I’ll do that step-back.”

Now, Karl has immense trust in Lawson, a relationship that has constantly tightened. They know it had to be this way once Chauncey Billups left in the Carmelo Anthony trade. Ultimately, Karl understood the Nuggets’ future rested on giving Lawson freedom, and in turn rested on his ability to blossom with it. And he hasn’t looked back.

Danilo Gallinari is done for the season and Kenneth Faried won’t return until the playoffs, but the Nuggets still clinched homecourt advantage through the first round, escaping Monday night with a 112-111 win over the Bucks. Lawson played his third straight game since missing eight of nine, and he put on a clinic: 26 points, seven assists, five rebounds – and a step-back game-winning jumper with 9.3 seconds left.

For all the talk about the Nuggets lacking a superstar, a go-to guy, Lawson looks around the locker room and believes the talent is there for a championship run this season. Yes, Gallinari is gone – a date for surgery on his torn ACL still not set so that the swelling in his knee subsides – but teammates believe Faried will return from a sprained ankle for Game 1 of the postseason. With an offense based on execution and movement and a defense heightened by Andre Iguodala, the Nuggets have been entertaining and nearly unbeatable at home all season.

So will this Nuggets season be a failure if Denver doesn’t win a championship?

“I think it would be a failure,” Lawson told RealGM. “We’ve been playing well all this year. We have the best record in team history. We’re a deep team, players good at each position, and we’ve been playing well. I feel like if we don’t make it past the second round, I wouldn’t be satisfied.”

For Lawson, the recovery from a torn plantar fascia in his right heel has tested him physically, tested his patience. From ankle and foot mobility exercises to massages, icing to even acupuncture, Lawson has done whatever it takes to get back on the court, get back healthy. He had been coming three hours before Nuggets practices – 8 a.m. trips to the team’s facility for treatment. Lawson’s mindset was clear: “I got to do what I got to do to get healthy,” he said.

Karl had a plan to ease Lawson into the Nuggets’ lineup: Limited minutes in a bench role in the first game back, an increased workload in the second and a complete test in the third. After playing 19 and 31 minutes in his first two games back, Lawson’s performance Monday was punctuated in over 38 minutes, in a brilliant display of blazing past defenders and absorbing and finishing through contact all night. It left Lawson, Karl said, “reassured … [with] his swag back. We know how valuable he is to us.”

“Sometimes, I thought that it was getting better – I was able to walk with no pain – and I start running and I couldn’t cut,” Lawson said. “I feel like I’m close to a 100 percent now or almost there.”

Three postseasons have come and gone for Lawson, and he knows the Nuggets need him to be more of Games 2, 3, 6 and 7 of last season’s series against the Los Angeles Lakers. Lawson has taken such a critical responsibility, games with seven points, with nine points, would shape a playoff failure for him.

The Nuggets know this: Their defense, especially on the perimeter, will have to stiffen in the playoffs. Monta Ellis shredded them inside and outside, dropping 38 points, and J.J. Redick and Mike Dunleavy continually got open shots on pin-down sets. Nevertheless, the Nuggets are a virtual lock for the third seed in the Western Conference and either possible six-seed, the Golden State Warriors or Houston Rockets, play right into Denver’s style.

Soon, Lawson knows the Nuggets will again start to hear their supposed flaws. No superstar, no All-Star. Lawson has long wanted this chance to lead the Nuggets deep into the postseason, this chance to receive the credit, the accountability that comes with being a go-to guy. On the cusp of the playoffs, there was Lawson on Monday, hitting a game-winner and strutting, nodding back to the bench.

“I think I’m getting better and better every year,” Lawson said. “Between me and Iguodala and even JaVale [McGee] – he has the most potential probably out of anybody – and Wilson [Chandler] is a starting three on any team in the league ...

“We can have superstars, All-Stars. Definitely somebody will be that in the near future. As of next year.”

For now, these Nuggets will be Lawson’s show, and he and Karl both knew the organization needed it this way. He can take whatever shot he wants in any moment, Lawson says with a smile, and he has the free rein and Karl just lets him run and run now. Even so, Lawson remembers it wasn’t always like this, and he still recalls that Karl message when he took – and made – a jumper that the coach deemed a bad shot.

On the night he hit the same step-back jump shot from inside the free throw line, Lawson summoned out his response to Karl three seasons ago: In 2013, I’ll be free to do that. In 2013, Ty Lawson is free to evoke a championship pursuit. 

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Most experts seem to have Louisville in their preseason Top 10 next year. And because people need to justify that ranking, between now and November you are going to be hearing a lot about Louisville recruit, point guard Chris Jones. Jones is the top junior college player in the country, and everyone is saying he will be an instant impact recruit. (Besides Chris Jones, some of the other top JUCO recruits this year include SMU’s Yanick Moreira, Marquette’s Jameel McKay, and Missouri’s Keanau Post.)

But what is a reasonable expectation for a top JUCO recruit? For many of us, we simply want to see Jones play before we draw any conclusions. Scouting is hugely important, and I wouldn’t be watching the Jordan Brand Classic and writing about it, if I didn’t see value in watching players and picturing how they will fit into an offense.

But if you want to look at the historical stats and use those to predict how Chris Jones might play, that is what today’s column is all about.  But before I share those numbers, let me point out that the biggest problem with junior college players is attrition. JUCO players are systematically more likely to have problems with eligibility, systematically more likely to withdraw at the start of the school year, and systematically more likely not to make it through the entire season. I thought this post by John Templon of NYBuckets summed it up rather nicely. Below I am only presenting the numbers for players that enrolled successfully and played more minutes than a typical walk-on. Only 77% of Top 100 JUCO players met this criteria, meaning my sample suffered a 23% attrition rate. Because of this, the most important hurdle for Louisville may be making sure Chris Jones is on the court on November 1^st.

Second, I think it is important to set a baseline for expectations for incoming players. I’m going to use freshmen as that baseline. The next table is a recreation of a table Luke Winn made a few years ago, measuring the first year impact of various freshmen. The only difference here is that I am using 11 years of data, from 2003 to 2013. Remarkably, the expectations are quite similar in the expanded data set.

Occasionally, a team of freshmen come together and dominate from Day 1, but this year’s Michigan squad was definitely an outlier. More realistically, only the highest rated freshmen tend to come in and dominate the first year they step on campus.

Now, in last year’s preseason rankings, I didn’t do much with the JUCO data. About the only fact I used was this one: From 2005 to 2013, JUCO transfers into Power programs have performed better than JUCO transfers into smaller programs.

I typically view JUCO players as emergency fill-ins. A JUCO player can come in and get you a 97.0 ORtg on average, which is better than the 94.3 for an unranked freshman. But it isn’t a lot better.

When I published my preseason rankings last year, one of the initial suggestions I received was that I should use the JUCO Top 100 data and see if it provided some additional information with which to form expectations. As it turns out, over 80% of the JUCO players enrolling in Power 6 conferences were ranked in the JUCO Top 100. (An example of a JUCO player outside the Top 100 at a major program would be Cincinnati’s David Nyarsuk.)  I have now coded that Top 100 data, and the next table shows how the JUCO Top 100 have fared in their debut seasons. For 2011 and 2012, I am using the JUCO rankings found on Jucorecruiting.com. From 2007-2010, I am using the JUCO rankings created by Juco Junction, a division of rivals.com.

I didn’t break out the Top 100 further because the variance for these players is huge. Using six years of data, none of the tiers of data are statistically significantly different from one another. To put it another way, when you plot efficiency relative to the JUCO ranking, the data is virtually a scatter plot. There are players at all points in the rankings with efficiency ratings below 90 and above 110. I’m not completely sure why the JUCO rankings have so little predictive power. It could be the differences in competition, the lower quality of scouting, or simply the different circumstances these players walk into. (I.e. a JUCO player matriculating at Texas Tech and Marquette probably faces a substantially different probability of success.)

That said, I think it is fair to say the Top 10 JUCO recruits look very similar to freshmen recruits ranked 21-30 out of high school. If you want to set your expectation for Chris Jones at 101.5 based on this data, that seems reasonable.

You might argue that my Top 10 cut-off is too wide. Maybe if I just focused on the Top 5 or Top 3, we would get an even higher expectation for a player like Chris Jones. But the data don’t really support that. If we cut off players ranked 6-10, we cut out some of the best JUCO players to go D1. You would be dropping Mississippi’s Marshall Henderson (#10 in 2012) and LSU’s Marcus Thornton(#6 in 2007) among others. And unfortunately, a number of players near the top of the JUCO rankings have bombed badly. Do you remember that Mario Little and Tyrone Appleton were ranked #1 and #3 in the JUCO rankings before attending Kansas in 2009? They did nothing. The #2 JUCO recruit in 2007 Nemanja Calasan had a dreadful 88.1 ORtg for Purdue. The #2 JUCO recruit in 2011 Kansas St.’s Freddy Asprilla was little better at 91.2.

Wichita St.’s Cleanthony Early (#2 in 2013), Missouri’s Ricardo Ratliffe (#1 in 2011), and Baylor’s Pierre Jackson (#1 in 2012) were all brilliant college players. So there are clearly some success stories. But do not let the positive outcomes for those players cause you to be overly optimistic about Louisville’s Chris Jones. Because for every Pierre Jackson, there is 2012 #2 JUCO Nurideen Lindsey, who posted an 83.8 ORtg before transferring out of St. John’s. I should also add that PG is notoriously the hardest position to play well immediately.

Probably the best thing Louisville’s Chris Jones has going for him is that Rick Pitino believes in him. If Pitino thinks he can compete and possibly start immediately, expectations should be pretty high. At this point, I see Jones as having a slightly higher expected value than Louisville’s other incoming PG, Terry Rozier. Rozier was the #75 RSCI recruit out of high school before spending a year at prep school. But I would expect them both to play. My model has Jones playing 55% of the minutes and Rozier playing 45% of the minutes.

Without Russ Smith, my predictions model currently has Louisville 15^th nationally. With Russ Smith, my model would now have Louisville 3^rd, behind only Kentucky (with the greatest recruiting class of all time) and Michigan St. (assuming Adreian Payne and Gary Harris return.) 15^th may seem unreasonably low, but remember that Russ Smith was Ken Pomeroy’s player of the year as the most important tempo free player, so obviously his loss is going to hurt in any model that relies on tempo free stats. Personally, I think 15^th may be a little low. But it all comes down to what you are trying to measure. My model has Iowa slightly ahead of Louisville right now. Iowa almost certainly has less of a chance of being an elite team or national title contender than Louisville. But Iowa had the 23^rd best margin-of-victory numbers last year, returns basically its entire rotation, and has little chance of a disastrous season. I think most people tend to make their predictions at least partly based on upside, and I won’t argue with Louisville in the 8-12 range in most people’s rankings.

Overall, the top JUCO recruits can be dominant players. But much like freshmen recruits outside the Top 20, there are no guarantees.

On Sunday, in his first game without Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard had 26 points, 17 rebounds and 3 blocks on 9-15 shooting. With the Los Angeles Lakers needing a win over the Spurs to stay alive in the playoff race, Howard outdueled Tim Duncan in the type of one-on-one post battle rarely seen in the modern NBA. He didn’t have quite the lift or mobility of his days with the Orlando Magic, but it was closer to what most expected when he came to Los Angeles. Given the inconsistent way Howard and the Lakers have played, it’s hard to know what to expect from them on Wednesday, when they could be in another win or go home scenario. Nevertheless, no matter what happens, there’s room for optimism for a team with a 6’11+ center capable of a 26/17 game.

Unless something dramatic happens in the final week of the regular season, the Oklahoma City Thunder will be the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference. If the Lakers make the playoffs, it’s hard to see them making much noise against Oklahoma City, even if they had Bryant. Ignore the vast differences in record and point differential and the matchups are still terrible. Oklahoma City has two 6’10+ post players capable of banging with Howard and Pau Gasol and a 6’7+ perimeter stopper (Thabo Sefolosha) who would have made Kobe work for his points. On the other side of the ball, the Lakers don’t have the perimeter speed to bother Kevin Durant or Russell Westbrook. Sending Steve Blake or a hobbled Steve Nash out to face Westbrook is like feeding a Christian to the lions.

Looking back now, the preseason expectations for the Lakers seem a bit foolish. They were an extremely top-heavy team with little depth and no continuity. Howard, coming off major back surgery, was the only one of their starting five in his twenties. With so much age on the floor, the Lakers needed a still hobbled Howard to be Superman, at least on the defensive end. Maybe things would have been different if everyone had been healthy, but it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise that Kobe (34), Nash (38), Gasol (32) and Metta World Peace (33) all missed significant time, especially considering how many minutes they had to play. It’s no coincidence the Knicks, the oldest team in the NBA, were also rocked with injuries.

But while the injuries to their top players may have been unavoidable, their lack of depth wasn’t. The Lakers team speed on the perimeter has been a glaring issue for three years, since Jason Terry and J.J. Barea steamrolled them out of the playoffs in 2011. Strangely enough, a franchise that had no problem racking up a $100 million payroll began pinching pennies when it came to upgrading the back end of their rotation. Chris Duhon and Steve Blake were solid pros in their day, but there’s no excuse for carrying two guards in their 30’s with PER’s under 12. Mitch Kupchak could have found better role-playing perimeter players in Europe, the D-League or under a couch cushion.

Regardless of what happens to their star players this offseason, upgrading their bench should be a priority. With so many offensive weapons already in place and a stable of competent big men, all the Lakers need are a “3-and-D” players at PG, SG and SF. Even without a first-round pick, they shouldn’t be too hard to find. After all, L.A. could have had Patrick Beverley, Alan Anderson and Chris Copeland for nothing at various points in the last two years. The talent pool for professional basketball players worldwide is at an all-time high; there are a number of players in Europe who could help the Lakers right now. Ignoring them in favor of aging veterans with NBA experience is akin to a starving man not picking up a $100 bill lying on the ground.

Of course, the first priority will be re-signing Howard to a max contract. While several other teams could make a run for him, it’s hard to imagine him leaving the Lakers. Star players rarely leave the biggest stage in their sport, whether it’s the Lakers, the New York Yankees or the Dallas Cowboys. If Howard went to Dallas or Atlanta, he’d be taking less money to play for a worse team in a smaller market. His reputation has taken a tremendous hit in the last two seasons, but he’s already reached rock bottom in L.A. If he wins a championship all will be forgiven and there’s no better place to do it than with the Lakers.

Re-signing Howard would push their payroll north of $90 million, which is why talk of amnestying Kobe Bryant is a red herring. Even without his $30 million salary on the books, the Lakers would still be over the salary cap, so it wouldn’t give them much more flexibility. From a strictly financial perspective, it’s hard to imagine a 35-year old shooting guard coming off an Achilles injury being worth the price the Lakers will pay for him, even if he does come back earlier than expected. It will be up to Jim and Jeanie Buss to determine whether the $80 million they could save in luxury tax penalties will be worth the massive PR hit.

Either way, the Lakers can’t afford to make too many changes in 2013, not with the summer of 2014 right around the corner. Right now, Steve Nash is the only player on the books and he could easily retire after his age-39 season. If they re-sign Howard and don’t take on any long-term salary, L.A. could make a hard push for some combination of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Carmelo Anthony or Dirk Nowitzki. Kevin Love, who played college basketball at UCLA and may be looking for a new home, could be available as well. The rules are different for a team in Los Angeles, New York or Miami; those are the three markets where clearing out cap space is actually a viable long-term strategy.

The Lakers will have to make some hard decisions on Kobe, Pau and Earl Clark, but they won’t make or break the franchise. No matter who is around him, if Howard can be as dominant as he was in Orlando, L.A. could be a title contender next season. Even if he never fully recovers, which is always a possibility for a guy with 10 NBA seasons under his belt, a 28-year-old center who can average 20/10 and contribute on both sides of the ball is an excellent start to a rebuilding effort. In an increasingly perimeter-oriented league bereft of great centers, Howard is the one player who can stand in LeBron’s way. That’s why, after all the dust clears from an incredibly tumultuous season in L.A., Howard is still the great “known unknown” for both the Lakers and the NBA.