The Lakers need more from Gabe Vincent, but can he deliver?

After a summer of getting healthy to come back from a lost season last year, Gabe Vincent — and the Lakers — had high hopes. Instead, he’s again struggling badly on a team starved for bench production.

In Wednesday’s short-handed loss to the Grizzlies that sealed a 1-4 record on the Lakers’ road trip, Gabe Vincent scored the most points in a game he had all season...with six.

Vincent’s eight shots were the most he has taken all season and tied for second-most in his 19 regular season games as a Laker. He connected on two of them, going 1-6 on 3-pointers and 1-2 on twos and free throws to reach his tally.

Though it would be great to be able to call this an outlier game for Gabe, we cannot. This season, Vincent is connecting on 33% of his shot attempts overall, including 18.2% of his 3-pointers en route to 3.1 points a game. He’s averaging a paltry 4.4 shot attempts per game, has been to the foul line for just those two attempts that he took vs. Memphis and has more turnovers (six) than assists (five).

All of this amounts to a 12% usage rate for Vincent through the Lakers' first eight games. In the first four seasons of Vincent’s career with the Heat, he never posted a usage rate below 17.5% in the regular season, which came in his final year with the team. In that same year, though, Vincent posted a usage rate of 19.5 in Miami’s postseason run to the Finals where he started all 22 games and played 30.5 minutes per night while taking 11.2 shots per game.

Needless to say, then, Vincent’s decline in usage and role has been massive since coming to Los Angeles. Not just this season, but last year too where his usage rate was even lower (10.9), though, to be fair, that came when he was both limited by injuries and then by the timing of his late-season return.

Context aside, though, this is the second straight season under two different coaches in which Vincent has been a super low-usage guard whose main contributions offensively have been as a screener and someone who generally understands spacing principles and where to stand and cut, not actually be involved in the middle of a play or as a finisher.

And, with that shift in his role and dip in how involved he is, his struggles have only seemed to increase.

Back in 2009, former Sports Illustrated writer Chris Ballard wrote a wonderful book called The Art of A Beautiful Game. Ballard took various topics from the game during that time — Kobe’s killer instinct, Dwight Howard’s rebounding, Shane Battier’s one-on-one defense, Steve Nash’s point guard play, and many others — and broke them down with wonderful discussions and anecdotes to give readers insight and context that would help them better understand what they were watching and the game they loved.

One of the other topics Ballard covered was on the “Pure Shooter.” The subject of this section was then Suns GM and now current Warriors head coach Steve Kerr. Kerr had retired just a handful of years earlier, but Ballard pulled him out of retirement for a friendly game of HORSE to get to the root of what it meant to be one of the world’s best shooters and how that skill and ability to hit a jumper, even into retirement, persisted.

I bring this up not to talk about shooting, necessarily, but to relay an anecdote Kerr shared during his discussion with Ballard, which Ballard then detailed in the book:

Midway through his career, (Kerr) approached Chip Engelland, an old friend who now works as the Spurs shooting coach, with a problem. Increasing, Kerr found himself in difficult shooting situations. He’d play 20 minutes one night, then six the next, depending on matchups. Some nights he’d get up four shots, other nights it would be two. Sometimes he’d sit two games, then be expected to come in cold — as he later did in that Mavs series — and hit a big shot. How could one prepare for such erratic opportunities?

Engelland had a solution. He told Kerr to meet him on the bench at the practice gym. Once there, the two men sat and talked for five minutes. Then, suddenly, Engelland leaped up, ball in hand.

“Start running the wing,” he ordered Kerr. “Now!”

Startled, Kerr jumped up and followed. Engelland dribbled madly, leading a fast break. When he got to the top of the key, he fed Kerr on the wing for a three-pointer. Then the two promptly returned to the bench, where they sat and talked for five more minutes. Then they did it again, and again. “In 30 minutes, I’d only shoot six shots,” Kerr says. “Psychologically, it was awesome, because then, the next game I was like ‘Hey, I just did this.’” (“I remember we did it three days in a row,” says Engelland. “The first day he hit 3 of 9, the second day it was 5 of 9 and by the third day it was 7 of 9. He really got it quick.”)

This story of Kerr’s always fascinated me. Basketball is a game of habits, but it’s also a game of feel and of comfortability. The players who can expand their comfort level to more and more scenarios and aspects of the game would find themselves able to perform well more consistently and across more, and varying, game environments.

Kerr became a better and more consistent bench player — particularly as a shooter — by training himself in the art of literally sitting on a bench one moment and then jumping full speed into the act of playing basketball and shooting the ball. It seems so simple and practical, but when I read this anecdote, it blew me away in its creativity. And, clearly, it worked.

Gabe Vincent is no Steve Kerr. Vincent has never shot higher than 36.8% from behind the arc and is more shot-maker than pure shooter. So, Kerr’s higher floor in this regard is likely much more translatable to being able to come in cold or without having much in the way of feel of the game and still be able to hit shots at a consistently high level.

That said, I must say, when I compare Gabe’s time in Miami as a medium — and sometimes high — usage on-ball player whose best stretch came when he stepped into a starting role with a bunch of offensive freedom, and then compare that to the struggles he’s having now is a significantly scaled-down role where he is often off the ball and will sometimes go large stretches without a quality touch or a shot opportunity, I can see why he might be struggling.

It is fairly clear that Vincent has no rhythm. What is also clear is that as he continues to miss shots and generally play poorly offensively, his confidence suffers and any sense of a greater willingness to try to reverse those struggles by being more aggressive feels nonexistent.

The result is a downward spiral in which a player the Lakers signed last summer to be a critical bench player who can score the ball while also being an on- and off-ball worker is suddenly someone who is a zero threat to score double figures.

And it goes without saying, but the Lakers need more from him than this.

Against the Pistons, Vincent played 18 minutes and did not take a single shot. JJ Redick later took some of the blame for this by saying it’s “not on him” with the implication being that the coaches must help Gabe more on this front, and there is some truth there.

But, Gabe also needs to be better than he has been, finding ways to get more involved, get to spots on the floor where he positions himself to score, and, most importantly, make more of the shots he is actually getting within the flow of the game.

It should be noted that the coaches can help Gabe get back on track. Running more actions through him and, in some ways, forcing more usage through him — and the guards in general, which might also help D’Angelo Russell — could help spur on some more production.

As a team that’s playing through LeBron James and Anthony Davis for most possessions, creating more off-ball actions during their post-ups and/or shifting to a few more pick and rolls to help get the defense into rotation more, and thus help to facilitate more spot up chances could also lead to more production.

Furthering this idea, impressing on the team to go deeper through their progressions within possessions to generate more drive and kick chances or help create more ball movement would also benefit Gabe and others.

This might not only allow more players to touch the ball and be more involved organically but help generate cleaner looks overall, which could, and should, lead to more success.

That said, it is still on the player to produce. And, clearly, things are simply not sustainable as they are now. Particularly on offense and for a bench rotation that is the lowest scoring group of reserves in the league.

So, for Gabe, he needs to find his way, and soon. Because if he doesn’t, the Lakers may be looking at even more drastic changes to get the production they so desperately need.

You can follow Darius on Twitter at @forumbluegold.