I’ll admit, I was skeptical about Tyrin Lawrence going into the 2022-23 season.
As a freshman, Lawrence was lost for the season after seven games with a torn ACL. Last season, he averaged 3.8 ppg with an 88.8 Offensive Rating with a brutal 71.3 Offensive Rating in SEC games. That’s in “usually gets run off the team” territory. There’s precedent for a player improving on that — Luke Kornet, for instance, posted an 89.3 Offensive Rating as a freshman and was an All-SEC player as a senior, but Luke Kornet is 7’1”.
So I’ll be honest and admit that I wasn’t expecting much here, and really, Lawrence wasn’t very good for the first two months of the season: through January 10, he was averaging under 10 ppg and his Offensive Rating was under 100 (so below-average efficiency) in 9 of 16 games.