Could Dennis Schroder be a Lakers sleeper agent?

The Warriors’ big midseason acquisition has been so bad since joining the team it feels like it’s on purpose.

The Golden State Warriors eked out a road win over the Detroit Pistons Thursday night in a game where they got 13 points on 5-for-11 shooting from guard Dennis Schroder. Somehow, that was one of his best offensive performances as a Warrior. Is the veteran guard still adjusting to playing alongside Steph Curry, or is there something more insidious in play?

Dennis Schroder is a two-time member of the Los Angeles Lakers, originally joining the club in the wake of their 2020 title via a trade with the Oklahoma City Thunder. After Schroder famously turned down a four-year $84M contract with the team that season, a set of circumstances that led to the Lakers trading for Russell Westbrook, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope winning a title with the Denver Nuggets, and “Westbrick” being recognized as a slur.

After Schroder endured an injury-plagued 2021-22 season with the Boston Celtics and Houston Rockets, he re-signed with the Lakers for 2022-23, where he helped them reach the conference finals and defeat the Warriors in the second round. That summer, he signed a big deal with Toronto Raptors and won the FIBA World Cup with Germany.

Now he’s on the Warriors, and looks like a totally different player than he was with the Lakers and the Brooklyn Nets.

A sleeper agent is a spy that lives in a foreign territory or organization for an extended amount of time, waiting to be activated by the power that he’s truly loyal to. Perhaps Schroder is simply loyal to the Lakers at heart, and the trade to their rivals is what has activated Schroder’s programming.

Schroder has shot poorly for the Warriors. His shooting splits are 32.5% FG, 25.9% 3PT, 76.9% FT, all well below his career numbers and what he was doing in Brooklyn. He was averaging 19.8 points with the Nets and 12.4 with the Warriors, with declines in rebounds, assists, and steals. But he also appears to have a dramatically different shot selection.

With the Nets this season, Schroder was taking 19.7% of his shots within three feet of the basket. That’s pretty consistent with his last few seasons, where he’s taken between 16% and 20% of his shots in that area. With the Warriors? Only 1.6% of his shots are near the rim.

Instead, Schroder has more than tripled the amount of long twos he’s taking (shots between 16 feet of the basket and the three-point line). Efficiency-wise, that’s the worst shot in basketball, and Schroder is shooting them at a 28.6% clip.

That’s why Schroder’s drive to the hoop late last night in Detroit garnered an all-caps response from the Warriors’ social media team, simply because it’s so rare to see this season.

Maybe he’s just adjusting. But hypothetically, if you were trying to sabotage the Warriors as a player, the most subtle way to do so would be intentionally taking bad shots, refusing to drive, not going for steals or crashing the boards. In 12 games, the Warriors are -103 in Schroder’s minutes, which include a fair amount of time playing alongside Curry.

We’ll never really know whether Schroder is slumping or reacting to deep pro-Lakers, anti-Warriors brainwashing. But if he signs with the Lakers again next summer, it means that Schroder’s handlers have called him back home.