With almost half of the season in the books, the Clippers hold a respectable enough record of 24-12, good for sixth in the West. They still have two of the top 10 players in the league, CP3 and Blake Griffin, playing at high levels; their freakishly athletic centre, DeAndre Jordan, has continued to mature on both ends of the floor (despite remaining a truly horrendous free-throw shooter); they’ve got a new owner that isn’t afraid to spend (or dance like a maniac) and sure-to-be Hall of Fame coach Doc Rivers not only working the sidelines, but also calling the shots as President of Basketball Operations.
This should be a joyous and prosperous time for L.A.’s other team. So, why do the 2014-2015 Clippers have such a funk around them?
The team that spent the first couple years of “Lob City” chomping at the bit to perform one ridiculous highlight after another and feeding off the energy produced by each and every Ralph Lawler “Oh me, oh my!” has been replaced by a squad that goes about it’s business more solemnly.
Sure, the pretty touch-pass alley-oops from Blake to DeAndre still happen, Chris Paul still uses changes of pace and his enormous posterior to create space in the lane, and Jamal Crawford still shakes and bakes with the best of them, but the exuberance isn’t as palpable this season—the Clippers just seem to be having less fun.
It’s no wonder, then, that they’ve been eclipsed by the Warriors as the default Western Conference “stay up way too late to watch them if you live in the east, but have no regrets about it the next morning” team. When the Warriors string a few sweet highlight plays together, you can see how hyped they get—hell, you can feel it. That kind of energy is infectious; it builds on-court chemistry. The Clippers have had it in seasons past, but not this year.
Is it possible that the funk (sorry, there’s really no other word for it) around the Clippers is due to the fact that Doc Rivers the Executive isn’t as inspired as Doc Rivers the Coach—that, in fact, the front office version has actually been a bit of a dud?
One of the biggest knocks on Executive Doc is that most of the personnel moves he’s made have brought in players that were in their prime and played for—or went up against—him in some meaningful way during his heyday coaching the Boston Celtics. Just look at four of the Clippers’ key bench cogs: J. J. Redick beat Doc’s Celtics in the 2008-2009 Eastern Conference Semi-Finals as a member of the Orlando Magic and lost to them in the 2009-2010 Conference Finals. Hedo Turkoglu was also a member of that ‘08-09 Magic team. Glen “Big Baby” Davis played for Doc during the Celtics’ 2007-2008 Championship season. Jordan Farmar was a member of the Los Angeles Lakers team that beat Doc’s Celtics in the 2009-2010 NBA Finals.
It’s common for teams to be tempted to sign guys who play well against them, but in Doc’s case, when the performances happened between six and eight years ago and most of the guys are now on the wrong side of 30, these moves are pretty hard to justify.
Then there’s the fact that Doc’s first big deal on the job sent Eric Bledsoe to Phoenix for Redick and Jared Dudley. Redick has played some of his best basketball with the Clippers. He’s a lights-out shooter with some veteran savvy, but that’s about it. Dudley, for his part, lasted just one out-of-shape season in L.A. before he was shipped off to Milwaukee last offseason. That’s a pretty weak haul for one of the most athletic point guards in the league.
Hindsight is often cruel when shaking out the winners and losers of a trade, but Doc didn’t even feel compelled to try to coach Bledsoe before trading him. There were rumblings that Bledsoe wanted to be a near-max player, running his own team, as opposed to being an overqualified backup for CP3, but the fact that the ultimate players’ coach—someone who preaches Ubuntu—wouldn’t even want to work with a guy as talented as Bledsoe before dealing him is… puzzling.
It took a 2015 first-round draft pick for the Clippers to land Doc from the Celtics, and they’ve dealt every second-round pick they have until 2019, save for a 2016 second-rounder they received from the Nets. They’re pretty much tapped out of assets they could move to upgrade the team and, as currently constructed, they may have trouble getting out of the first round of the playoffs, let alone reaching to the franchise’s first Conference Finals.
There’s still hope for Clippers fans, though. This past Monday marked the first day teams could start signing players to 10-day contracts, and the Clippers quickly traded Jared Cunningham to the Sixers to free up a roster spot. L.A. needs to shore up their perimeter defense and give their bench some life. One 10-day player isn’t going to fix all that, but opening the roster spot at least signals that they know there’s work to be done. The Clippers’ window appears to be closing (if it was ever fully open to begin with) and Doc’s still got a lot to prove.