Clippers at Crossroads (Part 3)
With another postseason failure in the rear-view mirror, what’s in store for this once-dynamic core?
For Part 1, click here and for Part 2, here.
I love Mission Impossible series. It’s one of the more underrated movie series that Hollywood has pumped out. It’s not as iconic or groundbreaking as Terminator, Predator, Star Wars, James Bond, Alien or Rocky but unlike those movies, it has consistently pumped out sequels that ranged from “A fine action flick” to John Wick. That’s the best action movie of the year”. MI-2 was even the highest grossing movie of the year 2000, beating out Russell Crowe’s Gladiator and Tom Hanks’ Cast Away. In recent years, even though the quality of the films have improved, the commercially best movie was MI-4 which finished fifth in the year-end box office results (thanks in no small part to that gripping Burj Khalifa scene).
Now, if you want to rake in money, it’s all about superheroes and sequels/prequels/spinoffs. Don’t get me wrong, Tom Cruise can still get butts in the seats. Replace him with let’s say, Jason Statham, a serviceable action hero, and I’ll be surprised if it manages to cross even the $200 million mark. But if the executives at Warner Brothers called up the executives at the Paramount Pictures to switch the MI series with the DC universe, the deal will be done even before Cruise could say “Red light. Green light.”
(And if you are one of the two people who think that Paramount will reject the deal given the spotty history of the DCEU, you are crazy! In 2016, a movie in which two buff dudes were wearing capes fought for seven minutes with the conflict ending because their mothers had the same name, ended up earning $800+ million dollars. That’s preposterous!)
It seems the changing landscape of the cinema has left the Mission Impossible series in the rear view mirror. Much like, how the Clippers have been left behind by the always evolving NBA. Like MI-2, they had a two-year window (in 2014 and 2015), before Warriors turned into Basketball Gods and Spurs remained Spurs, to win it all. But now? Well, they are still good. A core of CP3, Blake and Jordan will guarantee you 50 wins but unless they add another All-Star (which given their horrendous cap situation seems impossible), but gone are the days of them being put in the contender’s section. Similarly, MI is not topping the year-end box-office numbers if Cruise is the sole attraction. Add Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and now we are talking.
With an early playoff exit (again), the Clippers are facing a summer full of uncertainties (again), only this time they don’t control their own fate. Everybody has been yelling “blow it up”, “blow it up” after every playoff exit for the last three years, only this time instead of “blowing it up”, they will be “blown up”. Eight of the fifteen players that were under contract last season will potentially be free agents, none bigger than Chris Paul and Blake Griffin (you can throw J J Reddick into this mix too, but we’ll get to him later).
Paul will receive the 5-year $200 million contract thanks to the new rule which he not-so-subtly put in the new CBA by being the president of the Players’ Union. If the Banana Boat band members were not in their 30s, the probability of that rule being in the new CBA decreases by at least 62%. But now the rule exists and the Clippers will be stuck with a point guard who might be in decline earning nearly $46 million when he’s 36 years old. The best thing that the Clippers can do is to avoid the whole Melo-Knicks drama by handing him a no-trade clause. I know most of you must have scoffed at the idea of Clippers not learning from the Knicks, but don’t you forget, this is the Clippers we are talking about. Our history is filled with draft busts, atrocious contracts, injuries and blown ACLs.
And talking about injuries, Clippers will probably end up giving Blake a 5-year $175 million. Look, he’s not going to be the historic power-forward that we all deemed him to be (which I covered in part 1), but when healthy, he’s still one of the 20 best players in the league. And that’s a big “but”.
Broken toe
Right knee surgery
Sore right knee
Sore left quadriceps
Broken hand
Torn left quad
Staph infection
Back spasms
That’s a long of list of lower body injuries for an NBA player, let alone a power forward whose game revolves around athleticism. And this list doesn’t include the broken kneecap he suffered even before he stepped on the NBA hardwood. Gulp!
Sign both of them and with DeAndre on the books for at least another year, the cap flexibility will go to hell, and this is even if Reddick walks away.
Reddick will look for one last paycheck before father time takes him for good and they should let him go. My only regret with his tenure is that we didn’t trade him before the trade deadline last year. In his four years with the Clippers he averaged 15+ PPG while never shooting below 45% from the field in the regular season. These were his averages in playoffs:
2014 (13 games): 13 PPG, 46 FG%, 40 3P%
2015 (14 games): 15 PPG, 43 FG%, 40 3P%
2016 (6 games): 14 PPG, 43 FG%, 35 3P%
2017 (7 games): 9 PPG, 38 FG%, 34 3P%
His field goal percentage has dropped every year in the playoffs, and at age 32 he is a liability on defense. Opposing players hunt him out like a cheetah going after a deer which has separated from a pack. The Clips should’ve baited teams desperate to make the playoffs to take a swing at him and in doing so trying to land a first round pick. But when the person in charge of making these decisions is splitting time between front office, sidelines and Bel-Air County Golf Club, it’s really hard to pull off these tricky moves.
Also, not helping the cause is Doc signing players who were way, way, way past their primes just because they performed well against in that one series ten years ago. Hedo Turkoglu, 400-pound Glen Davis, Paul Pierce who actually needed a wheelchair, 39 years old Prigioni, Wesley Johnson (who is still on contract for at least another year), Lester Hudson (who?!) and surgically repaired Danny Granger, all played important playoff minutes over the last four years for a team which was supposed to contend for the title. Thank you Doc Rivers.
Steve Ballmer, whom I love, has said that he blew a couple of decisions in his first two years of the league. I’m pretty sure that 5 years down the line, when we will laugh at the fact that people thought it was okay for a coach to handle the front-office too, Ballmer will admit that this was one of them. Doc sacrificed future picks for short term fixes and rarely trusted young players even in a regular season game (except if you are his son because then you are playing crunch time in Game 7 of the NBA Finals).
A change in the coaching might give them some much-needed spark, but that won’t mask some of the structural flaws in the construction of the roster.
Let both CP3 and Blake go, and the team’s best asset will be DeAndre and Austin Rivers. Look, I like Austin and he has been mocked and ridiculed by the internet unfairly, but if he is your second best asset then you are making the Brooklyn Nets blush.
Given, all the malice that has grown over this roster, some fans might be calling out for a reboot. After all, we still haven’t crossed the second round of playoffs with each outing ending in a more crushing way than the previous one. But to all those fans, my compatriots, think about it. What’s the alternative? Tanking? Aren’t 40 long years of those enough? Say, we let both the All-Stars go and trade Austin and DeAndre for a couple of first rounders. Then what?
They say you don’t appreciate the value of something until you’ve lost it. Just ask the Kings and Wolves fans. They are enduring an 11 and 13 years playoff drought respectively. Orlando Magic has still not recovered from the Dwight trade, Lakers from the eventual decline of Kobe, Suns from the Steve Nash era and Knicks from the James Dolan era. Even the Pelicans have made it to the playoffs only once ever since the Clippers fleeced them in the Chris Paul trade and they have one of the ten best players in the league on their team. The Sixers fans have been chanting “Trust the Process” mantra for the past four years, and the end is nowhere near to be seen.
Being mediocre is considered a sin in the NBA folklore. You are stuck in a no man’s land (a la Atlanta Hawks) with no clear future path but the Clips aren’t mediocre. They have won more than 60% of their games for the last six seasons and maybe there’s some unquantifiable value to be always on the brink of something special. Luck plays a huge part in a team’s quest for the gold.
If Curry’s ankles weren’t made up of wet paper tissues during his initial years in the NBA, he wouldn’t have received the 4-year $44 million contract. It was because of that contract the Warriors were able to comfortably insert Iguodala in the mix in 2013 and Durant last year. The OKC team made it to the Finals only once despite possessing two of the most dynamic scorers this league has ever seen at their respective position (and three future MVP candidates). Injury bug caught them at the wrong time, and now KD is in the Bay Area.
The Clippers have never been on the receiving end of some good fortune. If they did catch a break, the Basketball Gods found a new and ingenious way to crush the team. Last year Curry slipped on a sweat puddle, sprained his knee in the first round series against the Rockets and with the Clippers up 2–1 against the Trailblazers, everybody thought that this was the opening the Clippers always needed. In less than 24 hours, Clippers clipped and lost both CP3 and Blake to injuries. The Clippers seem to be Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness with the caveat that they never achieve happiness.
As torturous as it may sound, the best route for the Clippers is to re-sign both the stars and not hand either of them a no-trade clause. If the ship does start sinking because Chris finally decapitates Blake out of frustration, you can always trade them. It is the most logical move. They are assets (regardless of their values) and you can’t just let go of them.
It took us 47 years, three cities, countless talented players lost to injuries, having the worst owner in sports history and 5 number one pick in NBA drafts to land a can’t miss prospect in Blake Griffin. And only because stars just for once aligned for us that we landed Chris Paul, a result of David Stern kicking the Lakers in the nuts and vetoing their trade for Paul. We don’t know when we will again have this opportunity to watch two of the best and most cerebral players in the league on our team. With the league getting more and more talented every passing second, it might be an even harder crawl back to legitimacy.
Or maybe I’ve got it wrong all along. Maybe some of us are used to the atrocious basketball and incompetently run franchise. At least back in those days we never got our hopes high only to see them get crushed like in one of those Final Destination movies. We knew we were the bottom feeders and were comfortable with the melancholy that came with it.
We are the Clippers, and maybe we are cursed.
