Welcome to the Hardcore Husky Forums. Folks who are well-known in Cyberland and not that dumb.
"The Clippers may join the sad ranks of the league’s great “what if?” teams after blitzing to within one quarter of the conference finals."
A team that never even reached the conference finals is a great "what if."
1 ·
Comments
They are a "what if" in the sense that they were incredibly close but never could find the one piece needed to get them over the hump.
A reasonable question to ask would be how much better off could/would they be if Paul was actually moved to the Lakers in the original deal?
They were never incredibly close. The Warriors would have beaten them if they got by the Rockets. For as much heat as Chris Paul gets (some is deserved), the Clippers would probably be a disaster if not for him. If they didn't get him they would have re-signed Eric Gordon to a max deal and had a big three with him instead of Chris Paul.
Agreed that the Clippers weren't going to get by the Warriors. I'd expect that the Warriors would have beat them in 5 or 6 games.
In some respects, I really like what the Clippers have done in the offseason in getting Born Ready and Pierce in the fold. What they should do is embrace the small ball movement, put Blake at the 5, and try to be the best offensive team in the league. Problem is that they've got to find a way to get some help for Blake in the front court though and how they do it is still up in the air. It will be vital for them to somehow turn Jamal Crawford into something that works.
Every player on GS was better in 2015, they were deeper, and Steve Kerr was a huge upgrade over Mark Jackson.
The Clippers were giving up 110+ the last three games against the Rockets. The Warriors would have shredded them.
Who was it that used to argue that Doc was really good, Cockus? Tequilla? RoadDawg?
Fuck, all you fuckers are starting to run together.
As a GM, the most important thing you can do for your team if it is a title contender is to ensure that it has more than enough pieces to cover any possible contingency in the course of winning a title.
The biggest problem the Clippers have had since getting Doc has been that their depth has let them down.
I do think that one of the things that really caught up to them in the Houston series was the number of minutes the starters had to play not only in the Spurs series but then in the Rockets series. When you have a 20 point 4th quarter lead, you need to be able to rely on your bench to play 4-5 minutes of relatively even basketball to not blow the lead and allow your starters to rest and be fresh. They were outscored by 25 points in the 4th. Griffin, Jordan, and Paul played 41-42 minutes during the game. Outside of Crawford's 24 minutes (and btw he was a -27 for the game), the rest of the bench COMBINED for 25 minutes. That's just flat out not enough from the bench.
If the draw of Doc isn't enough to attract elite talent, and it doesn't appear to be so, his game management is an absolute killer.
I would take about 20 guys before him.
Just throwing that out