Blake Griffin and his Los Angeles Clippers are gone till November
Blake Griffin, after receiving a bone marrow treatment on the right quadriceps muscle that first paused and then ended his 2015-16 season, will not participate in the Team USA training camp this summer. As such, he will not be part of the Olympic run in Rio this year. Griffin had to leave the 2012 Men’s Basketball team that won the gold medal in London after tearing his meniscus, and he may have lost his best shot at making the squad as the 2020 outfit will take hold five months after his 31st birthday.
[Follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]
Such awful timing has become commonplace for the Clippers, who can’t seem to buy a thrill in the wake of new owner Steve Ballmer’s $2 billion purchase of the team in 2014. It would be easy to draw unending parallels with the franchise’s ownership issues dating back to its time in Buffalo and past the embarrassing (seriously, why did David Stern tolerate this man in his league?) and eventually destructive Donald Sterling Era, because it has been an unending stripe. The Clippers aren’t cursed, because curses don’t exist, but they sure have had a particularly awful run of things.
Griffin re-injured the quad during his team’s first round series loss to Portland, in the same contest that saw all-world point guard Chris Paul break his hand after finding it tangled in the jersey of Portland guard Gerald Henderson. Griffin also broke his right hand during the regular season after finding it caught in a late night scuffle with a team employee. The mix of Griffin’s quad and hand injuries cost him 47 regular season games, and he was hardly the same player in his truncated playoff run – 15 points on 37.7 percent shooting, 8.8 rebounds, four assists.
Chris Paul’s injury cost him yet another year, another eight months of mileage. Another summer tasked with the knowledge that, come fall, the team will need him to play near-perfect ball for around 100 games from fall until summer in order to claim the first championship ring of his career. Or even, as has been brought up incessantly, the first Western Conference finals trip of his career.
Paul would be 32 by next year’s Finals, and backcourt mate J.J. Redick would be approaching his 33rd birthday. Griffin and center DeAndre Jordan would be presumably hitting their late-20s primes, which is nice, but if the whole gang is kept together it will once again be relying on an aging point guard that has been hampered by injury in each of his playoff runs as a Clipper.
Aging but spectacular, it should be noted, and this latest setback was hardly Paul’s fault. After a second straight overwhelmingly healthy regular season, this spring’s broken hand was as fluke-y as these things come. Still, the Clippers took in the worst of both worlds – stringing CP3s tread out for a regular season mostly spent without Blake Griffin, adding more miles to that odometer, with no postseason payoff.
Breaking up would be hard to do. Because the Clippers are so top-heavy, dealing someone like Paul or Griffin would need to result in a return of ready to rock good-to-great players, needed to shore up a lacking and thin rotation. Even if that proposed deal were out there, the team would then be without a tipping-point star to help lead things (not just CP3: Griffin can be that guy). What they need is that cadre of good-to-great stars to work alongside what they already have, and the team’s front office has failed in this regard thus far.
Clipper president Doc Rivers, infamously, is Clipper coach Doc Rivers’ worst enemy. It’s a tired but accurate cliché because of the truth behind it, and though Rivers once again produced a Sixth Man of the Year in Jamal Crawford, a 35-year old that shoots 40 percent from the field, below average from long range while doing little else beyond averaging 14.5 points per game does not a bench make.
Crawford is a free agent this summer, and while he clearly likes the environment after a career spent with five other teams before landing in Los Angeles, bidders will encircle him during the offseason in the hopes that his spark off the bench will put their team over the top. Forward Jeff Green, who was a poorer rebounder than Chris Paul during the postseason, will also become a free agent. As a former Celtic that played under Rivers, he might be a candidate to return.
Should the Clippers decline on keeping Crawford, Green, and Luc Mbah a Moute (who started 61 games this season), the squad would not have much free agent cash to work with even in the face of a rising salary cap. With Paul, Redick, Jordan and Griffin set to make over $71.5 million in 2016-17, next season’s paycheck has just about been spent.
Swingman Paul Pierce understandably spoke of retirement in the wake of missing 10 of 12 shots in the postseason, but the future Hall of Famer (who will be 39 in October) would be walking away from over $3.5 million should he decide to hang it up. Worse, though they’re hardly game-changers at this level, Cole Aldrich and Wesley Johnson might decline their modest player options (for over $1.2 million) and decide to have a go at what will be an overwhelmingly lucrative seller’s market for players this summer.
In a potential best-case, lay-waste scenario that sees Crawford, Green, Mbah a Moute, Pierce, Aldrich and Johnson all elsewhere in 2016-17, the rollover into a new rotation would be quite the task for even the best of front offices. Free agent pickings are slim this summer, cap space is in short supply for the league’s current second-highest payroll, and again it’s important to remember that outside of Green’s $9.2 million last season, none of these guys really broke the bank last year.
And the draft, as Doc Rivers groused about last week, is often little help at pick No. 25. Doc would probably prefer that roster spot be taken up by Leon Powe anyway.
In the end, the trick is the same as it was last year – all hands on deck in April, May and hopefully June. Yes, it was turnovers and shockingly poor play that doomed the Clippers down the stretch of winnable playoff games in 2014 and 2015, but while he won’t use it as an excuse Chris Paul wasn’t at full strength during those losses. This is a core that can still pull something off, and Doc Rivers can coach.
As it is in every Clipper summer under Doc Rivers, though, they’ll need to somehow find a way to fill out a rotation that doesn’t rely on players on the wrong side of 35, Luc Mbah a Moute as a 61-game starter, and a whole litany of Players Whose Names You’ve Heard Of That Still Aren’t All That Great.
Can Clipper fans trust Rivers in an offseason where they’ll be one of the few salary cap-limited teams, in a free agent setting that is going to be run by the players?
– – – – – – –
Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
