Doc Rivers’ three-plus year stint as the president of basketball operations of the Los Angeles Clippers ended on Friday. Here are his five worst moves.
On June 16, 2014, Doc Rivers was promoted to president of basketball operations with the Los Angeles Clippers. He remained the Clippers head coach, and had gained the final say in all personnel moves as well.
Combination coach-president is a weird and ongoing trend in the NBA. At the time, the likes of Mike Budenholzer and Stan Van Gundy were in both roles with the Atlanta Hawks and Detroit Pistons as well. Budenholzer resigned from his basketball operations role in May. Now Rivers is doing the same.
While Budenholzer didn’t receive a ton of flak in his dual-role, Rivers absolutely has. He loved to acquire also-ran veterans that either played for him with the Boston Celtics or were good back in 2010. Many of these acquisitions to Los Angeles did not end on the best of terms.
Here are the five worst moves Rivers made as president of basketball operations of the L.A. Clippers.
5. Trading Josh Smith to the Houston Rockets
Yeah, we largely forgot about this one. But we shouldn’t, as it is rather comical in the end. Josh Smith may no longer be in the league, but he was a near-All-Star-level player for his hometown Atlanta Hawks for about a decade. He was ultra-athletic, a great defensive player, played above the rim and had one ugly stroke from distance nobody but he could ever love.
When Budenholzer took over the Hawks, he punted on wanting to work with Smith, letting him sign a massive deal with Van Gundy’s Pistons in 2013 free agency. Smith’s Detroit experience was a complete disaster. The team should have exploded due to a front-court spacing quagmire between Smith, Greg Monroe and Andre Drummond. Needless to say, the trio could not play together.
The Pistons waived Smith and he became a free agent. His hometown buddy Dwight Howard helped convinced the Houston Rockets to pick Smith up off the waiver wire. He came off the bench for the Rockets for the second half of 2014-15. Smith would be the guy that shattered the Clippers’ Western Conference Finals with that gross 3-point stroke of his in Game 5 of the conference semifinals.
It was only natural that Rivers saw Smith play well against his team and traded for the also-ran power forward. All he ended up being was worse version of Blake Griffin, an athletic power forward that doesn’t shoot threes very well. Smith lasted about six months in Los Angeles before being traded back to the Rockets and fizzling out of the league. It was a typical Rivers front office move to want a guy that had one good game against his team.
4. The Glen Davis saga
At one point, Glen “Big Baby” Davis was Glenn “Doc” Rivers’ guy with the Boston Celtics. Davis was a rotund, albeit skilled, power forward for the Celtics in his basketball prime. He was a beast in college at LSU with the physique of Pablo “Kung Fu Panda” Sandoval. Man’s gotta eat.
Davis was a high-end rotational player for Rivers’ tenure as Boston’s head coach during the Big Three era. Without Davis, Boston doesn’t get to two NBA Finals in a three-year span and win the 2008 NBA Championship. When Rivers ended up with the Clippers, it was only natural for Davis to venture to the West Coast.
Davis wasn’t as good as he had been in Boston. Always being out of shape grew thin on Rivers, wanting Davis to take better care of himself physically. In a contract year for the Clippers, Davis dealt with an ankle injury in the second-half of the season. That was the final straw that broke the camel’s back in the Glen/n partnership.
At this point, Rivers had begun to cement a reputation of treating players poorly when they were dealing with injuries. The Jared Dudley tenure in Los Angeles was another example of this complete lack of empathy on Rivers’ behalf. Davis has not played in the NBA since the 2014-15 NBA season. The rift between he and the Rivers Clan is about as bad as it gets. Frankly, it’s probably the worst ending of player-coach relationship of the Rivers era in Los Angeles.
3. The Lance Stephenson trade with the Charlotte Hornets
Here’s another bad move. Though he wasn’t exactly good against Rivers’ Celtics or Clippers, there was a time that we all thought that shooting guard Lance Stephenson was going to become a perennial All-Star in this league. He was arguably the second-best player on the second-best team in the East with the Indiana Pacers.
Stephenson would sign a big contract with the Charlotte Hornets in summer 2014. Like with Smith in Detroit, this was a terrible move by the newly rechristened Hornets organization. He couldn’t shoot threes and Charlotte went in the toilet. But because he was good at one time, Rivers felt the need to trade for him to upgrade at small forward when he didn’t need to.
Small forward was the one position the Clippers couldn’t get right under Rivers’ front office watch. Chris Paul and J.J. Redick were terrific in the backcourt and now they’re gone. Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan are a formidable tandem in the frontcourt for the foreseeable future.
Rivers would trade for Stephenson with Charlotte by giving the Hornets forwards Matt Barnes and Spencer Hawes. These are two more serviceable rotational players than Stephenson. One could argue that Barnes was the best three Rivers had in Los Angeles since signing Danilo Gallinari this summer. Stephenson hasn’t stuck around anywhere for very long since his heyday in Indiana.
2. Waiving Joe Ingles
You’re starting to see a trend here. Rivers is not a man who believes a great deal in karma. The Joe Ingles saga in Los Angeles ended with a terrible PR move for the Clippers. Let’s go back to 2014: Ingles is an Australian native about to make his first NBA team with the Clippers.
As Ingles’ wife was about to come over to watch him play his first NBA season game, Rivers cut Ingles on the final day of camp. Upon her arrival, Ingles was a free agent wing unsigned to a professional basketball team.
Ingles would sign a small salary with the Utah Jazz to play for former outcast coach Quin Snyder in Salt Lake City. Utah was in the midst of a rebuild, but Snyder had a reputation as a great developer of on-court talent. Los Angeles’ trash became the Jazz’s treasure, but Utah would come up a game short of getting the No. 8 seed in the 2016 Western Conference Playoffs.
In 2017, Utah won the Northwest Division crown and the No. 5 seed in the Western Conference Playoffs. The Jazz faced the Clippers in the conference quarterfinals as the slight underdog in the series. Utah would upend Los Angeles in Game 7 at the Staples Center to advance to the conference semifinals.
That’s the last game the Clippers have played as an organization. Ingles was a sixth man candidate in his third year in the league. He turned the last three years into a massive contract with Utah. If Ingles isn’t the one former Clippers player Rivers gave up on too early, who else would it be? Utah doesn’t beat Los Angeles last year without Ingles playing a huge role for the Jazz.
1. The Austin Rivers trade with the New Orleans Pelicans
It was a strange move at the time, but it was a good move for the Rivers Clan and not a bad one on the court, but Rivers trading for his son Austin Rivers with the New Orleans Pelicans was not going to sit well with the guys in the Clippers locker room.
The younger Rivers was a former one-and-done player at Duke. He was the 10th overall pick in the 2012 NBA Draft by the Pelicans. It was a bad fit for him in New Orleans and he was on the fast track to being out of the league. On paper, the Clippers won that trade with the Pelicans, as Rivers is a solid NBA backup point guard, but everybody hates daddy ball.
Rivers would give his son preferential treatment over many of his players. He wouldn’t berate his son like he would with other players when they made on-court mistakes. Rotational players didn’t like it and the starters started to question the move. After one good second-half with the Clippers, Rivers would pay his son handsomely with a multi-year deal.
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Once Paul was kind of done with the daddy ball elements of Clippers basketball, he began to make his mind up that he was going to sign elsewhere in 2017 free agency. Not to say that the Rivers Men were the only reason Paul forced a trade to Houston, but it didn’t help keep the Clippers core together, that’s for sure.