Jerry West and the Los Angeles Clippers are doing just fine
Lose one star, shame on you. Get rid of a second, and suddenly it looks like a plan.
Considering the magnitude of change in the Clippers’ organization over the last several years, it would be easy to assume the franchise doesn’t have much of a plan at all. Los Angeles just went from locking Blake Griffin — the primary artifact of Lob City — up as a “Clipper for life” last summer to shopping him before this year’s trade deadline. But cloudy long-term vision would have changed the calculus of a move like that.
No — ridding themselves of the perennially injured Griffin and his gargantuan five-year contract was the smart move. And demonstrating the ability to understand that and move on, even with the disappointing departure of Chris Paul lurking behind them, may have finally lifted the needling reputation of being the “other” L.A. team, the one that fails hilariously and never gets anything right.
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They’ve gotten most things right since that trade, which brought back the versatile Tobias Harris and Detroit’s first-round pick.
Ballmer and minority owner Dennis Wong were looking after last season for a “superstar” (Ballmer’s words) to set up their front office and create a basketball identity — someone like Jerry West. According to the New York Times’ Marc Stein, it was Wong who originally suggested West himself, who was nearing the end of a contract in Golden State and had taken on a reduced role in the Warriors’ front office after helping to build its championship roster.
You could define the shrewd Blake Griffin deal, West’s first big task, under what Stein called a pet phrase of West’s: “What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right.”
West helped build the Showtime Lakers as general manager from 1982-2000 before moving on to the same position in Memphis for five seasons. In 2011, he signed with the Warriors as part of their executive board and a minority owner. With Golden State, West mentored general manager Bob Myers and reported directly to the team’s owners. He is credited with a large role in bringing Kevin Durant to the Bay, ultimately winning his ninth career championship last June.
The long-term flexibility West helped create through the Griffin trade more than justifies the risk of moving on from the All-Star. It will take several more moves like that, with a De’Andre Jordan player option on the horizon and hardly any young talent to speak of, to become a contender again.
When Steve Ballmer bought the Clippers in 2014, the ugly cloud of the Donald Sterling regime blew away. The hope was that Ballmer’s canny and impassioned style would help build the franchise into one of the league’s best.
The reasonable way the franchise has been run since counts as a surprise considering this is the franchise that pushed out both Elgin Baylor and Mike Dunleavy after those two led the Clippers to the second round in 2006, their only playoff appearance from 1994-2011. Gone are the jokes about Clippers fans being the most miserable in the NBA. Winning will do that.
The trade to acquire Chris Paul in 2011 added a second star to pair with Griffin and put the team in position to make the playoffs for each of the next six seasons. Yet when it came time last summer to move on from Paul, who was due to become extremely expensive with a veteran maximum extension, the franchise moved swiftly to get value in return for their star.
Since then, the Clippers organization has become almost a sanctuary for basketball lifers, working quietly together to create a flexible, modern team.
Last Friday, the Clippers re-signed Doc Rivers, who coached the team to a 259-151 record the last five seasons. Another good call, just a year removed from Stein, then with ESPN, reporting “persistent chatter,” about a Rivers-Orlando reunion.
Rivers was ousted from the front office by Ballmer shortly thereafter, with his one-time assistant Lawrence Frank tasked with leading the basketball operations staff. Frank has been a coach in the league since 1999 and a head coach for parts of nine seasons during that span. The relationship appears to be working.
“We are coming off a year where our team battled through many challenges and much adversity, proving deep talent and even greater potential. I am looking forward to getting back to work on the court to develop our players and compete with the NBA’s elite,” Rivers said Friday.
The Clippers would have survived after elevating Frank to the head of its front office last August, but now they’re thriving. It seems West’s decisiveness and instinctive understanding of the NBA have become the crux of Los Angeles’ philosophies.
West told Stein, “You have to be wanted.”
How about needed?
Looking forward with two lottery picks this June (West represented the team on the dais at the lottery) and only two players under contract for the 2019-20 season, the Clippers are on solid ground. Not a contender yet, but resetting the right way.
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Rivers has accepted and thrived in his role as simply the coach. Finally, he is playing more versatile lineups and working a system, perhaps rejuvenated by the openness of a post-Lob City roster. The Clippers had no business finishing as the league’s eighth most efficient offense getting only 33 games from Griffin, 45 from Milos Teodosic and 21 from Danilo Gallinari.
“The mountain is not that high for this team if we make the right moves,” West said in that New York Times feature.
Considering the people in place to make those moves, and the recent history of getting them right, it’s probably true. And who would know better than West, anyway?