NBA Season Preview 2018-19: Projecting Clippers backcourt combinations

The Clippers are a fascinating team this season. Decimated by injuries and remade by a late-season trade, their roster is loaded with interesting pieces who could fit together in a variety of ways, particularly in the backcourt.

The Clippers have a pure point guard (Milos Teodosic), two offensive shooting guards who are better off defending point guards (Avery Bradley and Lou Williams), a versatile combo who can fit at both positions (Patrick Beverley), and a pair of rookies (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jerome Robinson). Gilgeous-Alexander has the length to play more on the wing but worked as a primary ball-handler at Kentucky. The point being the Clippers are going to need to find minutes for all these players at the two backcourt spots and, in doing so, figure out how to balance competing for the playoffs now and developing their rookies for the future.

To see how this might all shake out, I used Jacob Goldstein’s Lineup Predictor tool, which allows you to insert any five-man combination of players and return a projected offensive, defensive and net rating. The Clippers starters seem set in the frontcourt with Danilo Gallinari and Tobias Harris surrounding Marcin Gortat. I then ran every Clippers backcourt combination alongside that group to see what would be the most effective.

It’s obviously encouraging that every pairing projects to be a net positive for the Clippers, but the trend of great offense and horrific defense should be pretty offense. No lineup without Patrick Beverley projects to allow less than 110.0 points per 100 possessions, which would still be a pretty terrible mark. However, it’s clear that the offensive capabilities of the frontcourt combination and players like Williams and Teodosic should be more than enough to keep L.A’s head above water.

The combinations that look productive here are certainly ones that we’re likely to see plenty of, especially once Teodosic returns from injury. One of the things that these projections do speak pretty loudly on, though, is the danger of trying to make this lineup crunch work by playing three guards together. Gilgeous-Alexander and Bradley are the likeliest candidates to squeeze onto the court as nominal small forwards but the lineup predictor isn’t very rosy on either possibility. Putting Bradley or Gilgeous-Alexander next to Beverley and Williams in place of Gallinari shaves 7.5 points off the projected point differential.

Obviously, these projections are rough and miss plenty of nuance about how these players will perform individually and in concert with each other next year. However, it seems clear that chasing the playoffs may mean putting off developmental time for the rookies or simply clearing someone like Bradley off the roster.