At first glance, Josh Smith — the new bargain-basement addition to the Los Angeles Clippers’ roster — won’t be able to shoot down his team’s chances in Game 6 of a conference semifinal series.
Then again, what’s true at first glance with Josh Smith — and other players like him — is that while he might not be able to make a bunch of threes for a Clipper opponent anymore, he could still shoot Los Angeles out of the playoffs… by missing those same threes, which is what he normally does.
The presence of Smith in Los Angeles offers its share of upside and potential — especially for the price — but that’s the problem with the Clippers, now and throughout their snake-bitten history: Potential never fully turns into the ideal scenario. It comes close to doing so at times, but with a conference final still an unmet goal, the Clippers have never enjoyed what one would call a magnificently thunderous breakthrough. That kind of season is still waiting.
Josh Smith represents the Clippers’ mixture of risk-taking and hopefulness, but the man ever more responsible for this team’s fate is its head coach, Doc Rivers.
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If you were asked, “Is Doc Rivers the GM or Doc Rivers the coach more under fire in the 2015-2016 season?”, you could cleverly answer with a “yes” and drop the mic. However, if you had to answer that question one way or the other and could not say both, the better answer — while a very close call, to be sure — would probably lean toward the coaching side this season.
This past season, “GM Doc” was more at fault for the Clippers’ shortcomings than the coach. The gack attack in Game 6 against the Houston Rockets and Josh Smith witnessed a complete implosion by established players over the final 7:30 of regulation. The version of J.J. Redick who had shown up in the playoffs abruptly vanished, and what many pundits have already forgotten about those seven and a half minutes is that while Smith and Corey Brewer got hot, Redick and Jamal Crawford couldn’t hit the ocean from the (Los Angeles) shore.
To put a finer point on L.A.’s collapse: Had the Clippers posted a 31-point fourth quarter — otherwise known as an average quarter for them at home in that series, up to that point in time — they very likely would have won. In many ways, given the flow of that series, Houston’s 40-spot in the fourth quarter of Game 6 was not the more shocking number; it was the “15” the Clips hung on the board. Los Angeles didn’t need to do anything more than it had already done on offense to tuck away Game 6. So, what did the Clippers do? They scored roughly half the number of points they’d been averaging per quarter in that final stanza of Game 6… after easily rolling through Houston’s matador defense for the first three quarters.
It’s hard to fault “Coach Doc” to a greater degree than “GM Doc” for that unraveling. If the Clippers had more answers on their bench, such that Chris Paul and Blake Griffin didn’t have to do close to everything for most of that series, Los Angeles probably doesn’t wilt late in Game 6. If there wasn’t such a pronounced drop-off from DeAndre Jordan to Glen Davis and uber-bust Spencer Hawes, the Clippers wouldn’t have been so conflicted about “Hack-A-DeAndre” situations that arose in that series.
In the offseason, “GM Doc” certainly got very lucky as a result of Jordan’s about-face, his withdrawal from a commitment to join the Dallas Mavericks and return to the Clippers. However, given that huge basket of great fortune, “GM Doc” did pounce on the chance to improve that bench. Paul Pierce, as a late-game shotmaker and a mentor to another new arrival, Lance Stephenson, could knit together this team in all the ways it failed to mesh in previous seasons. “Coach Doc” is certainly relying on Pierce, a player he trusts, to be an extra coach and voice throughout the season, particularly in the playoffs. If Pierce can get through to Stephenson and Smith, two guys one could readily view as “knuckleheads” in the league, potential could become a very prosperous reality for the Clippers. “GM Doc” is betting that Pierce can help high-risk, high-upside acquistions become the difference between the “almost” seasons of 2014 and 2015 and — on the other hand — a 2016 in which the Clippers at least make the West finals, maybe the NBA Finals, for the first time.
Pierce, of course, can’t do all the coaching, though. “Coach Doc” just might be walking into his put-up-or-shut-up moment as an NBA bench boss. This is his time to show that he can do for a soap-operatic cast of basketball players what Robert Pirsig did for motorcycles and his relationships in the seminal 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
What Rivers did in Boston — not so much with the 2008 champions, who played in full flight with fresh-legged stars for most of the season, but with the 2010 and 2012 teams — was special. He guided older but wise players through the long NBA grind, and equipped odd collections of role players with enough confidence and clarity to make deeper playoff runs than most expected. Had the Celtics defeated LeBron James and the Miami Heat in Game 6 (or 7) of the 2012 East Finals, Boston would have scored an upset as monumental as their defeat of the mighty Lakers in the 1969 NBA Finals. “Coach Doc” would have registered one of the great single-season achievements in the league, one that would have reverberated throughout the history of professional basketball.
However, LeBron (Game 6) and Chris Bosh (Game 7) answered the bell to deny Doc that electric accomplishment, and ever since, the Rivers of fate have flowed against Doc, both the GM and the coach, in Los Angeles.
The Game 5 gack against Oklahoma City in 2014 was bad enough. The Game 6 gack against Houston this past spring was, improbably, much worse. The Clippers have two of the 10 best players in the world, and they have a rebounding-and-defense force in Jordan, but the limitations of Jordan’s offensive game, combined with bad-shot tendencies from Jamal Crawford and utterly unreliable play from backup bigs, have kept the Clippers outside the candy store.
“GM Doc” is betting on Paul Pierce, but he’s also betting that “Coach Doc” can take some volatile spare parts and plug them into a star-laden starting five to make the Clippers better than they’ve ever been before.
Rivers had the perfect situation in Boston, with Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, and then a “before-he-plummeted” Rajon Rondo. With each year of Clipper failure, the idea that Rivers succeeded only because of his players gains more weight.
Well, here’s an upcoming season in which Rivers will have to pull together disparate pieces such as Josh Smith and Lance Stephenson. It could all crash and burn… but it could all come together perfectly.
The answer just might offer a lasting and definitive verdict on how good “Coach Doc” really is.
