NBA Trade Deadline: Clippers Face Familiar Point Guard Debate

As the 2023 NBA trade deadline approaches on February 9th, the Clippers find themselves having a very familiar conversation about point guards. For as long as Paul George and Kawhi Leonard have been teammates in Los Angeles, there has been a pretty heavy discourse surrounding the team–and within the Clippers’ organization–about the ideal archetype of supporting players to surround them with, especially at point guard.

Clippers general manager Lawrence Frank, in his public comments, has expressed a vision for the team that goes beyond traditional positional roles, with interchangeable, athletic wings that can switch across multiple positions and handle both on-ball and off-ball offensive roles. Jerry West notably pushed the Clippers to draft Terance Mann in 2019, envisioning the 6’5″ wing with a swiss army knife skillset as a point guard in the NBA. Many of the Clippers’ acquisitions around the margins, from the development of undrafted free agent Amir Coffey to the rehabilitation of veteran Nico Batum to the acquisition of Robert Covington at last year’s trade deadline, support this vision. And it meshes to a large degree with some of the defensive principles that Ty Lue has fallen back on in tight spots during his tenure as Clippers head coach, pulling Zubac for an extra wing and orchestrating strategic matchups and switches. This combo of roster moves and smallball success en route to the 2021 Western Conference Finals led to the birth of the “wingstop” meme/dream among Clippers fans.

Offensively, it has been another story. While the Clippers’ offense has been generally quite good with their stars on the floor in the 213 era (they were 2nd in offensive rating in 2019-20 and 4th in 2020-21), they have been prone to stall and at times even melt down: long stretches without quality looks, late-game ruts, notorious blown leads. Their collapse in the 2020 bubble against Denver notwithstanding, it’s fair to ask if these are really unique problems or just a part of the modern game–I have been known to sarcastically tweet “somebody get this team a real point guard” during other teams’ games when they have dry spells despite a traditional floor general on the court, and a twitter account @notjustyourteam has popped up to document how teams across the league are suffering dry spells, blown leads, and bad losses. But either way, there is a notion, in part pushed by the team’s head coach (a former NBA point guard) and star player (who has mentioned basketball IQ and decision making as one of the team’s needs over the years), that a veteran point guard is needed to keep the trains running on time. Enter a string of buy-low veteran names rubber-stamped by the team’s coach and stars over the last few years–Reggie Jackson, Rajon Rondo, Eric Bledsoe, John Wall. Meanwhile, after Terance Mann was moved into the starting point guard position earlier this month in the midst of a losing streak, we get ESPN reporting about the front office intervening and telling Ty who should play.

The reality is that there is a point guard skillset that has value in the NBA, and would have value for this team. But when you start to list what the Clippers need out of that role, it becomes pretty apparent why their attempts to add a point guard have been largely unsuccessful–they need a good shooter to space the floor around 213, but someone who is also athletic enough to go downhill and initiate the offense, someone who is a disciplined playmaker and doesn’t turn the ball over, and also can spearhead the point of attack defense against the pesky quicker guards that LAC’s big wings struggle with… while hopefully still being big enough to participate in a switch-heavy scheme. There is a term in the NBA for lead guards who are savvy decision-makers, good shooters, downhill athletes, and versatile defenders. It’s “All-Star.” The point guard debate that has dragged on for three years actually has very little to do with point guards, and everything to do with talent. Compared to other title contenders, the Clippers’ 3rd and 4th-best players are remarkably weak–who is their Aaron Gordon? Their Jrue Holiday? Mikal Bridges? Marcus Smart? Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Brook Lopez, Deandre Ayton, Malcolm Brogdon–all of these names are at best their respective teams’ 4th-best player, and all would represent massive upgrades for the Clippers’ supporting cast.

By all means, the Clippers can trade for a point guard at this deadline. Their recent run of success has come with a 9-man rotation featuring Mann as the starter, with Reggie Jackson, Norman Powell, Robert Covington, and Nico Batum playing off the bench as Paul and Kawhi take alternating shifts aiding the second unit. If someone like Mike Conley took Jackson’s role, would it be an upgrade? He lacks the scoring juice of Jackson at this point in his career, but the 35-year-old veteran of 16 NBA seasons is an incredibly savvy navigator, posting a career-high 7.6 assists per game to just 1.6 turnovers for Utah this year. As the floor general for one-star lineups, he would help the Clippers make sure that whichever star is on the floor gets the ball in their spots, and he’s still capable of sniping threes if given space. But he’s slower than Jackson, less of a threat to score on drives and far removed from his status as a good defender from earlier in his career. Exchanging Jackson for Conley in that role would be a tradeoff of skillset, and maybe even a winning one that made those units slightly more stable, but his deficiencies would still be apparent nightly, and the Clippers still wouldn’t have anyone on the roster who belongs on the aforementioned list of contenders’ #3 and 4 guys.

A lot of the same could be said for Kyle Lowry (though Lowry’s three-point shooting gives me extra pause). The “upgrade” from Jackson is less profound than many observers likely imagine it to be if they’ve been observing Reggie’s warts close-up for years while Conley and Lowry have resided in our imagination as the younger versions of themselves that we remember. Let’s look at the three across just a few basic categories to see how they fill different roles: who is gonna come into a game and score 20 points in a support role? Who scores efficiently? Who is gonna hit a three on a kick out from the stars? Who is gonna assist teammates while avoiding miscues?

My point here is not to argue that Jackson is better than these other 2 players, but rather that neither is a revolutionary upgrade that is going to catapault this team to the next level. They have mixed skillsets that will help in some areas and leave the team exposed in others, plus intangible combinations of leadership/experience that could help in a title run as well… although I’m not sure how much that helped the Clippers in 2021 as Rajon Rondo played himself out of the rotation. With the way the Clippers’ depth chart is shaping up, there are likely only roles for 2 guards (not just at point guard) to join Terance Mann and Paul George in the rotation. Not only would Jackson be displaced by an addition, but Wall has to be presumed gone, and then still you likely have to trade or bench one of Luke Kennard or Norman Powell to accomodate Lowry or Conley in the rotation.

It’s possible that either Conley or Lowry could have an important role to play in the Clippers 9-man rotation as they chase a title this year. I also think it’s possible that Jackson or Kennard could. If the team prefers the tradeoff of losing scoring punch to add Conley’s distribution, or thinks Lowry’s leadership is worth the shooting dropoff, I won’t hold it against them. But if they expect either come in and be some type of third-star difference-maker that is going to take the ball out of Paul and Kawhi’s hands in big moments, this team won’t be going as far as we all hope. I think similarly of another point guard whose name has been popular at this deadline: Charlotte’s Terry Rozier. Much more in the Jackson role, Rozier is a high volume driver/scorer who lacks some of the traditional floor general qualities of Conley and Lowry. But unlike his senior counterparts, he’d bring an athleticism upgrade over Jackson, creating more paint touches to initiate the Clippers’ ball-movement, three-point-heavy offense. Just as with the others, we are probably closer to swapping out sets of strengths and weaknesses than significant talent upgrades.

The noteworthy exception in this conversation is Raptors point guard Fred VanVleet, perhaps the biggest name known to be very available at the upcoming trade deadline. An All-Star last year, some of Fred’s key numbers don’t necessarily jump off the page in comparison to the other veteran names we’ve mentioned. He’s had an inefficient season (and was never a highly efficient scorer), averages fewer points this season than Rozier, and posts distribution numbers closer to Lowry’s than Conley’s. Diminutive in size and turning 29 in February, with nagging ailments from a heavy minutes burden over the years in Toronto and due a massive new contract next summer, there are reasons why he’s available–and why teams might be cautious about surrendering a major trade package for him. But there is a star power element present that the others simply lack, whether due to age or, in Rozier’s case, the low-leverage minutes he is playing on one of the league’s worst teams. Like Lowry, VanVleet was teammates with Leonard during Toronto’s run to the 2019 title, but unlike Lowry, he is still at an age where you would believe a return to peak form is possible. He brings a different class of volume self-creation and difficult shot-making that none of the other guards mentioned in this article possess, elevating him to a tier where he actually belongs in the same conversation with players like Aaron Gordon and Jrue Holiday.

Unfortunately, the Clippers aren’t the only team that would like to add a player of Fred’s caliber, and the 7 years of draft picks the team sent to Oklahoma City for Paul George still limits their ability to build the same kind of package that a team like the Phoenix Suns, for example, could. The Raptors also don’t really like the Clippers after the team’s relatively brazen recruitment of Kawhi Leonard (they can cry me a river about that one, but nonnetheless if the grudge is there and impacting decision-making then it warrants mention), and have shown a willingness to lose players, like Kyle Lowry, in free agency rather than budge on their asking price in trade talks. I wouldn’t call the Clippers’ outlook of landing VanVleet impossible, but I would probably lean towards unlikely. The Raptors don’t seem like the team to take a weak return, and if any of the other teams searching for point guard help at the deadline are going to go all-in and make a godfather offer for someone, it’ll be Fred. That would leave the Clippers in the same spot they’ve been at past deadlines: hoping to make a significant upgrade at point guard but lacking the trade assets to do so.