Is it really happening? Are you sure?
Maybe watch the second half again and double-check.
For the first time in the franchise’s pathetic (I’m allowed to say so, I’m a Clippers fan) 50-year history, the Clippers are going to the Western Conference Finals. It’s even ok to acknowledge that the extent to which we’re celebrating this victory with a bit of disbelief is a little bit sad–a byproduct of spending years supporting the kind of organization that doesn’t compete for championships.
In the last decade, Doc Rivers was at the center of a movement to redefine what it meant to be a Clipper. And to be clear, while I still harbor quite a bit of resentment over Rivers’ catastrophic coaching job during last year’s playoffs, his cultural redefinition of the franchise was unquestionably for the better. Long before he overplayed Montrezl Harrell, Doc did something much more fundamentally necessary for LA to become a winning organization: he came in and treated players and staff with respect. In other contexts, it may have been nothing groundbreaking, but in an organization plagued for decades by its historic piece of shit owner Donald Sterling, it was downright revolutionary. Rivers brought legitimacy to a franchise that had long been anything but legitimate. Free agents, assistant coaches, and front office staff from around the NBA carousel started actually wanting to take jobs with the Clippers.
And make no mistake–Doc Rivers won games. The only time in franchise history that the team had finished above .500 three times in a row before Rivers’ arrival was under another Doc–the famous Dr. Jack Ramsay–from 1974-76 as the Buffalo Braves before their westward move. Rivers’ first year with the team was their third straight above .500, and they’d beat that mark in all 7 of his seasons, extending the run to 10 this year under Ty Lue. The only other coach to survive 7 seasons at the helm of the Clippers in team history is Mike Dunleavy, who managed to finish above .500 and make the playoffs once in those 7 campaigns. Even though Doc inherited a Lob City core of talent that had already been to the second round of the NBA playoffs under Vinny Del Negro, the organization itself was still in shambles under Sterling, hamstrung by his ownership in terms of both resources and reputation. By steering the Clipper ship through the transition from Sterling to Steve Ballmer, and critically advising the new-to-the-NBA Ballmer on how to build a top-flight organization in his early years, Rivers was the linchpin of a process that took the Clippers from a joke of a franchise that occasionally lucked into 2 or 3 successful years of talent before squandering it to a legitimate, respectable operation that could sustain success long-term.
The problems the Clippers ran into under Rivers, namely his inability to adequately assess and adjust tactically on the fly during playoff series and that inability’s damaging effect on his roster’s belief in the gameplan, were problems that could never have existed in the team’s first forty years of existence. Managing playoff series is only a valuable skill if your team is not just in the playoffs, but in the playoffs with a legitimate chance of winning. And it’s only valuable if you’re there regularly–when you make the postseason 4 of your first 25 seasons in Los Angeles, playoff game management isn’t at the top of the wish list. And while it’s fair to assign Rivers his portion of the blame for Lob City’s failures and eventual breakup, it’s also fair to note that without a coach of his stature as the face of the franchise, Chris Paul and/or Blake Griffin could have easily forced their way off the team in 2014 during the Sterling fiasco, sending the Clippers back to purgatory and making that core a 3-year aberration of Clipper relevance rather than an actual era of sustained winning. Blame Doc for second round collapses, but acknowledge that we’d otherwise have been worried about Draft Lottery ping pong balls.
That rather lengthy lead up feels necessary to say that I’m about to say: it is shocking how drastically what it means to be a Clipper has changed in the less-than-a-year since Doc left. And the changes have been beautiful and necessary and cathartic, and yet they’re luxurious changes to first-world problems that would have never been relevant if Rivers hadn’t led the Clippers to the first world to begin with. Perhaps it’s just always a bit nicer to tell tales of a legendary figure franchise history in the past tense than live through learning his day-to-day imperfections in the present.
There would be no Kawhi Leonard/Paul George championship window for this franchise without Doc Rivers. The Clippers needed Doc Rivers at the helm for 7 years to make the Western Confernece Finals, and they needed to fire him last fall to make the Western Conference Finals. Life’s just funny like that sometimes.
But just as Rivers inherited an insufficient definition of Clipper and drastically improved it, so did Ty Lue 8 months ago when he was named as Doc’s replacement. There’s no nice way to say this: Doc’s teams quit. Among his strengths, Rivers is brilliant at working with individual players to buy into and blossom within their roles. But collectively, his groups always lacked the faith in team concepts to handle pressure and emerge victorious. In addition to his famous record of 3 blown 3-1 series leads in his coaching career, Doc also blew 3 3-2 leads with the Celtics. In one of them–the 2010 NBA Finals vs the Lakers, Phil Jackson famously said in a timeout huddle (while wearing a microphone for the TV broadcast) that Doc’s Celtics “knew how to lose.” Despite leading by as much as 13 in the mid-third (which is like a 25-point cushion in today’s terms–seriously, the lead was 49-36 with 8 minutes left in the third), the Celtics ultimately lost game 7 of the Finals and watched the Lakers win the championship.
You can speculate as to the potential reasons why, but the laudry list of examples are too great of an indictment of Rivers to ignore. Even this week, Rivers’ new team in Philadelphia blew two massive leads and are now stuck playing for their lives in a game 7 against a vastly inferior Atlanta Hawks roster. Just look at this:
It’s not a secret that Rivers is a fatally stubborn coach (this is part of how he is so successful in earning individual buy-in–he and his players establish strong mutual trust in consistent minutes and role), and as playoff series (particularly in the second round, where every opponent is going to be at least some level of quality) wear on, you simply have to be able to win a basketball games multiple ways to win closeout and elimination games and keep your season alive. Doc was often insistent that rather than overreacting to what opponents were doing, he wanted his team to play their own game, confident that they were the better team and would emerge victorious. But that only works if the talent gulf between you and the opposition is vast enough that an astute opposing coach can’t find weak spots in your gameplan to pick at. Keep playing Montrezl Harrell at the end of the third quarter, and by game 5 Mike Malone is going to learn to take Nikola Jokic out for a brief rest in the mid-third so he can return fresh to feast against an undersized defender. The first thing you need in order to win is the belief that you are capable of winning, and it becomes particularly hard to maintain that belief if you reach the late stages of a series and begin to lose faith that your head coach is capable of putting your team in a position to win. No matter how well or poorly conceived, if the players on the court don’t believe in a strategic plan’s ability to be successful, it simply isn’t going to be. And when they don’t believe in a plan, and then it doens’t work, they’re gonna have an even harder time believing in the plan the next time around–especially when it’s the same unchanged plan that failed the night before.
The 2020 Clippers were a mentally fragile group. That’s not a commentary Paul George’s individual mental health, it’s a statement of the cohesion among the group when things got tough. The chemistry issue was too often framed as whether or not the players liked each other (some did and some didn’t, as is almost always the case when you put a group of 15 people together) and not with the following question: Do the players believe in the team’s ability to win? Basketball players, believe it or not, are human beings with doubts and emotions like the rest of us. If it was hard for us to watch games 5 and 6 against Denver and believe that Doc Rivers and Montrezl Harrell were suddenly going to figure it out and win game 7, imagine how hard it would be to muster up that belief from within the locker room. You try maintaining faith when you’re repeatedly busting your ass to build comfortable leads over a quality opponent just to watch a lazy defender give the game back to your opponent repeatedly.
When he stepped into the locker room this season, Ty Lue had to undo a lot of psychological damage accumulated under Doc Rivers. The Clippers still occassionally defaulted back to their quitting habits. Remember the afternoon of Sunday, December 27th? If you remember the date that a regular season game was played on, that’s a pretty significant game. But as the season wore on, the Clippers began to show a resolve that was entirely unlike them. They went 11-7 without Kawhi Leonard and 9-7 without Paul George prior to two rest/tanking games to end the season. Without both stars, they came back from down 18 in Miami in January to win–and then beat the Heat without either star again in February. Down 21 in the mid-3rd to Atlanta in March, Lue pulled his starters and put in an all-bench lineup that would come all the way back to win behind 21 points from Terance Mann and 20 points from Luke Kennard. In a tight standings battle in April, Paul George stepped up with back-to-back 30-point games against the Phoenix Suns and Portland Trail Blazers, and two weeks later with Leonard sidelined, George had 8 points in the final 2 minutes to bring the Clippers back from down 6 in Portland to win the game.
The team knew they would never face the same kind of real pressure or adversity again until they got back to the playoffs, but they still gained confidence in themselves and each other as the season wore on. It wasn’t without speed bumps, but they gained belief that they could contribute in their roles and that they could win any game, no matter the situation they found themselves in. Virtually everyone on the roster had moments where they stepped up and delivered when the team needed them, right down to Yogi Ferrell signing on as an emergency guard late in the year and having 8 points and 4 assists in the fourth quarter of a win over the Grizzlies. Luke Kennard doesn’t come in cold in game 7 vs Dallas and have 11 points if he doesn’t save the day vs the Hawks in the regular season. Reggie Jackson doesn’t step up to confidently fill a high-volume offensive role in the playoffs if he doesn’t have the support of his teammates as he hits a gamewinner in isolation over the Detroit Pistons. Terance Mann can’t hit 7 threes to close out the Jazz if his teammates haven’t been encouraging him to shoot all year.
There was always a chance that the Clippers would make the Western Conference Finals this season by more or less running it back and doing the same thing with a few tweaks; a competent backup center, a new veteran point guard. But that just didn’t happen. Serge Ibaka missed much of the season with a lingering back issue before finally being shut down for the postseason after surgery. Rajon Rondo has found himself sometimes outside the rotation and a negative presence when he is on the court. And the Clippers didn’t follow the same script and get a little luckier with injuries, shot-making, and opponents. The Clippers became fundamentally un-Clippery. The fragility and rigidity and letdowns and collapses that defined the team under Doc Rivers were all completely undone and rebuilt as exact opposites in 8 months under Lue.
In fact, they got unlucky. Down 0-2 to the Dallas Mavericks in a truly breathtaking display of outrageous shooting variance in the Mavs’ favor, the Clippers had to head to a hostile road environment with their season on the line. The real advsersity was here, fast, and a group of known quitters were thrust into the spotlight. The Mavericks, and 18,000 fans, were licking their chops. The Clippers fell behind 30-11… and came back to win. And then they blew the Mavs out in Dallas in game 4. After a disappointing game 5 loss in LA, they came back from down 9 to grind out a win in an elimination game 6 and then emerged victorious in game 7. Two tight losses to the Utah Jazz to open the second round left LAC in another 0-2 hole… and they responded by blowing out Utah twice in games 3 and 4. Then, when Kawhi Leonard suffered a knee injury late in game 4, the Clippers had to rally around Paul George–the scapegoat of their 2020 failure and the NBA media’s favorite punching bag–for a road game 5 against the team with the league’s best record. The Clippers endured 17 made Jazz threes in the first half and ultimately pulled away to win behind George’s massive 37/16/5 line. And last night, as we all just jubilantly witnessed, the team took a haymaker from Jordan Clarkson in the second quarter and fell behind by as many as 25 before going on to win the game by 12 points behind a 39-point performance from Terance Mann that I still can’t quite believe happened.
ESPN commentator Mark Jackson said at one point near the end of the game that it would have been very easy for the Clippers to quit. They were down 25, Utah was making demoralizing, tough shots over good defense, they’d get another shot at advancing on Sunday, they were playing without their best player. I had already said after game 5 that it wasn’t fair to expect the Clippers to close out the Jazz without Kawhi, and that the season could be considered acceptable if the Clippers lost this series in 7 games. But to stage a 25-point comeback in the second round to advance to their first Western Conference Finals just one season after blowing double-digit leads in three straight potential closeout games was not just a breakthrough for the team or a successful achievement of a goal–it was a complete rebuke of who they were a year ago, a poetic 180-degree turn from fragile to teflon. It is no truer for anyone than for Paul George, who has taken constant criticism that he wasn’t good enough to be a second star next to Kawhi Leonard and yet stood up in the face of his inconsistent playoff track record and delivered two gutsy leadership performances to take the Clippers to the Western Conference Finals as a the only All-Star in the lineup.
Maybe the Clippers could have strung together a couple more 50-season wins and playoff appearances without hiring Doc Rivers. There’s enough talent in the NBA that sometimes short-lived success falls in the laps of the most inept organizations, like the Clippers in the early 90’s or 2006. But without him, they never would have built a legitimate, respectable organization capable of recruiting top talent and sustaining success over a decade-long span. Doing that meant changing what it meant to be a Clipper, and Doc Rivers did that.
Maybe this Clippers core with Kawhi Leonard and Paul George could have lucked into a Conference Finals appearance this year under Doc Rivers if some injury luck and good matchups aligned to present them a path without much adversity. But they never would have built the kind of team-wide system of tactics and trust that could endure the extreme stress of outlier opponent shooting, large deficits (in both series and individual games), and an injury to Kawhi. Doing that meant changing what it meant to be a Clipper, and Ty Lue did that.
I enjoy this new definition quite a bit. I can’t wait to see what they show us next, and even if it’s an unceremonious exit from their first-ever Western Conference Finals there’s a lot to appreciate about a Clipper team that is more worthy of its fanbase’s pride than any team that has come before it–not just becuase of what they accomplished, but how they went about accomplishing it.
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