Joerezz7 wrote:Blake Griffin was always trash. Chris Paul made him look like an all star. All that athleticism and only averaging 7-8 rebounds a game, and it’s not like he was some dominate scorer either. He’s trash. I put him in the same category as Dwight Howard. Overrated bum
Lol, okay. His rebounds decreasing wasn't due to not trying to get rebounds. He was playing next to DJ who could clean up most of the rebounds, and the team would sent Blake out early to get quick seals, etc for transition offense. Also offensively as he expanded his game, and as the Clippers as well as other teams started to tank offensive rebounds for transition defense and leave just one guy on the glass (the C), his offensive rebounds went down. This is why just looking at stats with no context is dumb.
Griffin was a top 10 player in 13-14 and 14-15. Now if you want to argue that it was due to a window where some of the older guys were slowing down and the new crop of stars had not started emerging, that's fine, but it is still true that he was in the top 10 those years.
dc wrote:Soulcatcher33 wrote:Again, game 7, on one leg, Chris Paul. Nuff said.
Props to CP3 for that, but again, that series vs. the defending champs doesn't even get that far w/o Blake. Guy basically carried that team with no depth to speak of.
And he carried them to a 3-1 lead the next round with CP3 out and injured for most of that series until he and his team (with no bench) basically ran out of gas.
Depends on how you are examining it. Overall series stats are good, for sure, but if you are saying someone carried them to wins, then you'll have to look at production in the wins vs SA:
Game 1:
Paul: 32/7/6/ 73.5 TS%
Griffin: 26/12/6/ 53.3 TS%
Game 4:
Paul: 34/3/7/ 72.5 TS%
Griffin: 20/19/7/ 52.1 TS%
Game 6:
Paul: 19/4/15/ 41.7 TS%
Griffin: 26/12/6/ 57.1 TS%
Game 7:
Paul: 27/2/6 / 91.5 TS%
Griffin: 24/13/10/ 63.7 TS%
So if your question is who was carrying them in scoring and offensively in the games they won, it was easily Paul who did it in 3/4 wins, there's no doubt or question both watching the games and statistically. If the question is whether Griffin played very well in that series, and if it was his best playoff series, then yes, but it wasn't one or the other that made that series go that far, it was both.
Also Paul got a good mix of Leonard and Green. Pop moved Leonard on to Redick to try to take him out of the series, with Green on Paul and then Parker got to guard Matt Barnes a lot, which obviously is a smart decision. Clippers killed the Spurs with the high horns pick and roll though and Spurs never had a counter.
Osirus89 wrote:Yeah I would say so. It was borderline and not for a long period of time (Maybe 1 season to 2 at the most), but he was definitely one of the best bigs in the league for a stretch during the Clippers apex. They should have been a WCF team the year they choked against OKC. I think that was the 2014 playoffs.
Even though some people point to the OKC series, the Houston series is actually the one they should have won if they could have defended or had any depth.
The OKC series, if they won game 5, Clippers would have gone up 3-2. Everyone seems to talk about it like going up 3-2 against an OKC team with Durant/Westbrook/Ibaka and the size and length they had, and who had home court for game 7 was a guaranteed series victory. Probably all those people also thought the Clippers were done after they went down 3-2 vs SA in 2015 and then won game 6 and 7. Probably all the same people thought the Thunder would lose to Memphis after being down 3-2 in the first round of that same 2014 playoffs. Similar thing when they lost game 1 in 2016 by 32, won game 2 by 1 point and then went down 2-1 after three games, you know people were saying "it's over", then they won 3 in a row.
Going up 3-2 as the road team is very good, but winning that game 6 is very hard, and due to hindsight, people will say "oh, the disappointment of losing game 5 is why the Clippers lost game 6", but realistically, the Clippers were very likely to lose that game 6, especially considering that they DID lose it in do or die. This means that even if the Clippers won game 5, that series was very likely going to a game 7 in OKC, and game 7 on the road against a team that has just as much star power as well as the size and defensive advantage is a tall order.
