JGOJustin wrote:When you win 51 games w/ Blake and Chris missing a combined 40 plus games, that means more than issues with Roster Construction. WAY more.
And it was a chronic issue during CP's run here. The year before last, we won 53 with Blake missing 42 games. 42! Don't tell me there were severe issues with roster construction when the team is winning 50+ games year in and year out with their best players missing significant time EVERY YEAR in the Chris Paul era.
The true misfortune of the CP era is health, not roster construction. Their roster surrounding their stars is comparable to what the Thunder surrounded KD and Russ with, what the Cavs surrounded Bron/Kyrie/Love with.
Our best players simply weren't good enough, and their health played a huge part in that.
It could possibly just be a reflection of how valuable Chris Paul as well as Blake Griffin are to winning games. Over Paul's Clippers tenure, the Clippers had a winning percentage that would equal 56 wins a season when Blake was NOT playing and Chris Paul was playing. Chris Paul missed 21 games this past season, but 43 of those 51 wins were with Paul playing. The team was 8-13 in the games he missed.
The thing about the post-season though is that it becomes about matchups and strategy and adjustments more so than the regular season. The Clippers problem obviously outside of being injured in 3/6 seasons they had that group was that on a yearly basis, they had matchup or roster issues due to the personnel, which going into the post-season, we knew was a problem. You can go back and read the posts before the post-season in 14-15. I know I said, and there were others who said "this teams lack of depth and the bench that loses every lead is going to come back and haunt the team". Guess what happened vs Houston? Sure CP and Blake choked in game 6, but the last three games of that series, a guy like Redick who should be playing 28 mpg but had been playing 40 mpg couldn't make shots he would usually make due to fatigue. Austin, Crawford, Barnes, they couldn't make OPEN shots. The Clippers bigs bench bigs were useless on both ends. There were no other options because the team was as shallow as they come.
The 15-16 teams was not bad they played elite defense over about 50 games. Aldrich was a great backup C. Despite Green sucking in general, he could have been useful against GS in some form. Obviously the problem that season was that Blake was injured most of the year, then when he came back he was not fully healthy and was bad, and then he was bad in the playoffs and re-aggravated his injury, and of course Paul got injured too.
The 15-16 team after the dust settled with all the mis-matched players that Doc and his crew acquired, that team was probably one of the better and more balanced Clippers teams. The main problem was that injury ruined both the regular season and post-season, so we never really got to see anything out of that group. Of course bad planning with player acquisitions by getting players who don't fit, and again, this isn't hindsight, go and read the pre-season posts and predictions and comments I and others made after some of the moves. That in addition to not having enough quality depth again became a problem because the Thunder only won 55 games. If the Clippers didn't have the mis-match roster early on, and if they had someone better than old man Pierce at PF when Blake went down, the team might have been able to fight for 3rd. Paul's injury was a freak accident, so buttefly effect on that one, but of course Blake's injury was structural, so the team still wouldn't have had Blake.
One of the big problems is that if you look at the trail of asset management on the team, it is awful:
Dudley + 1st Round pick === Cap Space
Barnes + Hawes + 1st Round Pick ==== Jeff Green rental
Now, just imagine the Clippers were offering a team
Crawford + Dudley + Barnes + Two 1st Round picks, what they could have gotten back? Crawford, Dudley and Barnes all had great contracts, doesn't have to be all three, but let's say 2 of the three. Portland traded You make that offer during the 14-15 season, and you could have gotten back an All-Star or close to type SF. Instead the total result of all those players and assets (minus Crawford) was actually nothing at all. The Clippers had a very small margin between success and failure, and asset mis-management like that, despite other factors is something that sets you back.
