Only Former Clippers Were Traded this Deadline

BD came out and played better in the 2nd half after that ribbing from coach.

We’ve got a ways to go before we get there—and remember that CS is posting about how the Clips didn’t hold a fire sale and dump salary.

It’s worth looking at the sequence in the proper order.

The first guy is Novak. Novak is great, and he’s going to have a value out on the market. (It would have been nice if he could have hit a few more shots against Phoenix, but whatever, we know what he can do.) Seeing how Novak fits with a healthy Clip roster, playing with Camby-Randolph-Kaman, should be really interesting. The good news is that the trades and injuries got his minutes so that he could show what he can do, and he stepped up. He’s not going to be especially pricey, and let’s not forget the contract that Dunleavy/Sterling gave Tim Thomas.

Thornton comes next, though he’s a couple of years away. And Thornton is not doing himself any favors with his inconsistency. As good and promising as he looked in the 2nd half of the season last year, and as good a basic replacement for Maggette as he’s been, Eric Gordon is actually making him look bad. Gordon is steady, smart, consistent, plays defense, distributes the ball well and makes good decisions, and Thornton is/does none of those things. He has stayed healthy and has gotten good experience, and he might look better if the team is at full strength and starts winning games. But his value has tailed off a little bit. And that puts him into the old school Sterling category of star money for star players. He may ultimately fit well and they might make a deal with him, but it seems to be headed towards the familiar Clipper scenario where they would let somebody else overpay him, and they’ll see where the market goes. Of course I hope that things work out better than that, but the burden is on Thornton to step up a bit, just as much as it is on the Clips and their disfunction.

And Gordon seems to be in his own category. He’s very good news, the best thing that has happened to the team by far this year and in recent memory. He’s very young and is only going to get better and he’s going to start getting calls and gain confidence. You know that Dunleavy (and Sterling) has to be excited about Gordon, as happy with him as he must be disappointed in the results so far from the “star” Baron Davis. It’s also worth comparing Gordon against the productivity and investment return that the Clippers have gotten from the contract that they gave to Kaman. In a 5 year deal you ideally get 400 regular season games and you invest your big money on guys who get you to the playoffs, and who get you more games. You hope to get 100 games a year out of the most highly paid players, right? And how many games have the Clippers gotten out of Kaman in the deal thus far? The numbers are starting to get pretty ugly.

It’s much too early to think that Gordon is destined for a short stay on the Clippers. Above all, he needs to stay healthy first, and he does seem to be strong and durable, even though he was tweaked at Indiana and then in summer league and the first day of training camp. Livingston’s fragility was evident from the start and it was one thing and then another, and then his leg fell off, sadly—a crippling blow to Clipper fortunes.

Gordon seems poised to gain the riches that Livingston was unable to reach.

Just moseying along in my standard fashion, and pressed “post” by mistake.

Continuing, and concluding:

“…and detracts from any semblance of his team’s class or collective character” seemed to apply all too well.

It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be afraid that the Clips traded for Bad ZBo. But you can’t rewrite history, and I think we can look back at how ZBo was more than a “stinking genius… in that small space around the low right block” in the games where he led the Clips to victory. He was doing a lot of good things. Zach’s action was inappropriate, and there’s no excuse for it, but he got the suspension (and docked pay, I assume) and we’ll see if he moves on and how he comes back. Frankly, I don’t need to see him play without Camby and Kaman against Portland.
But I would like to see him play with Camby and Kaman at some point.

The hard part about “able to carry the scoring load on a bad team” is that there’s no way around the truth of it at this point. The question that might be asked, however, is why the Clippers are such a bad team, and would they be so bad with their guys healthy. That’s the beginning of the “general agreement” with Chad Ford discussion.

But like I said, KA is a stinking genius in the small space around precise analysis of breaking down plays. Get him outside his little fiefdom, and he’s Kevin Arnovitz—an obvious lug who can’t be bothered to have a discussion. He will always be able to carry the load of scrutinizing a bad team, but that’s the extent of his function as a blogger of the NBA.

Not really, but is was fun to say that.

I don’t think KA is selling out necessarily. He might genuinely agree with Chad Ford. Actually, I can see KA’s point here with regards to ZBo. Yes we are a much better offensive team with ZBo. Yes we actually have a chance to win with ZBo in the lineup. But ZBo is, as KA claims, a disaster on defense. As a matter of fact, Baron, Ricky, ZBo, Novak, and Al can’t play straight up defense if their lives depended on it. It’s not a coincidence that we’ve been giving up points in the 120-140 range.

As far as Dunleavy’s reputation and preference for defense goes, this must be his worst defensive team of all time. Adding ZBo to the lineup makes us worse defensively, though it does help us alot offensively. But as long as teams score 100+ points on us everynight, an argument can be made that acquiring Zbo doesn’t help the team, especially with the personnel around him.

As far as Baron’s overcompensation goes…I think Baron would be overpaid if he got paid Elgin’s 350k a year. At least, Elgin had the dignity to sleep quietly during our home games and not fling air balls after air balls at the rim and make us choke on our pretzels.