What Went Wrong with the 2019-20 Los Angeles Clippers?

    The 2019-20 Los Angeles Clippers, before the season, were hyped up to be an NBA Finals contender with the additions of superstars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. They were picked by many to be the NBA Champions at the start of the season. But ONCE AGAIN... they failed to get past the 2nd round. This time, they blew a 3-games-to-1 series lead against the Denver Nuggets in the 2nd round, who were fresh off of coming back from a 3-1 series deficit in the 1st round against the Utah Jazz. This led to many doubts about the Clippers, so what went wrong here?

Lack of Team Chemistry

    Despite having the best roster in the league on paper, the team chemistry wasn't there. They had the players to pull off a deep run - Leonard, George, Lou Williams, Montrezl Harrell, Patrick Beverley, and trade acquisition Marcus Morris. The talent is there. But the lack of team chemistry is what caused them to fall apart in the end. Just look at their performances in the final three games of the 2nd round. The only players from the Clippers that scored in the 2nd half of Game 6 were Leonard, George, Williams and JaMychal Green. The entire team combined for 33 points in the 2nd half of Game 7, and Leonard, George, Williams, Morris, and Ivica Zubac had a combined 12 points in that half. Leonard and George had 24 combined points in all of Game 7 as well, while Nuggets point guard Jamal Murray had 40 points alone. See? Lack of team chemistry. Newly-appointed head coach Tyronn Lue addressed that it was a problem, along with the lack of continuity. They had a hard time meshing last year's core (minus Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Danilo Gallinari, who were involved in the Paul George trade) with the two new superstars - Leonard was subject to load management and George suffered a hamstring injury before the season. Williams, Harrell, and Beverley also missed time in the restart for various reasons.

Kawhi Leonard May Have Made a Bad Decision

    Leonard may have made the poorest career choice. He had the option to stay with the Toronto Raptors with the possibility to go for a repeat, but he decided to join the Clippers - a team that has never made it to the conference finals in their 50+ year franchise history. In July 2019, ESPN writer Tim Bontemps asked 20 coaches, executives and scouts from across the NBA, and 12 of the 20 said that Leonard was the best player in the NBA at that time. Some NBA fans were even comparing him to LeBron James! This season, we saw the truth: Leonard got WAY TOO MUCH credit for the Raptors' championship run. Yes, we can credit him for his performance on the way to the championship, but Nick Nurse, the Raptors' head coach and 2020 Coach of the Year, deserves his credit, too! Nurse has been praised for his creativity and innovation. He implemented strategies such as using box-and-one and triangle-and-two schemes during the Finals. The Raptors usually don't use those schemes, but have spent the 2020 season developing flexibility.

The Clippers Gave Up Too Much for Paul George

    Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and President of Basketball Operations Lawrence Frank may have made the WORST trade in Clippers franchise history. Why is this? They gave up TOO MUCH for Paul George. In the trade deal, the Clippers gave up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Danilo Gallinari, FIVE first round picks, and the rights to swap two other first rounders. In this year's playoffs, George had six games where he scored 15 points or worse: He put up 14 points in Game 2 of the 1st round, 11 in Game 3, 9 in Game 4, and 15 in Game 6, and had two separate instances where he put up 10 points in a game during the 2nd round: Games 4 and 7. Throughout the playoffs, George averaged 20.2 points per game, which was his lowest scoring average in the playoffs since the 2013 season. He also shot 39.8% from the field, which is his 4th time in his career that he shot under 40% in the playoffs. Meanwhile, Gilgeous-Alexander had a breakout year with the Oklahoma City Thunder, and Gallinari continues to be a solid starter. To sum this up, the Clippers basically gave the Thunder a very bright future in exchange for one of the biggest disappearing acts in the playoffs. And yet Frank went on to win Executive of the Year when he also traded the team's 2020 first round pick, the 2021 second round pick that they received from the Detroit Pistons, and a 2021 first round swap option in the Marcus Morris trade. That trade only made their future even worse. Yikes.

Doc Rivers is Overrated

    DO NOT let the media fool you. Doc Rivers is not a top 10 head coach. With this series loss, he became the first coach in league history to be on three teams failing to advance after taking a 3-1 series lead: The 2003 Orlando Magic, the 2015 Clippers, and this year's Clippers. He also holds the record for the most Game 7 losses in NBA history, with 8, and has lost six series after leading 3-2. There is a clear difference between the systems of Rivers and Nurse. Rivers' system focuses on the superstar players, meaning that he wanted Leonard and George to do most of the production on the court - this was not the first time it happened, it also happened when Rivers had Blake Griffin, Chris Paul, and DeAndre Jordan on the team. Nurse's system helps the players all-around, so note how guys like Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet, Marc Gasol, Serge Ibaka, and Norman Powell have succeeded under Nurse's system. The Raptors, who were expected to be a middle-seeded team before the season, actually got BETTER this season. Nurse implemented unconventional methods to take teams outside of their comfort zone, and is willing to try many defensive alignments.

The Clippers Have No True Vocal Leader

    One of the key differences between the Clippers and their in-city rivals, the Lakers, is that the Lakers have a definitive vocal leader on their team (LeBron James). The Clippers do not. And during the Raptors' championship run, the vocal leader of the team was actually Kyle Lowry. And he continues to be their vocal leader. Kawhi Leonard is not much of a vocal leader, as he plays more of the role of "silent assassin". LeBron, on the other hand, is like an on-the-court coach. You would see him passing the ball to other players, such as Kyle Kuzma, Danny Green, Alex Caruso, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, and allowing them to get on their rhythm. He understands that it is a team game, and not just about him and Anthony Davis. If the Clippers are looking to make a deep run or a championship run, they need to understand that they need everyone to produce, not just Leonard and Paul George.

Defense was Not as Good as It was Hyped Up to Be

    Before the season, people were saying that the Clippers have the best defensive players in the league, and even went as far as saying that Leonard and George are the new Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen! That was straight up disrespectful to MJ and Pippen. In the end, we saw the light: The Clippers were not as good defensively as we all thought they were supposed to be.

    Leonard is not as good defensively as he was back when he was with the San Antonio Spurs. The truth is that Leonard is better defensively when he was asked to do less offensively. When the Spurs had Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili running the offense, Leonard was better defensively. But when he came to the Clippers, he was asked to do everything on the court - being a scorer, a defender, and a leader. Can you expect someone to do EVERYTHING if he is already injury-prone? When he was in Toronto, he wasn't asked to do any of that. Offensively, everyone on the 2019 Raptors was more involved than the 2020 Clippers, and defensively, they were even better. People were talking about how he put Giannis Antetokounmpo on clamps during the 2019 Eastern Conference Finals, but the reality is that it was all a team effort. With the Clippers, it was all "Leonard and George or bust."

    Russell Westbrook was right about Patrick Beverley all along: Beverley is overrated defensively. He is better in terms of the mental game, but defensively, when standing in front of another player, guarding them, he's not the guy.

    The Clippers may have beat the Dallas Mavericks in the 1st round, but it was in ugly and unconvincing fashion: They gave up 109.8 points per game in that series, the worst out of any team advancing to the 2nd round. Luka Doncic averaged 31.0 points per game in that series, and Kristaps Porzingis averaged 23.7. Tim Hardaway Jr., Seth Curry, Trey Burke, and Dorian Finney-Smith also had field days during that series. When the Clippers faced the Nuggets in the 2nd round, Nikola Jokic averaged 24.4 points per game, and Jamal Murray had 40 points in Game 7. One can even argue that if Porzingis played the full 1st round series, the Clippers might not even have made it to the 2nd round.

All Bark, No Bite

    The worst part of all this? The Clippers talked a lot of trash during the season. They tried to look like they are tough with all the trash talk they made, to the point where they convinced almost all of the sports media that they were championship contenders. It's almost as if they felt entitled to a championship run. Patrick Beverley tweeted out "Don't talk to me" after the Clippers got Leonard and George. He would later mock Portland Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard with "Cancun on 3" jokes. But when the Clippers blew their 3-1 lead against the Nuggets, Lillard got the last laugh. In short, they went from being the bad boys on the court back to being the walking joke of the NBA in the matter of one playoff series.

What Do They Do Now?

    This kind of failure is not easy to recover from. Despite hiring Lue as their head coach, they have three of their players headed for free agency: Harrell, Morris, and Green. And the horrific truth: Two big name players aren't going to carry their team to win a championship that easily. You need to have a coach that can implement a system that works for the rest of the team. That's what Nick Nurse did with the Raptors. The Clippers could learn from their mistakes from this season and improve upon that with a more cohesive approach to their defense. They have a full offseason to rest up and get healthy so that they have enough time to mesh the core of players they have together. Tyronn Lue knows that the Clippers have the talent to get it done, but it will take the time and the health to have them reach their full potential.