Although Doc Rivers thinks the opposite, Avery Bradley and Patrick Beverley do not need to be on the court more together for the LA Clippers to succeed.
The LA Clippers dropped their fourth straight game on Wednesday with a match-up against the Golden State Warriors looming tonight. After another game of poor performances, head coach Doc Rivers stated that he thought Avery Bradley and Patrick Beverley need to be on the court more together.
Remember, this duo began the season as the starting backcourt and went 5-4 in their first nine games together. Rookie Shai Gilgeous-Alexander quickly proved his worth and was inserted into the starting position while Bradley was out with an injury and ultimately stayed there while Beverley moved to the bench upon AB’s return.
While this pairing has been moderately successful, the team has looked shoddy in their last few games. Many point to the starting lineups failures in both the first and the second quarter. Doc Rivers realized this as well, leading to the comment about pairing Bradley and Beverley again.
Doc said he thinks Pat and Avery need to play more together.
— Jovan Buha (@jovanbuha) January 17, 2019
Here’s the issue. The two aren’t that great together.
According to NBA.com’s two man lineup advanced statistics, the pairing has a negative rating at -0.2. No, it’s not terrible, but compared to other guard pairings, it isn’t great. In fact, the duo of Beverley and Bradley is the third worst guard pairing (of those with > 200 minutes played) with a rating only higher than the combinations of Lou Williams and Bradley (-4.9) and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Bradley (-9.2). Notice a trend among those?
While we won’t sit here and bash Bradley (we already did that this week), it is hard to argue that playing him more alongside Beverley is the solution. Yes, Doc’s assertion that the starting duo isn’t working is valid. SGA and Bradley offer no spacing on the offensive end. But Bradley is the culprit here, not SGA.
If you didn’t notice, every single two-man lineup (once again, with > 200 minutes) Bradley is featured in has a negative net rating. Meanwhile, Shai has a positive rating with both Beverley and Williams. Perhaps having Shai start with one of those two could lead to better starts for the team with the other being the first off the bench.
Alas, this does not seem to be the likely scenario and we may in fact see Beverley and Bradley start. All of this also ignores the fact that Tyrone Wallace is featured in the team’s top rated guard pairing when partnered with Lou Williams.
The Clippers have solutions to the woeful starts, but it just does not seem like we will get them, at least, not yet.