Everyone wants to know what’s going to happen for the LA Clippers moving forward. We take a look at 5 pressing questions for the team under Ty Lue.
Going into next season with a new head coach in Ty Lue, things are going to look very different for the LA Clippers. We’ve all got a million questions, and the next NBA season can’t come quickly enough.
Most of the questions I have are more personnel related: will we make a trade? What does free agency look like? And those are all fun questions to think about.
But I’ve also got a few questions for how Ty Lue is going to run the team, and I’ve brought up 5 of them here. Let’s get started!
LA Clippers Question 1: Can the Clippers stay out of their own way?
This is something we’ve talked about in the past here at Clipperholics; the LA Clippers have got to stop being their own worst enemies next season.
Bev told Steph Curry that “the next 5 years are mine.” Trezz likened himself to Dennis Rodman. In June, speaking to Kevin Hart, PG told us:
"“Immediately, we expected to come in and win it all. We didn’t have no other, like this was going to take a year to get used to one another.”"
After losing, he would remind us that it was never championship or bust this season.
All season long, the Clippers carried themselves like they were going for a threepeat, not trying to make the Western Conference Finals for the first time in franchise history.
Simply put, my question is: Can Ty Lue get this team to get out of their own way, put their heads down and just play basketball at the level we know they’re capable of?
Lue’s known for not being afraid to confront even his star players – remember him famously yelling at LeBron? At halftime of Game 7 in the playoffs, he got into LeBron’s face in the locker room, telling him
"“Stop being so passive! Stop turning the ball over! And guard Draymond!”"
We hope that he’ll bring that to the Clippers, and get this team to do what they’re supposed to do, rather than falling in love with their own hype.
LA Clippers Question 2: Can the Clippers play a consistent four quarters?
This question will probably inform how far the LA Clippers can make it into the playoffs, whenever those are.
Neither the Clippers’ offense nor their defense could seem to play all 4 quarters of the game last year; nowhere was that more visible than in the series against Denver.
Quarter by quarter, here’s how the Clips’ offensive rating ranked against the rest of the NBA last year: 4th, 3rd, 4th, 15th.
The same for defensive rating, quarter by quarter: 13th, 5th, 4th, 4th.
Put another way, in the second and third quarters, the Clippers played like one of the best teams in the league, with a top 5 offense and defense. In the fourth quarter, the offense was less effective than such terrifying attacks as the Cleveland Cavaliers and Indiana Pacers.
Or, put another way, the Sacramento Kings’ offense all game looked better than the 4th quarter LA Clippers offense.
On defense, they played great for three quarters, but came out with a less effective defense than the Knicks and the Nets.
Was that on the players? With guys like Patrick Beverley and Kawhi Leonard in the starting unit, it’s hard to imagine so, but not unthinkable. If so, it’s hard to imagine a whole lot changing.
But if it’s the more likely case, and the fault lies more on coaching and/or preparation, you have to hope to see this change under Ty Lue. Lue’s known for his adjustments and gameplanning against matchups, and if he wants to make a deep run into the playoffs, he’ll have to make sure that the Clippers who showed up in the 2nd and 3rd quarters also show up to start and end games.
LA Clippers Question 3: What kind of pace will the Clippers play at?
There’s an interesting dichotomy between the two LA Clippers stars based on how fast they want to play.
On the one hand, Kawhi Leonard developed under the plodding Spurs, who rarely escaped the bottom five leaguewide in pace.
On the other hand, Paul George, after leaving the grind-it-out Pacers, had a career year playing fast with the Oklahoma City Thunder, who had the 6th highest pace last year.
How will Ty Lue handle this? Historically, Lue has wanted to tailor his rotations to play fast. When he took over as coach of the Cavaliers, they were one of the most grind-it-out teams in the league, playing at the 3rd slowest pace in the league.
But Lue’s influence would take hold. In his second year, the Cavs were league-average at 16th in pace, and in his 3rd and final year, they were 9th in the league. It’s no mean feat to change the pace of play so drastically, and it speaks to how Ty Lue wants to play.
Last year, the Clippers played at the 8th fastest pace in the league, so Lue is inheriting a much different style than he did in Cleveland. The question, then, becomes how happy is Lue with this pace? Is the speed we played at last year acceptable, or does he want to push the limits of how fast this roster can go?
If Lue wants to go at hyper speed, he has the pieces to do it. A lineup that looks like Beverley/Shamet/George/Kawhi/Green doesn’t sacrifice much on defense, and surrounds Kawhi with four guys who all shot at 37.5% or better, letting him immediately capitalize on the first mistake a defense makes.
The point stands if the Clips enter the trade market for a playmaker. Lue can play as fast as he wants; the question is what’s best for Kawhi? Paul George has succeeded to varying degrees when playing fast and playing slow. Last year was Kawhi’s first year at an above average pace.
One of the big questions facing the team as Lue takes over is what pace the coach wants to play at, and what pace works best for this roster.
LA Clippers Question 4: What kind of minutes does Zubac play?
With the LA Clippers, Ty Lue will have a big man whose main job is set screens, make smart decisions in the pick and roll, play defense and grab rebounds.
Sound familiar?
Ivica Zubac‘s role on the team right now is fairly similar to what we saw in Tristan Thompson. And while Zubac is already more of a threat, especially on offense, than Tristan Thompson ever was, he also hasn’t found himself playing the minutes that Thompson did.
Another wrinkle is that Lue played seemed to not want to play TT nearly as much toward the end, leaning away from playing his defensive big a lot of minutes. In Lou’s first season, TT played 28 minutes per game. That went up to 30 in his second season, then cratered to 20 in Lue’s final season.
Of course, Thompson did suffer a calf injury in that season, leading to him missing a chunk of time. But in the 33 games between the calf injury and his subsequent ankle injury, TT eclipsed 30 minutes only 2 times.
Was that part of Lue’s gameplan? Or did it speak to a more effective lineup without Thompson? Or was it as simple as Lue recognizing that TT needed to be eased back in, even after being given a clean bill of health?
If it’s one of the latter two, that’s encouraging for fans of the LA Clippers. If it was injury concerns, then that’s understandable, and if it was a matter of finding the best lineup, we feel great about that from our coach! And the numbers show that Zubac should be getting big minutes anyway, if his condition can stand for it.
If Lue’s gameplan turns out to be shying away from his defensive bigs? We could be seeing more of the same for Zubac next season. I wouldn’t be overly concerned about this, though. Lue is known as a matchups coach, and it’s hard to imagine him ignoring Zubac when he’s the best option.
LA Clippers Question 5: How does staggering minutes affect our stars and role players?
A telling result of Ty Lue implementing a new system will be the change in the rotations for LA Clippers superstars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
In his piece for The Athletic (subscription required), Jovan Buha mentioned that we should be expecting our stars to be staggered more, so we might see a little bit less of Kawhi and PG on the floor at the same time.
What will that look like for our guys? The immediate reaction is that it should serve to get rid of some of those extreme lows that we saw in an all-bench unit.
There’s not a hard and fast statement on how much Lue will want to stagger. It could be as simple as subbing one of Kawhi and PG a couple minutes earlier than the other. Alternatively, he could strive to have one of the two superstars on the court at nearly all times.
If the latter, this could do wonders for our bench guys, and especially our young guys. Tossing a Terance Mann out into a lineup where Kawhi is playing puts a lot less on him than just throwing him to the wolves.
Ditto for guys like Landry Shamet. If Shamet can keep spotting up instead of being asked to run the offense for long stretches, then we’re playing him much more to his strengths.
The final question here is how it works for our stars. Having less time sharing the floor will mitigate the 1-2 punch, and that’ll have positive and negative ramifications.
A guy like PG, who feels (rightfully so) that he can be a number one scoring option will get his chance to prove it. On the other hand, there won’t be another superstar around to play a two-man game with if the shots aren’t falling. Ultimately, you have to feel like, if Lue sees that his rotations aren’t working for the superstars, that’s where the buck stops.
How do you feel like Ty Lue’s Clippers are going to answer these questions? Do you have anything else pressing that you can’t wait to see? Let us know on Twitter or Facebook, and keep following us here!