In Rivers We Trust

By Connor Aylward
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Updated: March 13, 2015

If there was one thing most Clipper fans could fix about this team, both before and during this season it would be to relieve Doc Rivers of his General Manager responsibilities and allow him to focus solely on coaching. I have just one question for those fans. Why?

Doc may not have made a flurry of moves that made a whole bunch of sense to everybody, but can we truly say he has hurt the team with his moves? Trading Dudley and a first round pick for what has basically equated to two stretched contracts and wasted cap space was a mistake, I think even Doc would admit that at this point. Could the Clippers have used that first round pick during the trade deadline to bring in the missing piece that brings this whole team together? Maybe. But it seems like all of Docs “little” transactions are starting to come together.

Recent additions of Austin Rivers, Dahntay Jones, Jordan Hamilton and Nate Robinson are looking to have paid off. I’ll be the first to admit that I was wrong about Austin Rivers, his hustle on the defensive side and his ability to put the ball in the bucket on offense has been a great addition to the depth of a very shallow Clipper bench. Jones has come on as a bench leader and a great chemistry player for the team which is often overlooked but is absolutely important for a team with deep playoff expectations like this one. Hamilton has shown his ability to fill in at the ever struggling Small Forward spot and in the few games we have had a chance to watch Robinson he has given the Clippers exactly what we should have expected from him, hustle.

After Wednesday night’s thrashing of Oklahoma City it seems very easy to find all of the things this team has been doing well. Thanks to Clippers Assistant Coach Sam Cassell telling Chris Paul to get more aggressive and score more buckets fans got to see the “Point God” in fantastic form as he put together 33 points and 9 assists in the 120-108 drubbing. DeAndre Jordan has been putting up numbers that have people talking about him as the team’s most important player and since he plays with two all-stars in Paul and Blake Griffin I think that says all it needs to about his play thus far in the absence of Griffin.

In the NBA, it is very easy to get either too high or too low on how well your team is doing based on their last game so I’ll try not to get too jazzed up after the Thunder game. Is the Clippers bench not as strong as it should be to compete in a tough Western Conference? Absolutely. Should every Clipper fan start running up to Thunder fans and yelling “in your face!” because of how CP3 shut down the streaking Russell Westbrook Wednesday night? Probably not until we prove we can do it in the playoffs. But, the win against the Thunder was a step in the right direction for a Clippers team that has for the most part underachieved this season given the high expectations most fans had for them.

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