Los Angeles Clippers Grammy Trip Panic
- Updated: February 11, 2015
Lets call it as it is, that is as bad as that grammy road trip could have gone for the Los Angeles Clippers. Blake Griffin is out for an extended period with a staph infection and elbow surgery, JJ Redick is having back problems again and we went 3-5. But, just for the sake of our sanity lets backtrack a little bit.
Last season at the beginning of January Chris Paul went down with a separated shoulder and missed extended time, this forced Blake Griffin to keep the team afloat and thats exactly what he did. Griffin became the player we all knew he could be and rode that momentum to finishing third in the MVP race. Who is going to step up this time?
DeAndre Jordan just took his first step at filling that role with his massive 22 point, 27 rebound performance against Dallas on Monday night. Chris Paul wasn’t exactly a slouch either with 25 points along with 13 assists and 6 rebounds. Jamal Crawford dumped in 22 points off the bench and the team rolled along just fine without Griffin in Dallas. In Oklahoma City though, not so much as the Clippers fell 131-108 and it seemed worse than that believe it or not.
Lets get back into the present now and talk about what the Clippers can do to fill the void left by Griffin’s absence over the next few weeks. Replacing him with Spencer Hawes, this is my favorite option for a number of reasons. It gives the Clippers a bigger lineup and another perimeter shooter. Also the hope is that Hawes will be able to use this stage to catapult himself into the form we all expected from him when he signed last summer. This is what Doc Rivers did in Oklahoma City and although the results in the game were poor, Hawes played decently with 17 points, but only one rebound in 35 minutes.
The second option is to use a variety of the Clippers bigs to attempt to fill the gap. In other words Hedo Turkoglu, Spencer Hawes, Glen Davis and the ever-absent Ekpe Udoh would have to jointly replace the All-Star Griffin. I’m not a big fan of this option. It’s like rotating quarterbacks in football, the chemistry can never get set and it might work in the short-term but over a long period this can cause more problems than it solves. In the 115-98 win over Dallas, Rivers used this option getting Hawes just 14 minutes, Turkoglu 19, Davis only 3 which I’m sure was just being cautious due to injury concern and then none for Udoh but that’s the norm as of now. Turkoglu was the top performer of the group with 4 rebounds and 9 points.
Suddenly the scariest of things this team can do is to look to free agency, at least after the rumors that circulated in Clipper Land after the loss to OKC. Sebastian Telfair and Amar’e Stoudemire have been the names mentioned the most. Lets start with Stoudemire before we enter the trainwreck that Telfair would be. Stoudemire has underperformed to put it nicely since he signed his big one-hundred million dollar contract, whether it be injury or just poor play he has struggled. Telfair has struggled his entire career and was released by the Thunder earlier this year, also the point guard position is not the need for concern to the Clippers right now with Griffin going down so I must say I don’t really understand this move.
With all of this going on just let me say, lets not get emotional people. I know the popular thing to do at this point is to sound the alarms and scream “Everybody Panic” like we’re all Jackie Moon and a bear was just released into the grandstands (Semi-Pro reference). But, just to keep things in perspective the Clippers are 34-19 and very much still in the playoff picture. Not to mention with the All-Star break coming up Griffin will have a long break to recover and not miss games for the team. So please take a deep breath everyone, lets not blow a difficult grammy trip out of proportion, it will all be fine.
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