I did find the article a little uneven. For some teams, he went into great detail with stats, charts and videos to support his points.
For other teams, he just seemed to mail it in:
"Los Angeles Clippers
They were emotionally drained and couldn't take down the Oklahoma City Thunder in the second round of the 2014 playoffs after bouncing the Warriors in the middle of the Donald Sterling scandal. They surprised everybody by beating the San Antonio Spurs in 2015 before collapsing in the next round after going up 3-1 on the Rockets. This past postseason, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin both suffered series-ending injuries in Game 4 against the Portland Trail Blazers after being up 2-1 in the series. They were bounced in six games.
Stop losing in weird ways, Clippers. Also, Chuck the Condor probably has to go."
What are you supposed to do with that. Ditch the mascot and tell your players not to get injured at the wrong time?
A better analysis would have been to discuss their lack of depth. This has been a problem for the Clippers for years, but it is somewhat masked by Jamal Crawford, once again, winning the 6th man of the year. You would think with the "best" 6th man in the league, you'd have a good bench. They don't, and Crawford may have won the award, but he is nowhere near the best 6th man in the league and nowhere near the player he was even just two seasons prior (when he also won the award, and at least kinda, sorta maybe might have deserved it).
It's interesting that the only advanced stats basketball-reference includes in their
6th man of the year voting page are Win Shares and Win Shares/48. Yeah, it's hard to capture a player's impact in a single stat, but you'd think the player people voted as the best 6th man in the league would at least have respectable advanced stats. Crawford didn't. Of the top 8 vote getters, Crawford had the worst WS and WS/48. Compared to some other 6th men (Enes Kanter and Dale Davis), Crawford's production was woefully insufficient. But, he's a volume scorer with a reputation as one of the best 6th men in the league, so voters evidently didn't bother to look at how inefficient his scoring was and how little he contributed in other ways.
If you sort the 2016 SMOY vote getters by WS, Crawford comes in 16th. If you sort them by WS/48, he's 17th.
It's not like he totally sucks, but at this point in his career he is an inefficient high volume chucker. He's always been a high volume chucker, but his efficiency has taken a substantial hit the last two years. At this point, he's an average 6th man. He just looks good, because outside of the Clippers best 4 starters, they seriously lack quality players. In fact, while he's technically a 6th man, Crawford was 3rd on the team in minutes played. Part of that was due to injuries, but it also speaks to their lack of depth.
Luc Mbah a Moute, with a PER = 7.3 had the second lowest PER of any player in the league that started at least 50 games. His pitiful production made Noah Vonleh look like a quality starter. The difference being, the Clippers didn't have any better options, and as we saw late in the year and during the playoffs, the Blazers had much better players they could start in place of the 20-year old Vonleh.
The Clippers tried to address their lack of depth last off season by bringing in veterans like Paul Pierce, Josh Smith, Lance Stevenson, Cole Aldrich and later Jeff Green. Aldrich is the only one who played well. Smith and Stevenson didn't even make it through the season. Green and Aldrich are gone, and if Paul Pierce hasn't retired, he should. He only played because of Blake Griffin's injury and was just as bad as Mbah a Moute. They had a shallow bench to begin with and it has gotten worse (and older).
And, this ties into the author's point about losing in the playoffs in "weird" ways. Maybe, if they didn't rely so heavily on their 4 best players, they wouldn't blow 3-1 series leads and get injured so much during the post season. And, it's not just a minutes thing, it's what those players are asked to do during those minutes. Chris Paul always has the ball in his hands on offense when he's in the game, and with the number of great PGs in the West, he's also going all out on defense on every play at the other end. He simply can't take plays off at either end if the Clippers hope to win. All that wear and tear eventually catches up with them.
At this point, they have 4 quality starters and a horribly thin bench - and DeAndre Jordan is the only one of those 4 starters that seems to be reasonably durable. Unless they add some significant depth, they will continue to lose in "weird" ways when it matters most.
BNM
