The depth and diversity of the LA Clippers’ well-constructed roster has made them 2019-20 NBA title favourites. Do they possess an Achilles heel? And, if so, is it an exploitable weakness?
In the process of dismantling the 'Lob City' teams built around Blake Griffin, Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan, the LA Clippers were at pains to get both quality and quantity for their outgoing star talents. It was not possible in the case of Jordan, who left as a free agent. But in the trades of Griffin and Paul, the front office yielded plenty of quality players and assets.
'Quality' does not in this context mean players who could potentially be the best or second-best player on championship-winning teams. Those players are almost never available in trade, especially not when trading for older stars.
The Clippers nevertheless did acquire plenty of players who could have been valuable contributors on a contender, had they been one, along with valuable draft assets. And even those whom they have since re-traded were able to get yet more quality pieces.
There is of course not much point in having a vast wealth of decent-to-good players if there is no path to a title without the required stars. All their good players last year saw the Clippers win 48 regular-season games, a good total but a couple of levels short of title contention.
The extremely quick turnaround on the rebuild, however, saw them get maximum cap room this past summer, which in turn allowed them to sign Kawhi Leonard, on the condition that they could also simultaneously trade for Paul George. And all the stockpiled draft assets and quality pieces allowed them to do exactly that, with plenty still in reserve.
What this now means is that the Clippers have the best of both worlds. They have two of the top 10 or 20 players in the NBA, two superstars who bring it on both ends and whose quality is beyond reproach at this point. And they also have a plethora of good-quality players elsewhere on the roster who can serve as a supporting cast.
This is not one of those situations - LeBron James his first stint in Cleveland, Anthony Davis with New Orleans, Kevin Garnett with the Minnesota Timberwolves for so long - where a superstar player toils away under the radar and out of the competitive cycle because the team has nothing to pair them with. The Clippers got most of the garnish before they had even chosen the main dish, and yet now they have potentially the perfect meal.
Patrick Beverley, Lou Williams, Montrezl Harrell, Landry Shamet, Ivica Zubac, JaMychal Green. All six of them with the Clippers last year, big parts of the 48-win total. All still there, bumped two spots down the hierarchy but only because of the brilliance of those above them. All extremely well-equipped to be quality players on a contending team.
Maurice Harkless and Rodney McGruder. Two new additional versatile defensive players to go with that.
Somehow, despite the higher-level salary cap machinations that they went through, the Clippers were still able to find the salary cap space to take on Harkless from the Portland Trail Blazers for free, and re-signed McGruder, a player added to the roster for the very final days of last season while out injured purely so they could have his Bird rights to retain him this summer.
It worked a treat; in both cases, the foresight to acquire the depth came through once again.
Even the end of the bench has upside. With the possible exception of Patrick Patterson - potentially the best stretch big shooting option on the team albeit a player coming off two very limited seasons hampered by a bad knee that looks not to ever be improving - the bench is not merely padded out with veterans with pseudo-valuable contributions like so many other new contenders in their first season have. Jerome Robinson, Mfiondu Kabngele and Terrence Mann are players with genuine upside.
The fact that Leonard and George are such good players on both ends of the court means it is difficult to identify shortcomings within the roster as constructed.
In the backcourt, for example, they can have either the defensive dominance of Patrick Beverley, or the offensive dominance of perennial bench shooting star Lou Williams. Or both. Alternatively, they can have the defensive instincts, rebounding and cutting of McGruder, or the incredibly potent shooting option that is Shamet. Or both. Or some combination of the two pairs. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
By having a roster packed mostly with versatile two-way players - and even those who only really play well on one end are sufficiently good at that end to merit time anyway - the Clippers have plentiful line-up options that they can run out at opponents. The idea of a Beverly/Williams/George/Leonard/Harrell clutch time line-up is particularly salivating.
Nevertheless, opposing teams will always look to pick on the weakest links in the rotation. No one area of the Clippers' depth chart is weak, per all the above, yet no roster is completely balanced throughout. And perhaps for the Clippers, the most exploitable area is at the biggest spot on the roster.
Despite standing only 6ft 8in, Harrell almost exclusively plays the center spot. He plays it extremely well - having added greater offensive skill last season, he became one of the best reserves in the league on both ends of the court, and it is only because of the unique unicorn brilliance of Williams alongside him that he somehow was not even the best reserve on his own team.
But Harrell rarely shoots jump shots and is best at playing defense around the basket as well, thus making him much more of a player at the center spot than a power forward.
By contrast, Zubac is certainly big enough at 7ft 1in, and has offensive talent to go with that. Almost all of it comes at the basket; creating angles, ceiling, catching and finishing, rolling to the rim and taking some post-up touches. He is asked to defend the back line of the defense, too. Yet he is foul-prone and struggles when pulled away from the basket.
In the first-round playoff series last year against the Golden State Warriors - a team able to play Draymond Green at center and who did so for most of that series - the ill-fitting Zubac was deemed somewhat surplus to requirements, a mismatch in a negative way against Green and thus leaving the bench only for dreg minutes by the end of the series.
In theory, the Clippers could also go small with JaMychal Green (who spent the majority of last season at center split between his time with the Clippers and the Memphis Grizzlies) or Patterson at center.
Green is strong, mobile and physical, and started in Zubac's absence against the Warriors, always willing to take on the fight. But he simply lacks size and length for a center, while Patterson, also built like a power forward except with little mobility and leap any longer, gives up perennial rebounding disadvantages and does not protect the rim particularly well.
What this all means in combination is that, whereas they can entirely match up in the backcourt and on the wings, the Clippers do not have the same luxury at the five spot.
To come through the Western Conference, they will have to come through the line-ups with Draymond in them, the Denver Nuggets with Nikola Jokic at the five spot, and the versatile wizardry of Anthony Davis for the Lakers. Jokic and big skilled centers like him (Joel Embiid, Karl-Anthony Towns, etc) could expose a Clippers weakness - unless Zubac, the only big in the rotation with the size to defend these players, grows quickly on the defensive and can play an effective containing role, the Clippers as constructed may face an innate disadvantage in key potential playoff series.
The repercussion of the NBA's general gravitation towards smaller and quicker centers is that those who remain with paint size and instincts are generally now very skilled. The small ball did not get rid of the center spot - instead, it got rid of the unskilled centers, those seven-footers who would have decent rebounding rates and occasionally block a shot but who covered little ground, had even less offensive skill, fouled a lot and who were only ever stacked four-deep on a roster because Shaquille O'Neal needed to be guarded.
Those players have gone. But behemoth skilled bigs in the Jokic/Towns/Embiid roles, as well as defensive wizards such as Rudy Gobert, Al Horford and Steven Adams, and young skilled athletes such as Bam Adebayo, Jarrett Allen and Mitchell Robinson, make for a center position league-wide that is in absolutely no way shallow.
It is very different and more diversified, and although the Clippers have different looks they can throw out, so do the opposition.
So there, that is one tertiary need that may not have been fully addressed. But in a two-year team-building cycle so full of wins, it is small potatoes.
If the harshest criticism we can find of a team's offseason is that they perhaps should have signed 34-year-old Joakim Noah over Patrick Patterson for a minimum salary contract at the end of the rotation, then they must have done a lot of things right.