Doc Rivers Falls Short Shaping Los Angeles Clippers into Title Contenders

Doc Rivers has earned a reputation as a good NBA coach. He's got a ring, he commands respect and his leadership chops are now beyond reproach after the way he stewarded his team through the trying Donald Sterling saga last spring.

But you can't help wondering how much better he might be if personnel decisions weren't constantly making his job harder. Personnel decisions he, the Los Angeles Clippers' president of basketball operations, is making.

The latest such decision is the most eye-opening. Doc just completed a multiplayer deal that will bring his son, Austin Rivers, to Los Angeles, per ESPN.com's Marc Stein: "The trade, sources said, will send Rivers to the Clippers, former L.A. first-round pick Reggie Bullock to the Suns and two players to the Celtics: Phoenix big man Shavlik Randolph and L.A. swingman Chris Douglas-Roberts."

The deal is now official, as reported on Celtics.com.

Stein also reports that in addition to giving up Chris Douglas-Roberts and Reggie Bullock, the Clippers will waive Jordan Farmar to make room on the roster and surrender a 2017 second-round pick.

From the Clips' perspective, it's difficult to justify this deal on any level. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Rivers deal, criticism has ballooned outward, taking this exchange as an opportunity to call Doc's overall performance into question.

Let's focus on Austin for just a moment before taking on the larger questions about Doc's success. A team with a glaring weakness on the wing gave up a pair of players at that position and a 2017 second-round pick to bring in a combo guard with zero track record of NBA success.

Rivers' real plus-minus ranks 86th among qualifying shooting guards this season, per ESPN.com. He's hitting 28 percent of his threes and 38.7 percent of his shots from the field.

In over 3,500 NBA minutes, Rivers has posted a true shooting percentage of 46.2 percent. He's one of just 20 players in the last 30 years to score that ineffectively over that many minutes, per Basketball-Reference.com.

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There is no viable basketball reason to make this trade. Even if you make the nearly impossible argument that Rivers will somehow help the Clippers backcourt, his arrival weakened them at a position that was far more vulnerable to start with.

And it cost them a pick to boot.

Part of the reason for this seemingly senseless trade is that the Clips' transactional hands are tied. They're hard-capped because they used their mid-level and bi-annual exceptions on Spencer Hawes and Farmar, respectively, this past summer, which means they had virtually no wiggle room between their roughly $79 million payroll and the $81 million apron.

It warrants mentioning that the Clips put themselves in that position last summer without addressing their needs on the wing. That's on Doc, too.

Maybe this is where we cut Rivers some slack. Maybe this is where we acknowledge how hard it must be to coach a team and manage personnel decisions. After all, plenty of very smart basketball minds spend all of their time on one job or the other, and they still get things wrong.

That didn't stop new Clippers owner Steve Ballmer from lavishing a massive $50 million contract on Doc and promoting him to his current front-office role. It's tough to expect one guy to handle both gigs effectively. 

Of course, that's precisely why separating the roles of coach and general manager is the norm in the NBA. And when there is no such delineation, it's crucial to have a system of checks and balances in place, one rival GM told ESPN.com's Kevin Arnovitz in December: "You need to have someone you respect who will say, 'No.'"

Dave Wohl is the Clippers general manager. Gary Sacks is his assistant. Rivers isn't working in the front office all alone.

But it would seem those people either won't say, "No" to Rivers, or they're in agreement with him that the moves he's making are wise. I'm not sure which is worse.

Because remember, this latest trade isn't exactly an outlier. It's the most recent example of an alarming pattern of bad swaps and sketchy signings that have compounded on top of one another to rob the Clippers of depth and future flexibility.

A short rundown from D.J. Foster of Clipperblog.com:

Jared Dubin of CBSSports.com dove in as well:

As Dubin notes, the Rivers deal can be traced all the way back to one of Doc's first moves, the ill-fated trade of Eric Bledsoe to the Phoenix Suns:

At the time, Bledsoe was viewed as a luxury behind Chris Paul, one the Clips could jettison for some shooting. But in his time with the Suns, Bledsoe has proved himself to be a max-level combo guard capable of logging minutes as a lead ball-handler or a wing scorer.

Oops.

Despite Doc's wheeling and dealing, the Clippers are still in a decent spot.

Blake Griffin and Chris Paul are still superstars, and DeAndre Jordan is a worthwhile third fiddle. L.A.'s offense continues to hum and its defense, currently a middle-of-the-pack unit, ranked eighth in the league last year. There's little reason to doubt the team's fitness as a fringe title contender—flaws and all.

But depth is a major issue, and Rivers hasn't addressed that need. Losing Bullock, Douglas-Roberts and Farmar isn't a deathblow in a vacuum. But because Farmar is simply a better player than Rivers in a one-to-one comparison, L.A. has basically sacrificed even more depth on the wing in order to make its backcourt worse.

The Clippers won't have a first-rounder this year because that was the price of getting Doc to Los Angeles in the first place. And there's no 2017 first-round pick, either; that's owed to the Milwaukee Bucks as part of the Jared Dudley deal.

Free agency is where Rivers the statesman should shine. Players like and trust him. But who's he going to lure this summer with no money to spend? Jordan will hit the market this July, and the Clippers already have more than $56 million committed to salaries next year. It'll take all of their cap space just to keep the current core intact.

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No flexibility, no help from the draft and ever-dwindling depth: not an ideal recipe for a team trying to contend now and in the future.

That means Doc has no choice but to lean even more on the half of his job he's done well: the coaching half. His other half, the president of basketball operations who keeps giving up assets for insufficient returns, is only making things harder.

I guess that means he won't have anyone to blame but himself if things don't work out.