Clippers' $42 Million Gamble on Jamal Crawford's 'Crazy Style' Looks Genius
LOS ANGELES — Seventeen years into Jamal Crawford's NBA career, the league has long since sorted out the telltale signs of an approaching scoring explosion. Crawford himself isn't shy to share his gunslinging secrets.
"You can always tell if I'm in rhythm by the way I'm handling the ball," he offered. "Even if I'm not doing anything, when I just move around with the ball in my hands, I get in the game."
For all their foresight, his opponents can't always stop what they see coming. Crawford knows better than most how to turn into a hurricane on the hardwood at a moment's notice.
On Monday, the Boston Celtics saw firsthand what Crawford, just shy of his 37th birthday, can still do. Basketball's Benjamin Button went ballistic, erasing most of a double-digit deficit and pulling the Los Angeles Clippers ahead for good in what wound up a 116-102 win for his club.
Not even Crawford's own home-state disciples could stifle him.
"Once he makes one," Celtics All-Star and fellow Washingtonian Isaiah Thomas said, "he's in a rhythm."
And once he makes two, Crawford might try just about anything. Like launching on the run, from nearly 30 feet, and catching even his longtime coach off-guard.
"Jamal is telling me 2-for-1 on the one," Doc Rivers recounted. "I said yes, but I thought it was going to be a pick-and-roll and then he launches it and it goes in. It ended up being a 2-for-1, but not the one that I thought we were going to get."
"I could see it in his eyes, he had the confidence, especially once he hit the three on me," said Celtics guard Avery Bradley, a native of Tacoma, Washington. "I could see it in his bounce when he had the ball in his hands."
"It was a little deeper, but when you zone out, you don't even see the lines," Crawford said. "It's just like, 'OK, I'm in range, let it go.' And that was it.
"Luckily it went in."
That barrage—part of a 19-point, five-assist night for Crawford—transformed L.A.'s flickering third-quarter flame into a towering 43-16 inferno of a run. Two nights earlier, Crawford came through with a similar ignition (25 points on 10-of-17 shooting) to spark the Clippers to victory in Chicago—on the second night of a back-to-back, following a stretch of four games during which he averaged just 5.5 points.
"We joke because I always say, 'Give yourself a shooter's chance,'" Rivers said following that 101-91 win over the Bulls. "If you don't shoot it, you have no chance of breaking out of it."
Crawford has never been shy to shoot. He ranks among the top 60 all-time in regular-season field-goal attempts, including an NBA-best 50 career four-point plays, per the Los Angeles Times' Broderick Turner.
"I shoot it when the defense isn't really expecting it, like 'There's no way he's shooting it,'" he explained. "By the time they try to react, I'm already in a shooting motion and that's when the contact comes."
But Crawford's penchant for drawing fouls on the fly doesn't do his efficiency any favors. If anything, the difficulty of his atypical attempts contributes to dry spells that can carry from game to game, if not sometimes week to week.
"I play a crazy style of game," Crawford admitted. "It's not good for analytics or anything, but it works for me."
| 0-2 Feet | 13.7% | 1.5 | 38.8% |
| 2-4 Feet | 47.6% | 5.2 | 46.9% |
| 4-6 Feet | 30.0% | 3.3 | 52.9% |
| 6+ Feet | 8.7% | 0.9 | 46.7% |
It can also be a boon to the Clippers. Few things work fans in the stands into a lather quite like a Crawford scoring binge.
"I think the biggest thing, if you even pay attention to the crowd, the crowd gets into it more for some reason," Chris Paul said. "On our team, I think Jamal's energy is contagious."
At times, he has a knack for spreading his hot hand around to his teammates. With the ball on his string, Crawford can set up easy opportunities once opposing defenses key in on him. He took full advantage of the Celtics' red alert from the third quarter by dropping dimes to DeAndre Jordan in the fourth.
"Now teams can't just load up on him," Blake Griffin said. "Now they have to figure out how to play him."
Some teams might not tolerate a player of Crawford's shot profile. In a league where sharpshooting is more the rule than the exception, his percentages (41.1 percent from the field, 35.3 percent from three) make him more of an outlier than he was back when the mid-range was all the rage.
Among 104 players who've averaged at least 10 shots per game this season, he ranks 93rd in field-goal percentage but second only to 38-year-old Dirk Nowitzki in age. He and Nowitzki are the only players over 36 in that shooting category, and if he keeps it up, Crawford will become just the 34th player in NBA history to try 10 or more field goals a night at his age or older.
The secret to Crawford's longevity? No blood spinning or magical elixirs. As he told Hollywood Hoops, it comes down to clean eating, clean living and playing the game he loves every day in any way he can.
"He's one of those guys that's just going to be hooping forever," Paul said. "Regardless of whether it's NBA, if it's lunchtime ball at somebody's local YMCA, he's going to find a game."
| Dirk Nowitzki | 38 | 12.4 | 47.4% | 13.6 |
| Jamal Crawford | 36 | 10.9 | 47.6% | 12.4 |
| Dwyane Wade | 35 | 16.4 | 45.8% | 18.9 |
| Zach Randolph | 35 | 13.1 | 47.3% | 14.3 |
This past summer, the Clippers inked him to the most lucrative yearly salary of his career—a total of $42 million over three seasons. They have seen up close what Crawford can do when he's allowed to play his way: 22 points in Game 7 of Round 1 against the Golden State Warriors in 2014; 16 points in Game 7 of Round 1 against the San Antonio Spurs and 21 points in Game 1 (without Paul) of Round 2 opposite the Houston Rockets in 2015; 32 points to nearly lead L.A. to victory without Paul or Griffin in a Game 6 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers in Round 1 last spring.
"There's not really a time where...you don't think the next shot's going in," Griffin said. "You're just kind of waiting for it to happen."
Crawford's confidence isn't irrational, not after becoming the fourth player to score 50 points for three different NBA teams, and certainly not after opening his own club as the league's first three-time Sixth Man of the Year.
The Clippers will need more of that swagger (and shotmaking) from Crawford to survive another Western Conference gauntlet this spring. For all that Paul, Griffin, Jordan and J.J. Redick do to form the team's core, it's Crawford who's best-suited to be L.A.'s not-so-secret weapon, one of the few who can win (and has won) a playoff game seemingly on his own.
"I think one of the best decisions I've made when I took this job," Doc Rivers said, "is decided never to tell Jamal 'bad shot' ever because I think a guy like that, you've got to let him do what he does."
All quotes obtained firsthand. All stats and salary information via NBA.com and Basketball Reference unless otherwise noted.
Josh Martin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and listen to his Hollywood Hoops podcast with B/R Lakers lead writer Eric Pincus.
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