Can Los Angeles Clippers Recover from Failed Spencer Hawes Experiment?
Spencer Hawes entered this season as the plug to the Los Angeles Clippers' perpetual hole at the third big man spot. Unfortunately, he hasn't done much more than his predecessors.
From a pure basketball perspective, Hawes seemed like a reasonable fit for the Clippers this offseason. Actually, it's possible he could've gotten more money at other places.
Hawes was going to be the breed of player who could play alongside DeAndre Jordan or Blake Griffin, mostly because of his ability to step out and shoot the three. He drained 42 percent of his long balls last year with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Philadelphia 76ers. And while Hawes has run alongside both of the Clippers' starting big men, it hasn't been a success.
Not even close.
Lineups with Hawes and Griffin are actually getting outscored by 3.2 points per 100 possessions. Ones with Hawes and Jordan, meanwhile, are getting outscored by 2.5 points per 100. This is a team with one of the best net ratings in the NBA, and it's being bested in common big-man combinations that involve Hawes.
He's not making his threes (33 percent on the season), and defenses are happy to help off him because of it—along with his slow release. Lineups with Hawes and Griffin have been, at times, unplayable on the defensive end because of the lack of rim-protection and rotational awareness.
The argument at first was that Hawes wasn't cozy playing significantly fewer minutes than he did a season ago. If he got more minutes, Hawes supporters might argue, then he'd be more likely to produce at a high level.
"When you're a starter you can count on coming in and the game kind of works itself out for you," said Hawes, via Ben Bolch of the L.A. Times. "I think I have to do a better job of being more assertive coming in off the bench and trying to grab ahold of it as opposed to just kind of letting yourself ease into it."
Except Hawes hasn't proven to be much different in the three games he's started since Griffin went down with an elbow injury. Save for a hot first quarter against the Oklahoma City Thunder, it's all looked about the same.
"He has to play better to play more," Doc Rivers said of Hawes, via Bolch. "Minutes are earned, they're not just given out like cookies."
The Clippers' best way to save themselves from the inappropriately long four-year Hawes deal would just be to find a way to get out of it, but clearly, that's easier said than done.
Common sense break: It's generally harder to trade overpaid players on long deals because teams don't want overpaid players on long deals. [Cease common sense break.]
Hawes' contract has put the Clippers in quite the predicament. Because the team used its full mid-level exception on the former Cavalier, along with the biannual exception on Jordan Farmar, it meant the signings would trigger a rule which would hard-cap the Clips for the 2014-15 season. This eventually led to Rivers waving goodbye to Jared Dudley and a first-round pick in a cap-clearing deal so his team could fill out the rest of the roster.
Banishing Hawes from town, regardless of what Rivers got back for him, would possibly make the Clippers' hard-capping all for nothing, but that shouldn't necessarily be the point.
First off, the Clips already made the road to hard-capping themselves irrelevant when they waived Farmar back on Jan. 16, wasting the ever-cherished biannual exception in the process. Secondly, continuing to move forward with a bad deal out of stubbornness is no way for an NBA front office—nay, any business—to operate.
It's certainly plausible Hawes bounces back from his down 54 games to begin the season. Plausible.
He did become a legitimate threat from three in the pick-and-pop a season ago, and he got particularly hot in the second half of the year, shooting 46 percent from long range after Feb. 24. Maybe that can be a trend for a guy searching for any sort of positive reinforcement.
If Hawes starts hitting his threes, then his value immediately changes, which is even more needed now with Griffin's elbow surgery keeping him out for at least a couple more weeks.
A 7-footer who can drain shots from beyond the arc is a matchup nightmare almost regardless of his adjacent flaws. But at the moment, Hawes' problems aren't on the periphery. They're at the forefront, the first traits of his that viewers see when turning on FOX Prime Ticket to watch the Clippers play.
It's not like Hawes' deal is debilitating, even if it does run for another three undesirable seasons after this one. $5.7 million a year on average will seem noticeably less once the cap rises from the current $63 million to more than $80 million for the final two years of the contract. But the disconcerting part is that we haven't seen signs of a turnaround.
Sure, there's been the sporadic showing when Hawes gets hot. Maybe he'll hit a few threes in a game. But his fit on this roster seems unexpectedly uncomfortable. The Clippers aren't as affected in the long term as it may initially seem, but you can bet they're still anxiously awaiting returns on their $22 million investment.
Fred Katz averaged almost one point per game in fifth grade but maintains that his per-36-minute numbers were astonishing. Find more of his work on ESPN's TrueHoop Network at ClipperBlog.com. Follow him on Twitter at @FredKatz.
Unless otherwise noted, all statistics are current as of Feb. 17 and are courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com.
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