What many didn't consider at the time was that Rivers was not only coming to the club to be its head coach, but to also take the lead in all basketball operations. Being an NBA head coach is a full-time job, as is being an NBA general manager. Tasking one man with doing both jobs is a huge undertaking, but part of the allure for Rivers to come to Los Angeles was the complete control aspect.
Rivers is far from the first man to wear both hats at the same time. The two most famous examples have been Pat Riley in Miami and Gregg Popovich in San Antonio. Former Clipper head man Mike Dunleavy did the double duty, as well. Riley's stint with both jobs went fairly well for the Heat, and included a championship in 2006. Popovich was the Spurs' GM before naming himself head coach early in the 1996-97 season. He led the team to a title in 1999 as the team's coach and GM, but ceded his GM duties to R.C. Buford in 2002 after acknowledging that holding both positions was too much for him to handle. Unlike Rivers, however, both Riley and Popovich had experience as general managers prior to assuming both roles simultaneously.
Today, only Rivers and Detroit's Stan Van Gundy serve as both head coach and president of basketball operations. Rivers led the Clippers to a franchise-record 57 wins in his first season in look like the same team. They're not passing the eye test. They're still winning a good amount of games, but something's out of wack.
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| Doc Rivers Photo Credit - shaka/Wikimedia Commons |
Rivers may have inherited a roster with good star power, but the rest of the team had some holes. Outside of Griffin, Paul and Jordan, anyone on the team was essentially expendable. He took this job with zero front office experience, so building a roster was always going to require a bit of a learning curve. Unfortunately, so far, that's been abundantly clear.
Since Rivers took over, here's a complete list of players the Clippers have acquired: J.J. Redick, Jared Dudley, Darren Collison, Stephen Jackson, Byron Mullens, Antawn Jamison, Maalik Wayns, Sasha Vujacic, Danny Granger, Glen Davis, Hedo Turkoglu, Spencer Hawes, Jordan Farmar, C.J. Wilcox, Carlos Delfino, Miroslav Raduljica, Chris Douglas-Roberts, Ekpe Udoh, Joe Ingles, Austin Rivers, Dahntay Jones.
To be fair, Rivers hasn't really had a ton of wriggle room with the team essentially capped-out already, but the majority of those players are underwhelming, to say the least. With the Paul-Griffin-Jordan triumvirate eating up over 76% of the team's cap space, Rivers would be hard-pressed to make anything but incremental improvements to the roster without dealing any of those three players.
However, perhaps the most concerning aspect about Rivers' GM performance thus far has been his willingness to jettison future draft picks. Sure, the Clippers are in a "win now" mode, and typically draft choices, particularly for 50-plus win teams, rarely provide much of an immediate boost. But at some point the lack of infusion of young players is going to come back to haunt them. And if the Clippers aren't able to win a title in the interim, it'll look all the more ugly.
Per RealGM.com, the Clippers owe a lot of upcoming draft picks to a lot of other teams. Their 2015 first-rounder is Boston's as a part of the trade to bring Doc to town. They also owe two 2015 second-rounders to Denver and the Lakers, respectively, their 2016 second-rounder to Cleveland, their 2017 first-rounder to Milwaukee (Dudley trade), their 2017 second-rounder to Boston (Austin Rivers trade), and their 2018 second-rounder to Philadelphia. Building via the draft is essentially a non-option for LAC in the next few years.
As Seth Partnow points out here, asking one person to be both a head coach and a front office executive is incredibly taxing from a time perspective. Rivers having to spend time coaching the team in practices and games, among everything else that goes into gameplanning, takes away from the time he has to perform many typical GM duties, such as scouting and evaluating talent around the league. He surely has plenty of help around him, but in any transaction, one would imagine Rivers has the final say.
Of course, none of this is to say that Rivers can't get better. As with anything, if you spend enough time doing something, you're probably going to improve over time if you put in enough effort. As a head coach, Rivers has improved tremendously since first breaking-in as Orlando's head man back in 1999.
But can the Clippers really wait for Rivers to improve his personnel decision-making? As mentioned just above, their core roster talent has them in position to be trying to win today, not tomorrow. It may still be too early to deem the Rivers-as-GM operation a failure, but the clock's ticking. Their saving grace may be the notion that the league's salary cap is expected to make a huge jump over the next few years, thanks to the new lucrative television contract. Some early projections have the cap rising all the way to nearly $92 million by the 2016-17 season, which is obviously a significant jump given this season's cap of about $63M.
So, unlike today, there should be a boatload of cap space coming the Clippers' (and every other team's) way over the next couple of years. LAC isn't currently in a position to add anyone truly significant via free agency, but that's soon to change. However, they have some important decisions to make before the projected cap leap even comes around.
For example, DeAndre Jordan is currently in the final year of his contract. He's on the books for just over $11 million this season, but he's a 26-year-old defensive-minded, über-athletic rebounding machine. The line will form to the left with teams willing to offer D.J. a substantial raise this summer, and if they're smart, the Clippers will be right at the front of said line. As per the aforementioned projected cap hike, L.A. should feel fairly comfortable paying Jordan a boatload of money while maintaining plenty of future financial flexibility.
Rivers' latest move to bring in his own son is the most curious decision he's made this side of the offseason's Jared Dudley salary dump. Austin Rivers was a lottery pick by the Pelicans a couple of years ago, but has shown little since then in terms of being an actual NBA-caliber talent. There's no questioning his athleticism, but he seems to be lacking in just about every offensive statistical area. He's super young, of course (22), but, once again, now is the time the Clippers need to be doing their winning. Trading too much (Reggie Bullock and a pick) to get a project backup point guard while jettisoning Jordan Farmar almost completely flies in the face of the "win now" idea. Farmar was far from great, but he at least provided L.A. a bit of shooting off-the-bench. Austin Rivers has shot just under 33% from deep in his short career so far.
Again, time will tell whether or not Doc Rivers is cut-out to be a coach and a general manager at the same time. We knew after doling-out $2 billion just to purchase the team that Steve Ballmer would be the polar opposite in terms of frugality of the team's previous owner, so perhaps those deep pockets will prove beneficial to Rivers' GM performance in the future.
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