It had to be a heart-warming sight for Los Angeles Clippers’
coach Vinny Del Negro to see his bench carry the Clippers in their Game 7 road
win versus the Memphis Grizzlies. Watching the Clippers over the course of the
season they have had issues with their depth and things only got worse when
they lost Chauncey Billups to a torn Achilles injury earlier in the season.
But the Clippers were able to address their depth issues by
signing Kenyon Martin and trading for Nick Young from the Washington Wizards.
They are also getting more meaningful minutes from Mo Williams, Eric Bledsoe
and Reggie Evans.
This has been great in terms of getting them past the
Grizzlies but it will be even more important when they face the San Antonio
Spurs in the second round of the playoffs. Simply put, the Spurs are the deepest
team in the playoffs so the Clippers are going to need to use their depth to
offset the Spurs bench.
Of course that won’t be an easy task by any stretch of the
imagination. The Spurs have a nice mixture of youth and experience on both the
starting unit and their second unit. They come at teams in droves and don’t
take their foot off the gas until the final buzzer sounds.
The Clippers have a strong enough starting unit to compete
with the Spurs but their bench will have to try and keep San Antonio’s bench
from extending leads when both second units are on the floor together.
L.A.’s bench may even have to win a game or two for them to
win this series. The biggest matchup in this series will be at the point guard
position with Chris Paul and Tony Parker battling it out as their team’s two
best players.
Parker owned Paul in the two meetings they faced each other
this season. Parker averaged 22 points and 9.5 assists while shooting 55% from
the floor in their two meetings.
Paul averaged 15.5 points and 7.5 assists while shooting a
paltry 31% from the floor during the two losses to the Spurs. The only time the
Clippers beat the Spurs was in their third meeting when Parker didn’t play.
Hopefully for the Clippers, having Parker missing games isn’t
the only way they can beat the Spurs because Gregg Popovich isn’t going to let
L.A. off that easy. The Clippers will have to find some way to either slow down
Parker or at least get Paul to play him to a standstill.
But the ultimate key to beating the Spurs may lie with their
bench. The Clippers must get the same kind of production out of their bench for
a whole series that they got in their closeout win versus the Grizzlies if they
want to survive this series. With the way the Spurs have been playing though
that still may not be enough.
Roosevelt Hall is an NFL Blogger for The Sport Mentalist and an NBA Blogger for The Sport Mentalist 2. He is also a Sports Reporter for Pro Sports Lives. He can be contacted at RHall_TPFB@Yahoo.com and be sure to follow him on Twitter @sportmentalist.
No comments:
Post a Comment