Is Doc Rivers to blame for what happened to the LA Clippers in the NBA playoffs?
Thirteen days after the Clippers were upset by the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference semifinals, ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski broke the news that Rivers was out as head coach after the longest period of sustained success in franchise history.
Monday's development suggests the Clippers felt Rivers was to blame and that the team would have a better chance of breaking through in the 2021 playoffs without him.
Does the evidence support the idea that Rivers was at fault and the Clippers will be better with another coach?
What happened in the Nuggets series?
The heights the Clippers reached under Rivers, the arrival of new team owner Steve Ballmer and the addition of All-Stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George last summer raised expectations to the point where a second-round loss could be seen as a crushing disappointment.
There was plenty of blame to go around after the Clippers lost the final three games to Denver, taking them from a 3-1 series lead to out of the playoffs, and Rivers surely shoulders some of it. In particular, he was too slow to adjust his rotation at center, where Montrezl Harrell was performing at less than 100 percent after missing the Clippers' seeding games following the death of his grandmother.
Given how badly the Clippers were outplayed with Harrell on the court, it's possible benching him might have made the difference in the series -- particularly in Games 5 and 6, when the Clippers outscored the Nuggets with Harrell on the bench. Nonetheless, it's easy to understand why Rivers wanted to keep the NBA's Sixth Man Award winner involved. Playing through whatever fatigue and rest had accumulated was Harrell's best chance of helping the Clippers if they advanced to the conference finals, and benching him also risked alienating a key player right before he hits unrestricted free agency.
Beyond that specific decision, I think much of the criticism of Rivers' coaching effort falls short. In particular, it's notable to me that the Clippers got good shots throughout the series. Those shots just stopped going in as frequently over the last three games.
Second Spectrum's quantified shot probability (qSP) measure estimates the effective field goal percentage (eFG%) we'd expect from a team given where their shots are coming from, how close opposing defenders are and who's taking the shots. Quantified shot-making (qSM) measures the difference between actual and expected performance.
By these measures, the Clippers got better shots in Games 5 through 7 than they did in the first four games of the series. But their shot-making -- which is more important in determining the outcome of an individual game -- went from slightly better than average to atrocious.
Meanwhile, the Nuggets enjoyed almost exactly equal shot-making in the opposite direction, posting a plus-7.4% qSM over the final three games after below-average shot-making (minus-2.0% qSM) in the first four. Overall for the series, the Clippers got substantially better shots than the Nuggets but made substantially fewer of them. It's hard for me to attribute that to coaching.
Coaching changes like this rarely work
The Clippers' decision to part ways with Rivers after playoff disappointment fits into a larger trend of impatience among NBA contenders. During the 1980s and 1990s, according to my research, just one coach was fired after leading his team to at least 55 wins during the regular season (or an equivalent winning percentage during seasons like this one that featured fewer than 82 games): George Karl by the Seattle SuperSonics in 1998, when his contract ended.
Over the past decade and a half, however, there have been seven coaches fired after a season with 55-plus wins or equivalent. Oddly enough, Rivers got the Clippers job after one of them -- Vinny Del Negro -- was fired by the Clippers in 2013 after a 56-26 regular season and a first-round loss to the Memphis Grizzlies.
It's clear that these teams are seeking the outcome the Toronto Raptors got last year. After a series of 50-win seasons saw the Raptors fall short of the NBA Finals, they fired Dwane Casey weeks before Casey was named Coach of the Year for leading Toronto to a 59-23 record. With the addition of Leonard, rookie head coach Nick Nurse helped the Raptors to the first championship in franchise history.
At the same time, it's equally clear from the track record that what happened with the Raptors is the exception and not the rule.
In half of the eight cases, the teams didn't even make the playoffs the following season. Just two -- the Clippers under Rivers and the Raptors under Nurse -- advanced deeper in the postseason with a new coach.
Certainly, not all these situations were equivalent. The Cleveland Cavaliers' coaching change had a lot less to do with their decline in 2010-11 than LeBron James taking his talents to South Beach, while Rudy Tomjanovich took over a Lakers team that had traded Shaquille O'Neal to the Heat. Still, it's notable that these teams as a rule did not end up happy with their replacements. Of this group, Rivers is currently the lone coach to survive past three seasons with the team, though Nurse seems sure to eventually join him.
Clippers taking huge gamble
Looming over the Clippers' decision about Rivers is how much they have riding on the 2020-21 season. At year's end, both Leonard and George can become unrestricted free agents. Though the Clippers can take comfort in the fact that both players chose to come to the franchise rather than being drafted or traded there against their will, the organization won't want to give them any reason to think twice about their decision.
Given those stakes and the fact that teams were more patient in the past, I think you can make the case this is the single riskiest decision to change coaches in NBA history. I'm willing to concede that the organization knows more about Rivers' coaching behind the scenes than any of us can ever tell from the outside. Perhaps he was responsible for the team's questionable conditioning, an issue in Game 7 that could be responsible for poor shot-making.
Conversely, those other organizations that decided to change coaches after a successful season had their reasons too. And with the benefit of hindsight and objectivity, it's evident now many of those decisions were mistakes born of emotional overreaction to a playoff loss. For the Clippers' sake, they'd better hope this decision doesn't fall into that category.