Clippers Try New Look by Trimming "The Beard's" Length
Sometimes the best way to go forward is to look back.
PLAYA VISTA, Calif. — The LA Clippers attempted a bold new strategy during their Saturday afternoon win over the Golden State Warriors.
Well, perhaps not entirely new.
Since the team acquired James Harden at the end of October and he made his debut on Nov. 6, Harden has predominantly played nearly the entire first quarter of games, as evidenced below:
The 5 minutes and 26 seconds that Harden played in the first quarter on Saturday afternoon represented the least amount of time Harden had spent on the floor in a first quarter since June 5, 2021, when Harden played just 43 seconds in Brooklyn’s playoff game against Milwaukee before having to exit with a hamstring injury.
Before that, Harden had played 4 minutes and 22 seconds against the New York Knicks on April 5, 2021, but just like the playoff game that followed a couple of months later, Harden left that game with an injury, too.
All this is to say that Saturday’s 5 minutes and 26 seconds represented the least that Harden has played in a non-injury first quarter since … wait for it … Feb. 4, 2016.
That night, Harden played 3 minutes and 51 seconds in the first quarter. The reason for that? Well, Houston was getting hammered early on by Phoenix, and interim head coach J.B. Bickerstaff was not pleased with what he saw as the Suns held a 15-5 lead. Bickerstaff, after a timeout two minutes into the game didn’t alter the trajectory, subbed out the entire starting lineup, threw the bench in there, and let them play the rest of that quarter.
“It just looked like we were in a fog,” Bickerstaff said following the game that night when giving his reasoning for subbing the entire starting lineup out. “We kind of needed to shock us a little bit.”
Harden’s first basket that evening didn’t come until 10:48 to go in the second quarter.
That night nearly 3,000 days ago and Saturday afternoon are the only two non-injury times in Harden’s career that he hasn’t played at least 5 minutes and 30 seconds as a starter in the first quarter. Those two games also had something else in common: Harden still played at least 35 minutes.
However, one could even look at Harden’s pattern last season in Philadelphia as a possible blueprint for how this potential new Clippers strategy employed by coach Tyronn Lue could conceivably work.
Last season, Harden averaged 9.0 minutes per first quarter. It was the lowest mark in the future Hall of Fame guard’s career since becoming a full-time starter following his trade from the Oklahoma City Thunder to the Houston Rockets just before the 2012-13 season tipped off. Yet, it has been a noticeable trend as of late for Harden.
As things stand, Harden is averaging 10.4 minutes in first quarters this season with the Clippers, his highest mark since 2017-18. But perhaps the change made last game against Golden State will drive that number down in the coming weeks should, as Lue alluded to ahead of practice Tuesday, it stay the normal rotation pattern.
And it’s that rotation pattern that makes things interesting to parse through.
Harden started 11 games last season with the Philadelphia 76ers where he logged fewer than eight minutes in first quarters. Before last season, Harden had only logged nine such games in the prior 10 seasons.
That would lead to Harden coming back early in the second quarter and sometimes starting the frame outright. Harden totaled 22 games last season where he played 12 minutes in second quarters, the same amount as he had tallied the previous three seasons combined.
The 76ers were 3.7 points per 100 possessions better with Harden on the floor compared to off in second quarters last season, but some of that was due to the impact of Joel Embiid, Philadelphia’s imposing center who went on to win MVP.
Still, Philadelphia being minus-22 in the 221 second-quarter minutes that Harden played without Embiid last season isn’t an indictment against Harden’s overarching ability. Truth be told, it might speak a little bit to how good he still is as an offensive engine to keep lineups without the MVP afloat long enough to take advantage later on.
Therein lies what could be the Clippers’ thinking going forward.
“I think just letting James be James,” Lue answered after Saturday’s game when asked what led him to the rotational decision to sub Harden out early in the first quarter before bringing him back to start the second.
“Having the ball in his hands, creating on the pick-and-roll like he always does, putting shooters around him, putting a roller around him and just letting him play. We’ve been struggling at the start of those second quarters a lot lately, so it’s going to take some time, but I did like it. And then we gave James his own unit for a while and then brought PG in probably, I think, two or three minutes into that second quarter.”
When asked after the comeback win by the Clippers how much of an adjustment it was for him to not play the bulk of the first quarter and then come back in with the bench unit in the second quarter, Harden was rather judicious in his response.
“Whatever the team needs,” Harden remarked. “Whether I’m playing the whole first quarter or playing six minutes and then coming back with the second unit. like, we’re trying to figure it out, we’re trying to get it right and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get it right. It was a conversation being had, ‘All right, let’s do it — if you like it, you like it, if you don’t like it, it’s a conversation.’ And then we just continue to build from there.”
Taking Harden out early also gives some time for reserve guard Russell Westbrook to play alongside Paul George and Kawhi Leonard without Harden on the floor.
That quartet — Westbrook, Harden, George, and Leonard — has been disastrous in their time together so far: the Clippers have been outscored by 37 points in their 96 minutes and 14 seconds together. That’s over 10 games of action since there have been four contests where that group hasn’t spent a single second on the floor. They’ve registered a positive plus-minus in just three out of those 10 games and have yet to have a single game where they’ve gone better than plus-4.
Since the trade, the Clippers have outscored opponents by 80 points in 280 minutes when George and Leonard are on the floor with only one of Harden or Westbrook, or with neither at all.
But going back to Harden: Saturday’s second quarter saw the Clippers get outscored by eight points despite Harden playing all 12 minutes.
However, this is where an important caveat should be noted: The Clippers outscored Golden State by one in the seven second-quarter minutes that Harden was able to play without Westbrook. That, invariably, matters. Why? Well, the Clippers have been outscored by 58 points in the 175 minutes that Harden and Westbrook have shared the floor. They’re plus-59 in 497 minutes when only one or neither is on the floor.
In those seven Saturday second-quarter minutes without Westbrook alongside him, Harden at times appeared to generate the looks for both himself and teammates that the Clippers would be more than happy to live with.
For the season, Harden is averaging 9.9 drives per game which is down from the 13.5 that he averaged last season, and dramatically down from the staggering 19.6 drives per game that Harden averaged in 2018-19.
However, Harden is shooting 51.2 percent on his drives to the rim and has one of the highest pass rates in the league among players averaging at least 9.0 drives per game.
But Harden’s driving frequency takes an even more drastic turn when adjusting for the starting lineup change that came about on Nov. 17 ahead of the team’s meeting against the Houston Rockets.
That was when Clippers coach Tyronn Lue opted to slot Terance Mann into the starting lineup and move Russell Westbrook to the bench, a move that has since seen the Clippers go 6-3 in their last nine games with wins over the Rockets, Dallas Mavericks, Sacramento Kings, Golden State Warriors, and the San Antonio Spurs (twice).
Harden, before the lineup change, was averaging 8.0 drives per game. Since then, however, that number has jumped up to 10.9 per game. While the efficiency has dropped during that time, for the Clippers to be successful it’s the sheer volume of attacks that have made a difference.
In fact, since that lineup change, the Clippers have three separate players averaging at least 10 drives per game — Harden (10.9), Kawhi Leonard (10.4), and Paul George (10.0). Before that, only Leonard (10.0) had reached that mark.
Another reason to possibly task Harden with the lead role in second quarters (and even fourth quarters) could also just be a very simple one: the team has been pretty awful in that frame through their first 19 games.
Through games played on Dec. 4:
+7.8 Net Rating (7th in NBA)
106.1 offensive rating; 98.3 defensive rating
-4.5 Net Rating (19th in NBA)
111.3 offensive rating; 115.8 defensive rating
+12.2 Net Rating (3rd in NBA)
118.8 offensive rating; 106.6 defensive rating
-2.0 Net Rating (20th in NBA)
118.8 offensive rating; 120.8 defensive rating
When asked ahead of practice on Tuesday whether or not the plan going forward would be to have Harden check out early in the first quarter so he could get run with his own unit in the second quarter, Lue was quite emphatic and straight to the point.
“Yes, sir,” Lue voiced.
If the Clippers are to rebound from their shoddy second- and fourth-quarter results, perhaps this is the best idea going forward — sacrifice some first- and third-quarter efficiency to prop up the problem areas.
And that means we might be seeing a lot more of Harden getting taken out before the six-minute mark in first quarters, something that, before Saturday, had only happened once without injury in his entire career as a starter.
It’s an adjustment. But perhaps a much-needed one.