Film & Numbers: In what ways can Bradley Beal help the Clippers?
Adjust your reading glasses, grab a drink, and get ready for the deep dive.
There’s a phrase in soccer transfers that gets used a lot, almost to the point of making you want to rip the hair out of your skull because it’s so overused: “market opportunity.”
Yeah, it sounds pretentious. And, yeah, it kinda is. Think about it!
If you heard someone say the phrase “this represents a market opportunity” while you were walking through a grocery store or on the street or doing whatever it is that you do to pass the time as everything crumbles around you, you’d want to hit them in the face with a 2x4 until they leave you alone.
Yet, here we are discussing one of those insufferable market opportunities. Only, this one comes in the form of a basketball player: Bradley Beal, formerly of the Phoenix Suns, and who now is on his way to the LA Clippers, where he will seemingly step into a sizable role.
Beal, 32, has been bought out of his rather expensive contract and is taking pennies on the dollar, essentially, to get out of Phoenix and to Los Angeles.
It’s been a whirlwind ride for Beal, who just two summers ago agreed to waive his no-trade clause to move from Washington D.C. to the Valley of the Sun so he could play alongside Devin Booker and Kevin Durant. Except, it didn’t go smoothly. That trio shared the court for just 78 games over those two seasons, going 45-33 (.576; a 47-win pace). The Suns went 40-46 (.465; a 38-win pace) when at least one of those players had to miss a game.
The Suns soured on him, he cooled on them, there was a lot of behind-the-scenes shenanigans with new ownership and whatever-the-hell-else you want to throw onto it. So, he’s gone. Poof! Just like that.
With that said, we have to examine what it is exactly that Beal can provide the Clippers. After all, he’s coming to Los Angeles for a reason. One would imagine it’s not because of the palm trees.
What exactly does Bradley Beal do for the Clippers? Glad you asked!
⨕ HELL YEAH, BABY! NUMBERS & GRAPHS!
Say what you want, but the 6’4” guard managed to still produce over the last two seasons despite everything that was going on in Phoenix, even with two different coaches and the upheaval involved.
Beal averaged 17.6 points, 4.3 assists, and 3.9 rebounds on 50.5% shooting overall and 40.7% on 3s across his 106 games with the Suns. Last season, though, saw a bit of a dip: 17.0 points, 3.7 assists, and 3.3 rebounds on 49.7% shooting from the field and 38.6% on 3s. Still, that is a worthwhile amount of production out of what was the third option on offense for Phoenix.
Even when adjusting for all the crazy things going on, Beal managed a 60.3 True Shooting Percentage over his two seasons there, and his 60.7 TS% mark in 2023-24 was a career-best number. His 59.8 TS% this past season ranked third-best in his career. That’s … not nothing!
The issues lie deeper, however, and you have to really peel back the layers to see just how rough things got for Beal in Phoenix, especially over this past season.
Among all eligible players who logged at least 1,500 minutes last season, Beal posted the 11th-lowest Net Rating differential in the NBA.
To be fair to Beal, though, that list isn’t completely devoid of good players. After all, Jalen Williams, who helped Oklahoma City win its first-ever championship a few weeks ago, was dead last among all players. Williams finished the season in the 78th percentile in Regularized Adjusted Plus Minus (xRAPM). Even players like Cason Wallace and Obi Toppin were in the 79th and 60th percentiles, respectively. Josh Hart was in the 80th. And then there’s LeBron James, who was in the 76th.
There are good players here. There are also some, well, not-so-good ones. Such is life in sports. For there to be good players, there must also be … um … bad ones?
And Beal was indeed bad. At least going off of xRAPM, where he finished in the 35th percentile, the worst mark of his 13-year NBA career.
The graph above is Beal’s DARKO DPM. (Or, if you want the full acronym: Daily Adjusted and Regressed Kalman Optimized projections (DARKO) Daily Plus-Minus (DPM).) It’s another highly-regarded advanced metric that helps grade players. The higher the number, the better the performance. Anything in the negative is, you guessed it, not ideal.
It’s never good when a player’s impact can be seen quite literally falling off a cliff. But even if you don’t want to go off of that, we can take a look at the aforementioned xRAPM as it pertains to Beal and see how he’s done throughout his career.
Like with the previous graph, you can see the erosion before your very eyes. The decline starts slowly then speeds up a bit before ultimately crashing out into the 35th percentile.
Going to Phoenix did not help Beal. By all accounts, it neutered what made the guard good in the first place. Shifting Beal from first option to third fiddle hampered him greatly, even if the efficiency increase benefited him.
A lot of this has to do with how the Suns did both with and without him.
With Beal on the floor, the Suns had a -7.2 Net Rating in non-garbage time possessions, according to Cleaning The Glass. Almost preposterously, it jumped to a much-improved -0.1 Net Rating without the guard.
That wasn’t all. In the 1,754 possessions that Kevin Durant and Devin Booker played without Bradley Beal, the Suns posted a +4.5 Net Rating. It cratered to a -3.3 Net Rating when you added Beal, turning that quality duo into a trio that scuttled any chance Phoenix had of being good.
Not all of this is Beal’s fault, to be fair. The Suns had no uniform center. It was a revolving door of Mason Plumlee, Nick Richards, Jusuf Nurkic, and then whoever else could operate in that spot for a minute here or there.
This is where it should be pointed out that the Beal, Booker, and Durant trio had a +8.1 Net Rating in the meager 328 non-garbage time possessions that Plumlee was on the court with them. If they had a big man who could move the ball and roll, they seemed fine. (It was -6.9 without Plumlee, for what it’s worth.)
Beal was essentially mired in “The Suck” last season. When looking at the graph above, Beal is firmly entrenched in the “Quadrant of Woe”.
The graph depicts an intersection of players who logged at least 50 games played and at least 30 minutes per game, chronicling where they placed in both Net Rating (how their team did with them on the floor per 100 possessions) and the LEBRON metric, which stands for Luck-adjusted player Estimate using a Box prior Regularized ON-off (LEBRON),
Around him on this graph, Beal has players like Anfernee Simons, Miles Bridges, Keyonte George, Kelly Oubre Jr., and CJ McCollum; a veritable who’s who of underperforming and uninspiring players.
The LEBRON metric graded Beal out at -0.79 last season. That ranked 128th out of the 178 players to log at least 1,500 minutes. Beal’s -8.0 Net Rating was the sixth-lowest in the NBA. Now you understand why he’s in the bottom left and not the top right.
But what does it all mean? Does it even mean anything? Two miserable years in a place that couldn’t even give you 82 games of their three best players together in those two seasons certainly had to have taken a toll, not just on him but on everyone.
Maybe there’s something to be salvaged. That’s what we’re here to find out.
And that brings us to the five most important questions: (1) What exactly can this version of Bradley Beal provide on offense to the Clippers?; (2) Is he a Paul George replacement or is he better served as the Norman Powell replicant?; (3) What are the lineup options we’re looking at here?; (4) Where does he rate out defensively?; (5) Is there something we’re missing?
❶ IS THE OFFENSE ACTUALLY GOOD?
If you go off the baseline numbers from last season—17 points, 3 assists, 3 rebounds, and 250 3-point attempts—you get a list that places Bradley Beal 17th in True Shooting Percentage among the 48 qualified players. Is that eye-popping? Not really. But there’s an interesting conglomerate of players around him: Anthony Edwards, Desmond Bane, Kyrie Irving, and Tyler Herro, just to name a couple based on position and archetype.
But Beal also didn’t take a lot of 3s. The 250 3-pointer baseline places him with the second-fewest attempts among those players. Only DeMar DeRozan’s 256 attempts came in below Beal’s 264 among players to average at least 17 points, 3 rebounds, and 3 assists last season.
If you adjust it to players who attempted at least five 3s per game last season, and keep all other baselines, Beal was 13th in TS% out of a group of 46 players. Sounds better! Yet, is it? Because Beal was dead last in that group in scoring, had the fifth-fewest amount of rebounds, placed with the seventh-fewest assists, and took the fewest 3s. In other words, he scraped by.
It brings us to an important question: Does it matter how efficient you are if you’re just scraping by in stuff like this? Does doing the bare minimum mean something? Even when adjusting for the fact he’s now on a team where he won’t be asked to do even as much as he was tasked with in Phoenix, doing a basic amount isn’t anything of note.
When we examined John Collins, there was a difference. Collins rated out highly on a bad team, both from an efficiency standpoint and an impact point of view. Other factors aided Collins’ projection on the Clippers: rebounding, transition, screen flipping, rolling to the rim, etc. With Beal, there’s none of that. Well, there’s one of those: the efficiency.
Like we saw in the Collins piece, here’s Beal’s shot chart from last season with the assist rate baked in. The biggest takeaway is that Beal is good around the rim, and taking 31% of his shots at the rim last season is nothing to scoff at considering his age and, well, how the year went for him overall.
The other interesting subplot is that he was much better shooting 3s on the left side of the floor (right side on this chart). Does it mean anything? Probably not. It’s just a rather peculiar sidebar. (If you’re wondering, he was slightly better on the right side of the floor, the left side of the chart, in 2023-24.)
A cool thing is we can see the last two seasons for Beal in one chart, as well. And that’s what we’re looking at here.
Think what you want of the guard, but he is efficient. When you account for the fact that 35% of his shots over the prior two seasons were 3s, and that he made nearly 41% of them, you’re looking at someone who can actually impact the game in a positive way on the offensive end for a Clippers team that does need to be taking more 3s and especially when adjusting for Beal likely taking the Norman Powell role within the offense.
Only 69% of Beal’s shots over the last two years have come at the rim or as 3s, though, which can be a bit of an issue. Now, the Clippers don’t mind players taking mid-range shots, and they’re certainly not going to tell Beal he can’t take them, but it might behoove both the team and Beal to start searching out slightly more effective areas of the floor.
Those more effective areas of the floor are ones that, for the most part, Beal ranks pretty poorly in when it comes to rate statistics. He was, after all, in roughly the 10th percentile last season in At Rim plus 3-point Frequency per 100 possessions.
Now, it’s not the end of the world. Beal is hyper-efficient in other areas on the floor, and there is value in that when it comes to giving a unique look to an offensive structure.
Beal does grade out as a 43% mid-range shooter when looking at shots from 16-to-24 feet, and the 50% on short mid-range shots (8-to-16 feet) gives a good look at the general shot-making ability he possesses. Still, if Beal traded some of those long middies for more 3s, no one should complain. It’d be a smart gameplan.
Beal is primarily a player who spends quite a bit of time on the ball, as evidenced above. Last season was his first year under the 80th percentile in that metric since the 2020-21 season, and you have to go all the way back to the 2016-17 season to see a year that will likely match up to what we’ll see out of Beal this upcoming season.
I don’t think you can project Beal to be on the ball as much as he was in years past. This isn’t a Phoenix Suns team with Devin Booker and Kevin Durant. While yes, there are James Harden and Kawhi Leonard, two players who have the ball in their hands a lot, there are still other ancillary players that will be featured quite a bit, namely Ivica Zubac and John Collins. Not to mention, Bogdan Bogdanovic and Brook Lopez will get their fair share of touches, as well.
An area of the floor that could yield great results for a player of Beal’s caliber is in corner 3-point shooting. Last season, Beal connected on 41.4% of his corner 3-point attempts, according to the NBA’s tracking data.
When Beal is spotted up in the corner and a teammate is able to draw two to the ball and occupy multiple defenders, the guard is a deadly weapon that can unlock things for the Clippers offensively.
(This is also where it should be mentioned that Beal does an excellent job of getting up the floor in transition and spacing to the corners in order to give transition ball-handlers plenty of space to make decisions. That’s a major, major positive for a team that could use more transition offense.)
A scaled-down Beal isn’t a bad thing. Let’s make that clear.
In fact, truth be told, that’s a very, very good thing for the Clippers. Beal isn’t the player he was even three years ago, so dialing back the time with the ball in his hands is not a bad idea. If your options are giving the ball to Beal more or letting Harden and Leonard operate with greater freedom, you’d choose the latter over the former.
The upside with Beal is that he does indeed drive to the rim. So, there is that. He’s graded out around or above the 80th percentile in each of the last 10 seasons. That’s a positive.
Last season, Beal was tracked with 518 drives in 1702 minutes, or 9.1 per 30 minutes of action. For reference, Norman Powell averaged 8.8 drives per 30 minutes. Beal shot 59% on them while Powell was at 51%. Beal also passed more on them, but when just looking at drives specifically, Beal grades out pretty well alongside Powell and was more efficient. Another positive.
But can he do it more? Can he get back to the level he was at during the 2022-23 season when he averaged 14.3 drives per 30 minutes?
Honestly, probably not. The reason is simple: downsizing. Beal’s drive numbers took a hit because, as you would expect, he had the ball in his hands less than he did during his final season in Washington, and the reason for that is something we’ve been staring at for a while now: the talent around him.
It’s easy to be an on-ball engine when you are the best option for it. But that necessity dissipates when there are better choices around you, just like there were in Phoenix and like there will be again in Los Angeles.
When looking at the tracking data, Beal operated 25% of the time as a pick-and-roll ball-handler last year, tallying 0.85 points per possession in the process. It was 24% the year before, but it was at 30% his final year in Washington and peaked at 35% in 2021-22. (By the way, during that 2016-17 season where his on-ball time was the lowest of his career, Beal had a career-low 22.5% of possessions come as a pick-and-roll ball-handler. Just for reference. Oh, and the Wizards went 49-33 that season, their most wins in nearly 40 years.)
Beal was a ball-handler with the Suns, even with Booker and Durant on the floor. They all shared the responsibilities, and the vast majority of Beal’s involvement possessions were with him dribbling rather than just spotting up in catch-and-shoot situations.
It’s easy to see in this format: Beal was fantastic in handoffs and spotting up in general. Last season, Beal averaged 1.13 points per possession in spot-up situations, and he led the NBA* with 1.28 points per possession in “hand off” settings. (*Amongst players to log at least 50 such possessions.)
Beal really is an interesting offensive archetype, especially with how he can fit with the Clippers and their need to prioritize some level of variation in their offensive schemes, namely when it comes to handoffs and getting players the ball on the move so they can make quick, precise decisions against an unsettled defense.
If the Clippers are adding Bradley Beal and don’t run more handoffs, it’d be a bit of a travesty. Beal needs the ball on the move going downhill, where he can make a decision against a defense in retreat and either opt for a pull-up in the mid-range, which he’s obviously great at, or get to the rim as either a passer or scorer, which he’s also been really, really good at.
There are two options here for the Clippers on offense with Beal: (a) on the move going downhill or (b) spotting up on the perimeter. Anything with Beal operating as a play-maker or soaking up those types of possessions over both Harden and Leonard is not something the team should be all that interested in, unless absolutely necessary on a possession-by-possession basis.
The veteran guard is very capable of attacking defenders who overextend on closeouts, which can lead to a variety of finishes for him, whether in the mid-range or at the rim. Beal, even while getting up in age, has become a fantastic finisher in the paint. Being able to attack closeouts and finish through contact against bigger defenders is a massive plus.
Then there’s the added function of Beal getting to his spots in the mid-range against aggressive defenders, and it gives you some idea as to why his offensive fit with the Clippers could be pretty seamless if used properly.
There is a very efficient player in here. No one can deny that. It’s up to the Clippers to draw that out of him for their style of offense.
But just how does he compare to the ones who came before him?
❷ BEAL vs GEORGE vs POWELL
It stands to reason that there’s going to be comparisons made between the newest arrival, Bradley Beal, and the team’s two previous shooting guards—Norman Powell and Paul George.
When evaluating them, though, it’s best to keep in mind the proper context needed, and that’s something we’ll go through as we look at player-by-player data and such.
Powell did a fantastic job last season of getting into the paint and also being a major weapon on spot-up and catch-and-shoot opportunities. If the Clippers get this same level of production out of Beal, they’d probably be tickled because Powell took shots in efficient areas and made them at a high rate.
Nearly 85% of Powell’s shots last season were at the rim or 3s. As mentioned earlier, it was only 69% for Beal over his two seasons in Phoenix. (It was 65% during his final Wizards season, if anyone cares. But, also, it was 73% in that 2016-17 season! Tied with 2018-19 for the highest of his career so far!)
On the positive side for Beal, he was a better finisher around the rim this past season than Powell was and pretty much excelled in every area except for Powell being a better 3-point shooter. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Beal shot 40.6% on 3.4 catch-and-shoot 3-point attempts per game last season. To his credit, Powell connected on 45.2% of his 4.0 per game. Beal was at 43.6% the year before and Powell hit on a staggering 49.6%.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Beal can scale up as a spot-up 3-point weapon for the Clippers and impact the game in that area in similar ways as Powell did while supplying a more lethal downhill threat, especially when adjusting for scaling Beal’s on-ball reps down from even his Phoenix days. Less workload could—and I do stress that word: could—equal better results.
But if you’re going to compare Beal’s offensive archetype to anyone, at least based on shot split, it’s probably going to be Paul George in his final season with the Clippers.
During 2023-24, George saw 70% of his shots come at the rim or as 3s, but even that split was heavily skewed towards the 3s rather than the rim. However, that’s also fine when talking about Beal since layups are more efficient than 3s, even for good shooters.
I know people reading this might cringe at the comparison, but it should be noted that George was a fantastic offensive player in his own right and hypothesizing that Beal could achieve that same level of intrigue on that end of the floor isn’t too crazy.
George’s frame made him a better weapon than Beal since he was able to get his shot off against seemingly any defense, but Beal has more wiggle to him and can get to the rim far easier than George can or does.
Perhaps a hybrid of Powell and George is the optimal goal here for Beal. The ability to supply as much downhill juice as Powell (39% frequency) and as much as 3-point volume as George (48% frequency). Now, is Beal just magically going to jump from a 69% rim and 3-point rate all the way up to an 87% mark? Of course not. But 75%? I wouldn’t rule it out if the right people get into his ear and make it known that this is what they need more of, not the mid-range, even if he’s so deadly at it.
I say this with a full understanding that getting a 32-year-old, 13-year NBA veteran to drastically change their game on the fly in a new setting is not something that ever happens. But in terms of what’s best for the team, that’s probably going to be what it takes.
This is the head-to-head-to-head comparison between Beal, George, and Powell, at least as DARKO DPM is concerned.
You can see the precipitous decline of Beal happen, and it starts from a lower level than George’s decline has, which means George has more runway and can still be a positive impact player even if he declines a little bit more. For Beal, however, he’s already underwater in this regard because his baseline starting point was much lower.
Now, the other takeaway is that Powell, based on the strength of last season, has passed Beal and is already close to touching where George is at. That doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world in this like-for-like swap. It simply just means Beal had a bad season, and if you look at the graph and plot points from before this past year, Beal was a positive player. So, perhaps this is just a glitch in the system, so to speak, for Beal and he’s going to find his way back above water, much like John Collins did last season.
On the flip side, though, there’s been a pretty steep decline for Beal on the offensive end over the last several seasons, dating back to when he peaked in the 2020-21 campaign. We see a similar decline from George, but it’s a lot less pronounced than Beal’s, and perhaps we have to take into account the context that Phoenix was just not a good place for him to ply his trade. But that shouldn’t absolve Beal of what we’re seeing.
It’s very tough for players, especially on this side of 30, to turn things around once they start becoming a negative value player, doubly so on the offensive end when they’re already a poor defender (we’ll get into that soon). It means Beal would have to achieve an uptick you don’t see all that often, and most of it would have to come on the offensive end, where he’s already a productive player, at least statistically.
Powell took over from George when it comes to play types, even if George operated a bit more as a focal point offensively with the ball in his hands, either as a playmaker or shot creator. So, it stands to reason that Beal would then take the baton from Powell and carry it forward much in the same way.
If Powell was addition by subtraction, is Beal addition by … happenstance?
When looking at play type volume, Powell wasn’t nearly the varied on-ball threat last year that Beal was. While Beal racked up 25% of his possessions as a pick-and-roll ball-handler, it was just 19% for Powell. It was also 19% for Paul George in his final season in Los Angeles, down from the 30% it was in 2022-23, the season before the Clippers acquired James Harden.
Perhaps that’s the flashing neon sign in the misty night pointing to Beal’s on-ball usage seeing a decline this coming season—it’s hard to be on the ball as much as James Harden, ya know?
❸ GIVE ME THE LINEUPS THAT WORK
Much like with John Collins, there seems to be some murkiness with what lineups could be the best fit for Beal, but there also could be a bit of logical streamlining that could get us to the easiest answer.
In theory, the Clippers will probably want to limit the amount of time that Beal and Harden would see on the floor together, except for instances where they possibly start games or second halves, or maybe even finish games alongside each other. And it stands to reason that Kawhi Leonard would alternate during the rest of the Beal minutes to supply another ball-handler.
So, with that said, maybe we see variations of the following players:
1. Bradley Beal
2. James Harden -OR- Kawhi Leonard
3. Ivica Zubac -OR- Brook Lopez
4. TBD
5. TBD
Is it a bit of a cop-out to leave two open spaces? Maybe. I guess! But it’s also really tough, man. Outside of the Harden and/or Leonard fit, and then having Ivica Zubac or Brook Lopez on the floor to supply much-needed rim protection with Beal out there, it stands to reason that the final two spots will be a rotating cast of characters.
You could have some combination of Derrick Jones Jr., Nicolas Batum, Kris Dunn, and Bogdan Bogdanovic to give varying degrees of defense, size, length, and shooting. A lineup of Beal, Leonard, Jones, Batum, and Lopez makes sense. So, too, does one with Beal, Dunn, Bogdanovic, Leonard, and Zubac.
Weirdly enough, there are options because of Beal’s on-ball juice, shooting ability, and playmaking when going downhill. But there’s also enough around Beal to insulate him on the defensive end and protect him in the areas they’ll need. Throwing Dunn and Jones on the floor with him wouldn’t be the end of the world, especially if players like Lopez and Batum are out there with them, just because there’d be enough spacing, decision-making, and defense to alleviate all burdens.
Out of all the players the Clippers could sign to their final few roster spots, Beal is the most intriguing from a pure lineup perspective. And we haven’t even talked about the John Collins fit alongside Beal as both a roll man and spot-up option.
Beal is also the 10th playable rotation player the Clippers seemingly have: Beal, Leonard, Harden, Collins, Zubac, Bogdanovic, Jones, Lopez, Batum, and Dunn. That alone gives you optionality. It’s what makes what this is, just lineup guesswork, much more difficult.
For Beal, though, some of his playability will hinge on one thing: defense.
❹ THE DEFENSE CAN’T BE THAT BAD, CAN IT?
OK.
OK OK OK OK!
Before we get started on the video—and there is video!—I’m just going to put my notes on here and then parse through them bit by bit as we go through said footage. These are my raw notes from watching Bradley Beal's defensive tape over the last few days. So, here we go:
Poor defensive posture; gets lost off-ball; gets lazy with his help and gap coverages; overplays his hand to help teammates on wing drives but then gets caught rotating back and gets beat too easily off the dribble; late to diagnose when his assignment is going to be used off a screen; trouble getting over screens; washed out on screens in PNR setting; can get pinned; susceptible to backdoor cuts off of just one hard jab step faking coming off a pindown; takes poor angles over the top of screens
If it sounds harsh, it is. I didn’t mean for it to come across that way, but I do just jot down what I’m watching in basic form and work my way back. And we do need to be honest about what we’re seeing! It’s a key factor in all of this. Not everything is going to be great. There are layers and context.
This is just Beal’s career marks when it comes to DARKO Defensive DPM. He’s never even approached an average level on that end of the floor. But that’s also OK! Not everyone can be a good defender. And when you examine it within the context that Beal was a heavy-usage offensive player for a lot of his career, it makes some sense why his defense would not be up to that same level.
Despite that, it doesn’t excuse anything that we’re about to see. There has to be a big-time improvement on the defensive end of the floor from Beal with the Clippers if the team and he want to have a successful partnership.
Much like when we looked at John Collins, there has to be a massive level of buy-in. And maybe there will be. After all, Jeff Van Gundy is in charge of the defense for a second straight season, and it’s not as if Van Gundy takes it easy on players when they make mistakes.
But we do need to watch the film. Roll it.
In the first of several damning clips, Bradley Beal is guarding De’Aaron Fox in the corner and gets beat by a simple jab step that Fox fakes Beal out with, mainly because Beal is assuming Fox is going to come off of a pindown and ends up cheating far too high up the wing in anticipation of such an action.
Now, this isn’t the end of the world. But Beal was pretty susceptible to this sort of thing throughout this past season, and even dating back a little bit to his time in Phoenix with Frank Vogel before this.
You can excuse all of the off-ball stuff with Beal if his on-ball defense was at least passable, especially when it comes to screen navigation.
The play above is something that happens to Beal regularly, where he gets washed out on a screen when playing with a big behind him that’s operating in drop coverage. The issue with that specific setting is the Clippers now employ two drop coverage bigs: Ivica Zubac and Brook Lopez, and they’re arguably two of the best in the league at it.
Beal’s problem on this play is that once contact is made on the screen, he’s late at diagnosing that he needs to get off of it and then get over it in a timely manner in order to funnel Fox downhill where Mason Plumlee is waiting to help. And it’s not as if this is an early-game situation. It’s a three-point game with just under two minutes to play. This is a dire scenario.
Even with all of that said, it got a bit worse because Beal doesn’t hustle all that much back into the play, so he’s late at contesting Fox on the pull-up, as well.
Another issue with Beal, as the notes initially point out, is that he has a poor defensive posture most of the time, but he also operates at an almost half-speed level, and that’s not sustainable on a Clippers team that, seemingly, can bench him at a moment’s notice for someone much more defensive oriented, or at least who will play defense at a higher tempo.
Beal gets pinned in by Anthony Davis as Austin Reaves comes off the screen, and because Beal isn’t in a good stance and doesn’t fight through the screen at the proper angle, it’s an easy blow by for Reaves with zero rim protection waiting for him because Jusuf Nurkic is up defending Davis.
In the notes, the phrase “gets lazy with his help and gap coverages” made an appearance. This is one of those instances.
Beal is guarding Reaves and when the ball gets to Davis on the left elbow, Beal cheats down way too much and doesn’t maintain proper discipline when helping. Reaves relocates to a spot that Beal isn’t aware about, and then the recovery from Beal is late and not with any sort of verve.
You can forgive some of this. It’s a long season, and there’s going to be blips like this for a lot of players in the league. It’s hard to keep 100% attention and drive up for 82 games. Lapses happen. But it was a lot of lapses for Beal during this last season.
The player that Beal is going to basically be replacing, Norman Powell, even got a play off against him when Beal takes a poor route back to recover on a relocation, and his poor posture again gets him into trouble as Powell easily blows by him on a straight line drive for a key basket.
It’s like Beal gets his head over his hips far too often as a defender when locking and trailing, and that’s an issue because it means you can get washed out of the play pretty easily by a defense, or even a single player, that knows how to manipulate that.
This is a similar play as the one that Fox had in the mid-range much earlier. But it highlights just how much Beal can die on screens, even modest ones that are set.
Beal gets hit by the screen, takes several choppy steps over the top and gets pushed even higher up the floor before eventually getting around the screen and giving a half-hearted contest on the back end that has no effect on Anthony Edwards’ jumper.
This is the final defensive play we’ll look at, and it’s a pretty bad one because this is early in the game and you’re supposed to be setting some kind of defensive tone, if possible. But that doesn’t happen.
Beal gets hit by the Jaxson Hayes screen, feels it way too late, and then can’t recover over the top of it at all. Yes, Nick Richards is deep in drop and maybe could be higher up the floor, but that’s also not the scheme Phoenix is using. It’s on the guards to use their guile and aggressiveness to get over the top of the screens and push ball-handlers downhill to the helping big. Now, what I will say is that drop coverage struggles when screens are set this high up the floor. However, even with that said, it’s on Beal to either get over the top of it, or recognize just how high it is and go underneath to recover back and get in front of the ball-handler. Instead, he gets washed out completely and just can’t get back.
The all-around defensive tape on Beal last season is pretty bad. But it’s been bad for a while. And yet, with that said, maybe there’s hope. Maybe the Clippers, like with the John Collins trade, can draw something out of him on that end of the floor. After all, Beal has not been on a good defensive team since his third season in the league. That was 10 years ago. I’m serious!
The higher the graph lines go, the worse it is. Lower is better.
You seriously have to go back to when Beal started out in the NBA for the last time a team of his ranked in the Top 10 on defense, and at no point in Beal’s 13-year NBA career has he been on a team that was both Top 10 in defense and Top 10 in Net Rating. In fact, he’s been on a Top 10 Net Rating team just twice in his career, and one of them was his first year in Phoenix.
Just to illustrate the move that Beal is making by signing in Los Angeles as a free agent: the LA Clippers were 3rd in defensive rating last season and 5th in Net Rating. They quite literally represent the best team he’ll have joined or been on going into a season. (The 2022-23 Phoenix Suns were 7th and 9th, respectively, when Beal joined in the summer of 2023.)
It stands to reason that, even at 32, Beal has some juice left in the tank, and possibly on the defensive end for a team that preaches it. Whether or not they’re able to squeeze it out of him is another story. And while it seems like I’ve been negative about this signing, especially from a defensive standpoint, I’m very open-minded when it comes to why it was done. It makes sense!
The individual defense hasn’t been good, but maybe in a scaled back role with less ball-handling responsibilities and a better shot diet, he could have some impact on defense to augment the offensive shift. It could be wishful thinking. It could also be what happens. We won’t know until the ball rolls onto the floor.
Still, with that said, the defense last year was … well … atrocious. No other way around it.
You also do wonder how much injuries have taken a toll on Beal. The guard has not played more than 60 games in a season since 2018-19, when he played all 82 and led the NBA in minutes. It’s been a lot of lower-body injuries, as well: hamstring, calf, knee, toe, ankle, hip. I’m not just naming parts of the body. He’s missed games in the last 12 months due to injuries to each one of those areas.
A trimmed down role, even if he starts, could yield to greater health, and perhaps better play on the defensive end. It’s at least a theory we have to entertain for the time being.
❺ WHAT ELSE IS THERE?
Justin, you’ve spent 6,500 words just talking about all the ways Beal might not be an ideal fit, so is there anything that gives you optimism about his addition beyond the sheer efficiency he provides on offense?
Yes!
I think there’s some playmaking chops when going downhill as he draws two to the ball, and he has been a pretty decent spray-out passer during his time in the league, even dating back to his last couple years in Washington.
Over the course of his final two years with the Wizards, Beal averaged 3.21 3-point assists per 100 possessions, which ranked 40th among the 214 players to log at least 2,500 total minutes during that time. That was in line with guys such as Darius Garland (3.26), Jayson Tatum (3.21), and LeBron James (3.16).
Beal’s 1.34 corner 3-point assists per 100 possessions those final two years in Washington ranked 16th. Beal was also one of 15 players to average at least 1.3 corner 3-point assists per 100 possessions and 3.0 rim assists per 100 possessions during those two years. So, there is something there in getting players shots in high-efficiency areas. It doesn’t mean he can do it all the time. But it does mean he can do it enough to at least provide value there.
I also think Beal gets a bit too much flak for his offensive style. Yeah, he takes a lot of mid-range jumpers, and yes, I have said he needs to add a bit more 3-point volume to his repertoire, but he has also done that in recent years.
In the three seasons before he arrived in Phoenix, only 26.5% of Beal’s field goal attempts were 3s. It jumped to 35% with the Suns, and that includes the 38% he was at last season, which was the highest of his career since—and stop if you’ve heard me reference this season before—his 2016-17 season in Washington where he saw 42% of his shots come as 3s. It means he can adapt. That’s a positive.
Beal also can get to the free throw line. That went down with the Suns, but for the vast majority of his career, Beal has shown an ability to draw fouls at a pretty good rate (25.4% free throw rate for his career).
Then there’s the biggest factor of all: James Harden.
It goes without saying, but Harden represents the single best point guard Beal has played alongside in his entire career. That’s not a stretch to say, even when accounting for John Wall. But if you want to cite Wall as an example, there is a lot of quality data from their time together with the Wizards that perhaps could point to a good fit with the Clippers as Beal now gets to play next to Harden.
Harden is the tide that lifts all boats, at least as far as the Clippers are concerned. Add Kawhi Leonard into the mix, sprinkle in some Ivica Zubac, and this has the makings of the best team Beal has ever been on. While the Suns over the last two years could boast big-named talent, it doesn’t feel like they were the same level of team that this Clippers squad happens to be.
“I’m told James Harden was a focal point in recruiting Bradley Beal, internally but also speaking directly to Beal and his camp,” ESPN’s Shams Charania said on Wednesday.
And therein lies why Bradley Beal could make some sense and could fit what the Clippers need. They were looking for a way to replicate some of the scoring and shooting punch that they were losing by trading Norman Powell for John Collins, and Beal, based on everything in his career and the archetype that he represents, should supply that ability.
It’s everything else that could dampen the fit. But there are no perfect players that you can bring in for $5.3 million, which is what Beal is getting in this upcoming 2025-26 season. It’s about limiting the weaknesses, and the infrastructure surrounding the Clippers could be strong enough to insulate Beal against failure. That matters.
Is Beal a perfect fit? No. They also don’t need him to be. They just need him to do what he’s done for 13 years: score at an efficient rate and give them enough of the things they don’t presently have.
For what they got him for, yeah, it does represent a “market opportunity”, even if that phrase should die in the fiery pits of hell.
Didn't realize how bad Beal's footwork on defense was until watching the clips in this article. That said, you make a good point about the players who can replace him if his defense is failing - Kris Dunn and Derrick Jones Jr. If Beal has any sort of competitive drive left in him, hopefully getting benched in the clutch so that Kris Dunn can be on the court motivates Beal to keep his head and body in the defensive game.
Do you think that he's going to be the CLIPPERS second man especially during the regular season and BEAL can play off HARDEN which will let KAWHI roam as a 3 and BEAL takes on Kawhi s ball handling duties?