The Herd with Colin Cowherd - Hoops Tonight - Does Russell Westbrook make Clippers greater NBA Finals threat?

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Jason Timpf reacts to Russell Westbrook joining Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, and the Los Angeles Clippers. Does Russ make Los Angeles a greater NBA Finals threat in a loaded Western Conference including LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers, Stephen Curry's Golden State Warriors, and Kevin Durant's Phoenix Suns? #volume #herdSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque.

Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win.

I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifers Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHard Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok's podcast network on TikTok. The volume. It's Hoops Tonight, presented by Fanduel. The NBA season is kicking into gear, and there's no better place to get in on the action than with Fanduel.

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dial 1-8778-8-Hope-N-Y or text HopeN-Y to 467-369 in New York. Call 1-800-5-22-4-7-0 in Wyoming or visit www.W.W.1-800 gambler.net in West Virginia. All right, welcome to Hoops tonight, presented by FanDuel here at the Volume. Happy Monday, everybody. I hope all of you guys had a great weekend, a very boring All-Star weekend, and we're not going to talk about that today. the players didn't seem to care much, so I don't see why we should. The game itself was not entertaining in the least, not quality basketball, not interesting in any way, shape, or form.

And we had a very interesting basketball story come down this morning. Russell Westbrook is going to be a Los Angeles clipper. So what we're going to do today is just dive into the basketball elements of Russ's fit with a major Western Conference playoff contender. You guys know the drill before we get started. Subscribe to the volumes YouTube channel so you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at underscore Jason LT so you guys don't miss show announcements. And last but not least, if for whatever reason you guys missed one of these videos and you can't get back over to YouTube to finish,

don't forget you can find them wherever you get your podcasts under hoops tonight. And then lastly, on Saturday morning, we released a video that was a footage breakdown of the five greatest scoring moments of LeBron's career. It's kind of a fun trip down memory lane of a bunch of major playoff moments. And we went through it the way we do on this show. in the weeds, looking at the schematics, looking at the skill set stuff and the footwork stuff and all the little details of those major moments in LeBron's playoff career, I thought, I was super proud of our team. They did such an amazing job producing it on the back end and getting the footage to where it needed to be.

I think it's one of our best projects that we've done since I started with the company a little over a year ago. Want you guys to check that out. So scroll back on our YouTube channel feed to Saturday morning, five greatest scoring moments of LeBron's career. I think you guys will really like it. But let's talk some basketball. So, you know, it's funny, right before All-Star Break, the last game I watched was on Friday morning, I watched the Clippers play the Sons. And we didn't cover the game because there wasn't enough to put a full show together.

But I watched the game, and I was incredibly impressed by the Clippers. They put on a defensive clinic shutting down the Sons pick and roll offense. Everybody looks great. Kauai didn't shoot the ball well in this particular game, but he's been looking great for a while. Paul George looks great. They've been going with Terrence Mann basically since the beginning of the year as their starting point guard. And that's been working well.

They've really taken off since then. Since January 20th, which is a full month, the clippers are 10 and 4, which is the third best record in the league over that span. They're also second in offense over that span. So they're really clicking right now. Now, did they need to look at bringing in a point guard? Yeah, but I thought they tried to do that at the deadline,

swapping Reggie Jackson for Bones Highland. I didn't see anybody in the buyout market that really stood out to me. That made sense. And the main reason why is, you know, the point guard position as the clippers need it is not what Russell Westbrook is, in my opinion. To me, a point guard is about consistency and stability, especially for the way that the clippers need that position filled. That's like, can you bring the ball up the floor against ball pressure every single possession and get the team into your sets? Can you run, you know, respectable

second side action when Kauai and Paul George give the basketball up and you need someone to further the action? Can you on the, can you be a threat? off the ball? Can you on the other end of the floor, guard the other team's opposing point guard and run your pick and roll coverages properly? That's the stability they need from that position. And Russ is just way more volatile. Russ is like adding a bunch of alcohol to any sort of social situation. It can lead to like the best night ever or it could lead to a complete and total disaster. It's a force multiplier. It just brings out extreme outcomes on either end of the spectrum. And it's kind of like an emotional roller coaster as someone who rooted for the Lakers

over the last couple of years, it was really stressful on a night in a night out basis. So I didn't like this move for the Clippers simply because this is a team that was clicking and trending in the right direction for a good chance of getting out of the Western Conference and a playoff run. And what you've done is you've fundamentally changed the profile of your team and you've thrown a massive wild card into the mix. And, you know, it has the, it could work. There's a version of this story where this ends up pushing the clippers over the top.

But it also could be the thing that puts them under as well. But even though I don't like the move, it is what happened. And so what we're going to do today is we're going to look at the basketball fit for Russ on both ends of the floor. Again, you guys know Russ is not my favorite player, but I take my job very seriously. And I do see the good things that Russ does. So I want to talk about how that fits with the clippers. So let's start with the offensive end of the floor. and let's talk about what Russ does well.

Russ is very good at pushing the pace, which is a very intriguing thing with this particular team because this team likes to play slow. Now, I think that's going to cause some issues if they play him with the starters a lot. But in bench groups, I like the idea of adding a change-up and having the team play with a lot more pace. And Russ is one of the best players in the league

at consistently pushing the pace every time he gets a rebound or a kickout. He brings the ball at the floor relentlessly, probably better than anybody in the league. But it's volatile. There's a lot of turnovers. He's going to push the ball in transition when there's opportunities that aren't there, and he'll drive into traffic and turn it over, he'll throw bad passes.

He'll miss a lot of layups. But on a points per possession basis, that's an effective offense in the aggregate over many possessions to have Russ pushing the ball in transition. The Lakers were seventh in transition frequency, according to cleaning the glass, and Russ played a huge part in that. But the volatility of it makes it so that you don't want that sort of thing at the end of games. And there were a lot of options, a lot of situations, particularly last year, for the Lakers, where Russ would engage in those reckless transition pushes at the end of games,

and it would lead to disastrous outcomes. So it kind of serves the clippers better in the middle portions of games to have him pushing the pace. When they get into the half court, when Russ has good matchups, he's been an effective ball handler this year, a lot more than I think people realize. He's one of the best rim-pressuring perimeter players that we have in the league. And rim pressure just causes a bunch of positive outcomes. It leads to offensive rebounds because you're occupying rim protectors. It leads to drop-offs and kickouts for easy dunks out of the dunker spot or to shooters in the corner. It collapses the defense and opens things up.

There's a ton of value in rim pressure, and you do see that with Russ. The Lakers scored 653 points on 618 pick and rolls this year. that's 1.01 of 1.06 points per possession. There are 42 players in the league who have run at least 500 pick and rolls this year. That's 13th. It's pretty solid. He's also been the best post-up player in the league to run at least 50 post-ups, scoring 1.3 points per possession. There are 63 players who have run at least 50, and Russ is number one.

But that's typically when he gets good matchups. That's posting up smaller guards that are usually coming off the bench for teams, and in pick and roll against a backup center, which usually is a very poor pick and roll defender. You know, think of like the way that Thomas Bryant was for the Lakers or DeAndre Jordan was for the Nuggets. Those backup rim protectors are typically the easiest guys to score on in pick and roll. So again, it seems to make the most sense in bench lineups.

You can kind of see a trend that I'm hinting at here. And then off the ball, this is where his weaknesses are. He's shooting below 30% from three. on outrageously good shot quality. So even when the defender is at least six feet away, which NBA.com classifies as wide open, he's shooting 30.7% on almost three attempts per game. So on standstill, wide open, completely conceded threes,

he's making less than a third of them, which is a major problem. That's what allows teams to completely ignore him. It's what allows teams to put their center on them. And you'll see that a lot. And you might think to yourself like, oh, well, that means that we can get Zubots with a better matchup, but it doesn't matter if your center is ignoring Russ to help on that said post-up, right?

So there's a bunch of issues that come with Russ off the basketball, and the only way to counter that is a non-shooter is to be relentless as a cutter and as an offensive rebounder and as a screener, which those are three things that Russ has done on occasion, but has never bought fully into enough to make himself a positive as an off-ball player. So as I loop all of that together, there's an obvious role that takes shape. You want him in the middle portions of games when you can put the ball in his hands, so the off ball stuff is not a problem, and you let him run the show for one shift each half,

bridging the end of the first and early second and bridging the end of the third and early fourth. You let him run those two shifts. You put the ball in his hands. He pushes the pace. He does all of those things. That's when you can get real positive outcomes out of Russ. he's going to bully all the smaller guards that come off the bench for teams. He's going to bully all of the lesser rim protectors in the league that come off the bench for teams.

That's where he can have some success. And the Lakers did not have a very good shooting roster. In fact, I said before the season, and I still believe up until the deadline, they had the worst shooting roster in the entire league. The Clippers are an excellent jump shooting team. In Mason Plumley, who they brought in at the deadline to be their bench big, runs the floor really well. So this could even be a better version of what the Lakers had when Russ was coming off the bench. But if they start games with him and they close games with him,

I suddenly view this as a huge net negative. First of all, when you give Russ the basketball, you're taking touches away from better players like Paul George and Kauai Leonard. So you feel the need to put him off the ball, but then off the ball he will hinder their offense. Not as much as it did the Lakers. Kauai and Paul George are professional pull-up jump shooters. So they will be able to have more success with Russ on the floor than the Lakers did.

But still, you prefer if Kauai has a rim-driving threat or if Paul George has a rim-driving threat to balance out that pull-up jump shooting so defenders can't press up on them as much. It absolutely will hurt them in some ways, just not as much as it hurts the Lakers. And then in crunch time situations, if you play Russ, that's where his volatility can become a problem. Like I said, in the large sample size, the up-and-down nature of Russ is, game is not as big of a deal because if he's running, you know, 35 possessions in a game off the bench and he makes, you know, 15 good plays and 10 bad plays, it's going to be fine. But if you put him in a crunch time situation where it's just a small handful of possessions, his mistakes become so

much more damaging. And I'll give you some examples. So like there was a play earlier this year against Portland at the end of a game. LeBron and AD are on the floor. I think the Lakers were down one at this point and, or were up one at this point. And a basket basically six. steals the game, and Russ just goes off script and dribbles up the floor on the right wing and takes a pull-up jump shot. And he's like the worst pull-up jump shooter in the league. There's no basketball case for him to take that shot. It's a pivotal possession at the end of a game, but up here, Russ goes, I'm shooting this. And that sort of volatility can cost you games. There were a couple of key late game mistakes against Boston and Philly this year where Russ decided to play

isolation basketball against excellent centers. He did it against Joel Embed, and then he did it against Al Horford, going off script instead of giving the ball to his better players to attack the other team's best defensive player under the basket. He threw the ball into the bottom of the rim against Al Horford and then he got fouled against Joel Embed, but those kinds of foul calls don't usually get made at the end of games, and he didn't have an advantage in that situation. And had he not been fouled, Joe would have blocked him up top. That sort of volatility in decision-making at the end of games could really hurt them. The one other thing that concerns me, is the Clippers core players, like we talked about earlier.

Kauai Leonard, Paul George, Marcus Morris, and Evika Zubach, they don't like to play fast. Those are slow basketball players. The Clippers have been one of the slowest teams in the league this year. So it makes sense off the bench when you put them with Norman Powell and you put them out there with Mason Plumley and they're sprinting up and down the floor and they're getting great shots. That kind of makes sense.

But with that core group, there's some class just in their overall playstiles. which will be a problem. Like those core clipper lineups are going to like to play in the half court, and that's where Russ is at his least level of impact. So, you know, overall, so much of it will come down to the role. If Ty Loo uses Russ in the middle portions of games, two shifts a night, one in the first half, one in the second half, in bench groups, against bench guards and against bench rim protectors,

I think he could be a significant net positive that raises the ceiling of the clippers. but if they play him to start games, if they play him to close games with the style clash of the slow style that the clippers like to play, and with him having to do more things off the ball, I think it could quickly shift into being a massive negative. I do like the influx of athleticism, though. Like even in Russ's decline state, he's very fast, and the clippers do not have a ton of speed on the roster. They've got a lot of length, they've got a lot of offensive skill, but they don't have a lot of speed. so I like the different physical profile that he brings. And you'll really see that on the defensive end of the floor.

He's been a very good on-ball defender this year, particularly when bigger players try to take advantage of him by backing him down in the post. He's been killing all-star wings all season long in post-defense. Off the ball, it's a little bit more of a mixed bag. He's a freelancer. So he will blow up plays, like flying around with his athleticism, but then he'll also give up offensive rebounds

or lose a shooter because he's too much of a freelancer and he forgets his baseline responsibility within the defensive scheme. But overall, I do like the physical force he brings to the team. This move is entirely going to come down to how Ty Lou uses him. And if he uses him well, I do believe it can work. But my prediction is that there will be a lot of pressure internally, just the same pressure that led the Clippers to make this signing. There will be a lot of pressure internally to play Russ with the core lineups

I don't know if Tyloo will be able to fight that off. He'll probably get roped into it as well. And it's going to be a roller coaster. There will be nights where Russ wins the Clippers games. There will be nights where Russ loses the Clippers games. And overall, I think that volatility hurts the team. So I do feel less optimistic about the Clippers' chances after this move. And I wish they would have just stood Pat.

And yes, it sucks that you don't have a point guard, but there's nobody in the buyout market that really stands out. Patrick Beverly is a defensive point guard, but he's not an offensive point guard, so it doesn't really solve the problem. Even then, though, I'd rather have Patrick Beverly on this Clippers team than Russell Westbrook. So it was a confusing move, but hopefully this video gives you guys a better idea of just how it will fit offensively and defensively. Here's our plan for the rest of the week. I'll tweet out the actual schedule as soon as I finalize some things,

but we're planning on covering the top five or six players in this year's NBA draft over the course of the next couple of days. and then, dude, we're like, look at the slates. The slate starting Thursday get incredible. We're going to be covering a lot of basketball, a lot of instant reaction breakdown nights where we do four, five, six games at a night starting Thursday, and it's going to be a grind the rest of the regular season and heading into the playoffs. I'm very, very excited for it. As always, I appreciate you guys rocking with me, and I'll see you in a couple of days.

The Volume. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite, on Humor Me with Robert Smygel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their Between Songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games.

Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A win is a win. A win is a win. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated.

So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford Show on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok, podcast network on TikTok. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.