Defensively Herro and Powell are both solid team defenders so it’s not really an issue in the regular season.

In the playoffs weaknesses become amplified because the opponents best player is trying to target the weakest link of the defense so they go from defending role players to elite superstars. It will be up to Spo to provide help for them.

Side note: I was surprised to see that Miami has been leaning hard into a 3-guard lineup of Herro/Davion/Norm, seems like it’d be porous on D.

This has been pretty interesting to see. The reasoning is that Herro and Norm are both too good to bench. The offense is much more dangerous if they are both on the floor.

Davion is simultaneously both our best passer and our best perimeter defender. His defense being so good is why the lineup works. Aside from defense, he leads the NBA in A/TO ratio, his passing has been that good.

Davions improvement for us has been insanely impressive, and now he’s also become too good to bench.

So in order for all of them to start, Norm has to slot into SF, which is out of position. But those three are all so good that it’s the best option for us.

Clips had an amazing defense last year with Norm and Harden next to Dunn or DJJ doing most of the POA work so the formula worked before. Norm falls asleep off ball and is a horrendous rebounder but at least defends one on one OK with his athleticism. Still gets hunted in the playoffs but you can still have a good defense if he’s your weakest link out there

(Clippers have a bad defense this year from replacing a bad defender in Norm with horrendous ones in Beal Bogi and John Collins and having a bunch of 2nd rounders and defensively washed Kawhi take hard assignments. Plus being cursed by the Aspiration thing)

Him not being worth 30 mill is a mental barrier because he was a second round pick

Imo, Powell has not proven that he’s better than Herro. Maybe by the end of the year he will, but as of now he hasn’t.

• This season: Herro is 24/5/2 on 66% TS, Powell this season is 25/3/2 on 65% TS.
• Last season: Herro was 24/5/6 on 61% TS, Powell was 22/3/2 on 62% TS

Both are fantastic scorers, but Herro is better as a passer and equal as a scorer. He can work as a point guard in lineups, Powell cannot. That being said, both fit extremely well in our new offense

Neither is very good at defense, sadly.

Herro is also 25, and Powell is 32.

It’s clear to me who is more valuable, but I love Powell on this team and would love to keep both of them.

Beal is fool’s gold

Yeah, he might’ve even been as good as Norm!

Beal is a guy who will play mid-level starter minutes for you for half the season. That’s been who he is for the last 5 seasons. It’s astonishingly crazy that they essentially dropped Powell to add Beal.

They have ways of providing incentives to free agents, or so I have heard

There are going to be so few free agents that will even care what happened to CP3. If the Clippers throw money at them, they will most likely still sign there.

the loyalty they’ve shown Kawhi through his piles of injuries is probably intriguing to players

That ain’t loyalty, players are all gonna demand to plant some trees before they sign there now and hold it over Ballmers head like a sword of damocles, if things go bad

People really overrate how much players care about loyalty. What they care about is money.

I don’t think so, I mean did you see the Hailburton video? He even says players care more about the money plus it’s LA. They’ll still get their stars.

Lol

Lmao, even

If you’re gonna do it, do it big

I could be wrong but I would think Norm on the shorter and less expensive contract (when they did trade him) is more attractive than him on an more expensive contract that takes him until his mid 30’s

If they could get some picks for him, they’d already gotten them when they actually traded him lol

Reality is, Norm is looking good now but he’s a limited player that you can’t build your offense around if you wanna be serious in the postseason, even with Spo magic, and he can’t adapt too well to be a secondary piece.

He’s looking great rn, just like he did this time last year, but there’s a reason the Clippers got him for peanuts and only got peanuts for him.

Norm was in trade rumors for a while prior to his amazing season last year. They were basically unable to find any suitors for him because of his contract at $~18M a year.

Then he had a damn near All Star season, and the most value they could get out of him was basically as salary filler for John Collins because teams simply don’t want a 32 year old guy who only plays on one side of the ball looking to get a $30M+ multiyear contract.

There’s no real reason to believe that we would be able to sign him to the deal he wanted and trade him for positive assets at the deadline. IMO, the smarter move would have been to just keep him and hope that the depreciated market for scoring guards allowed us to sign him at a team friendly deal, but signing him to $30M was insanely risky and very likely would have ended with him being a negative asset that we needed to give up assets just to dump in the event we wanted cap space.

I aspire to have this mindset

I’m glad we agree