DOC C’S DIAGNOSIS
Clippers coach hopes his rebuilding goes as well as old team’s
LAS VEGAS — Doc Rivers didn’t want to rebuild, so he left Boston for the Clippers. Now he’s watching summer league games and facing a reconstruction project in Los Angeles as the Celtics seek to clear the final hurdle with new faces.
The Celts had hopes of making The Finals this past season, but injuries to Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward got in the way — though it still took a Game 7 stinker against Cleveland to knock them off the flight to the title series.
Most teams have five-year plans, but rarely does one make it from tear-down to contendership in that frame.
“That’s Danny (Ainge) and Brad (Stevens) and those guys — and, I mean, obviously the players, too,” Rivers told the Herald. “But they’ve done it as well as it’s ever been done, because all these other teams, including us now, everybody has a plan, but the plan has to work. And if it doesn’t work, then you have to start over again with another plan. And Danny and them have been able to run their plan.
“Now the next step is to try to win it, and that’s the hardest step. We all know that.”
Rivers knows because he tried to take that step with the Clippers and now he’s back to square one. Or at least near said square.
“Yeah, but we’re rebuilding in a little different way,” he said. “And, you know, it’s easy to rebuild when you haven’t won, you know what I mean? We won in Boston, so rebuilding there is tough. We haven’t won crap in LA, but we’re trying to.
“The goal is to win, and once you win — if you ever do — then I don’t want to rebuild anymore. Then you go to the next one. That’s the way I look at it.”
It’s interesting that Rivers is essentially committing himself to one rebuild per city, though he’d hoped to have concluded that process — championship and all — with the Clippers by now.
He joined a club with Blake Griffin, Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan and lost in the second round of the playoffs twice and in the first round the next two years before failing to make the postseason at all this past season.
And with Jordan signing with Dallas, he, Griffin and Paul are all gone from Clipperville. Rivers had hoped the stars had aligned with LA’s “other team.” Now he has to find others.
“Yeah, but we had a run and it didn’t work,” Rivers said. “So what do you do? Are you supposed to keep doing it? Like I said, it’s part of the NBA. You go for it and you either do it or you don’t. And if you don’t, then you’ve got to change strides. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
In five years there, it seems as if Rivers has lived several lifetimes.
“I know,” he said. “It’s called being with the Clippers.”
That name used to connote doom, but things changed around the organization when Donald Sterling was forced out and Steve Ballmer bought the club. Still, it’s been a bit crazy for Rivers, who recently saw his son Austin dealt from the Clips to the Wizards.
“It’s the NBA,” Doc said. “It’s life in the NBA. There’s nothing in the coaching handbook that says how to trade your son and deal with that. But other than that, it is what it is. I like where we’re at as a team; I’ll say that.”
He also likes where he’s at in terms of job description, though he says things haven’t shifted much in his tenure.
“I’m still doing basically the same stuff,” Rivers said. “It’s interesting. I don’t think my role has changed since I’ve been there.
“When I first came, I was just the coach, but I was involved in every decision. Then I was the president, and I was involved in every decision. Now I’m the coach and whatever other title I have — I have another title, but I don’t even know what that is — but I’m still involved in every decision, so it really hasn’t changed much. My workload has changed some though. It’s less now, and that’s good. Before this last title change, I was hiring different people so I didn’t have to do everything, and that was the intent.”
That gives him plausible deniability if the trading of his son doesn’t work out.
“If Austin goes to Washington and scores 50, I’m blaming everybody else,” Doc said with a laugh.