Why the Celtics succeed, and the Clippers failed, with similar team builds

The team is led by two wings. One was an All-NBA First Team selection and the other a Finals MVP. Both have NBA-defining talent. Shooter, defender, initiator, cutter. They do it all. Of course, the team is a championship favorite heading into the season. The team is… the 2019-20 Los Angeles Clippers? 2024-25 Boston CelticsYes, yes. Both.

The Celtics dominated the field in 2024. They The 20 Most Dominant The most seasons in NBA history. After retaining most of their team this offseason, they Very popular They will be the champions again this season. And the Clippers were the favorites to win. Looking ahead to the 2019-20 seasonSince then, they have performed well over the past five seasons. 6th place winner They were a good regular season team, but never came close to winning a championship, and then their clock struck midnight after star duo member Paul George left for the Philadelphia 76ers.

Ultimately, the Clippers’ last five years will likely be defined more by what they didn’t do than what they did. They started in a similar situation to the Celtics and built a similar foundation of a superstar wing duo. Arguably, when healthy, Los Angeles’ Kawhi Leonard and George peaked higher over the last five years than Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. But the Celtics did what the Clippers couldn’t: lead that duo to a championship.

Why is that, and what lessons can the rest of the league take from two teams that have taken different paths from similar starting points?

If you look purely at the numbers, the Clippers have actually had more success than the Celtics with their two stars on the court — at least in the regular season. The playoffs are a different story.

The Celtics had a dominant regular season and showed little sign of slowing in their play in the postseason, but that’s not true. in front 2024. Tatum and Brown will be together for four seasons before winning a championship. On-court net rating: 4.43 In the playoffs. They’ve got something coming up for 2024, something the Clippers never managed to do.

Now, a caveat: health is a factor. The Clippers lost Leonard midway through the 2021 playoffs, lost both Leonard and George in the 2023 playoffs, and lost Leonard midway through the 2024 playoffs. They played the entire 2020 season when the Denver Nuggets came back from a 3-1 deficit to win a second-round series. And they played parts of other series together. As a result, they played nearly 800 minutes together in the playoffs despite poor health. LeBron James and Anthony Davis Only two of those players have ever played together, which is a pretty large sample size, and if both were healthy for more series, the Clippers might have broken through and won the title, but there’s little reason to think so, given that their on-court goals were mostly neutral in those nearly 800 minutes and their team-building philosophy never panned out.

After years of trial and error, the 2024 Celtics have assembled a championship team that has softened their stars’ dislikes and strengthened their preferences, especially when it comes to one of the favorite shots of all four wing stars: the mid-range pull-up.

All four are phenomenal players and contribute a lot to the offense. However, none of the four stars puts too much pressure on the goal, which means their respective teams are did The guy who made the layup. The guy who spread the floor. And the guy who did it all without having the ball much. The common thread between all four of them is that all four of them rank among the best. Top 20 Forwards in Seconds Per Touch That was the case last season. (To be fair, the ability to hold onto the ball for long periods of time is something he shares with nearly every other star player in the league.)

Those preferences were evident this past season for the Clippers. Leonard hasn’t beaten the position-average rim frequency since the 2014-15 Spurs season, and George hasn’t since the previous year with the Pacers. But the Clippers didn’t add a supporting cast to fill the void. In fact, some of the other players who played their biggest roles in the five-year span emulated the same strengths and weaknesses. Reggie Jackson, Marcus Morris and Lou Williams were among the players who played the biggest roles in the Clippers’ five-year stretch. 5th, 6th, 11th Per Cleaning the Glass, each ranks third in total minutes played for Los Angeles since the 2019-20 season, with all three playing well above average with moderate frequency. Morris and Williams In many seasons during his time with the Clippers, he ranked near the 100th percentile at each position.

As a result, the Clippers 22nd in assists Over the past five seasons, Los Angeles had never had a point guard who could imprint his style of play on the team and actually make layups for others until James Harden joined the team. When he played, the Clippers 2-point shooting percentage: 56.4%From 2019-2024, without him, the assist percentage was 51.2%. (By comparison, the assist percentage on 2-point shots last season was 56.4%. Number 9 Harden was tied for 22nd on the team with 51.2%. Best Last year, the Clippers’ on-off offense was plus-7.2 per 100 possessions. Among 1,000-minute seasons, that ranked third in the Leonard-George era and behind only Leonard’s two seasons.

In many ways, Harden was the perfect addition for Los Angeles. But they acquired him in a trade that essentially emptied the Clippers’ already empty draft shelf for the cost of trading for George. Seriously, they don’t hold a full first-round pick until 2030, and all of their picks have been traded or swapped. Even if they decided to keep George, there was little way to build a team around a star player. Meanwhile, with the Celtics drafting two leaders, Boston could acquire a variety of players with impact comparable to Harden for a fraction of the cost of the trade market, changing the team’s identity and easing the distaste for a star player.

In 2021, they traded a first-round pick and Kemba Walker for Al Horford, acquiring a floor-spacing, shot-blocking big man who had been a huge contributor to the team over the previous three years. The trade also freed up cap space for next offseason, so they signed Josh Richardson. They then traded back for Derrick White, along with a first-round pick and a pick swap, giving them another floor-spacing shot-blocker, this time at guard.

When Jrue Holiday found himself in the middle of a rebuild Portland Trail BlazersBoston acquired him in exchange for two rotation players and two first-round draft picks. Boston also sold another role player, this time for a player who was in the NBA. Get In addition to two first-round draft picks, they have big man Kristaps Porzingis who can space the floor and block shots.

Certainly, one of the obvious lessons here is to not spend too much when trading for a star player — or, more interestingly, to not spend too much on a player who will impact your team. Like Stars. James Harden is arguably a more talented basketball player than Derrick White, but White has changed the face of the Celtics to the same extent that Harden has changed the face of the Clippers.

And Boston’s four newcomers fit right in with the stars. Of the four, only Porzingis had an above-average mid-range shooting percentage last season, per Cleaning the Glass. All four Surprisingly low isolation rates and Above average 3-point percentage for positionAs a result, Boston, despite its stars’ love of the mid-range pull-up, Bottom 5 Last year, Boston took over 100 of those shots per game, while the Clippers were in the top five. There’s nothing wrong with a star taking long two-pointers, but when your entire offense is based on those shots, defenses have easier choices, shorter rotations, and more room for mistakes. In other words, Boston is 2nd in catch-and-shoot three-pointers Los Angeles was last in the league last year.

The Celtics prioritized rotation players with quick thinking skills. Guys who could only shoot layups and threes. Pass and drive. Defenders. The Clippers had a few of those guys under Leonard George. In fact, they’ve been the Clippers’ best non-star players over the past five years.

Just a quick note: Ivica Zubac is a huge center, so it makes sense that he doesn’t use mid-rangers much and has a low usage rate. But compared to other centers, he also doesn’t use mid-rangers much and has a low usage rate. Additionally, his average time of possession is 1.36 seconds per touch, 5th lowest among all centers He has been a great role player for the Clippers for many years.

Since 2019-20, role player usage and long mid-range frequency compared to win shares per 48 minutes have shown a negative trend, albeit with a relatively low correlation coefficient, suggesting that players who see the ball less and shoot less frequently from Leonard and George’s preferred areas contribute more to the Clippers than the other way around. It is ironic that Batum, one of the prizes of the Clippers’ team-building process, was traded to Philadelphia in the process of acquiring Harden. Batum had the lowest usage rate and the lowest mid-range frequency of any role player who plays a lot of minutes. And isolation? He plays very little alone, not even reaching 100 yards. The filter on nba dot com shows at least 10 such plays. in Any A season record for the Clippers.

The team-building approach that the Clippers have taken, as opposed to the Celtics, has largely defined the Los Angeles offense. At the very least, Redefine The Clippers have long done that in a meaningful way beyond the preferences of their two stars. Mid-range pull-up jumperThese shots were primarily produced from static isolation. Led the league Los Angeles faced more isolations last season, and with many role players whose shooting characteristics worsened, Bottom Last year, they attempted 1 million passes per game. Their anti-modern offense was very good (as any Leonard-George led offense would be), but they were constantly facing downs that were a big obstacle in the playoffs. The minutes Leonard and George played together, the team’s offensive rating dropped from 1 million to 1 million. 122.6 in the regular season From 2019 to 2024 116.7 in the playoffsLast year, Boston’s offensive power in the playoffs was 121.6 To 119.0.

The league was once defined by superstar wings; That stopped being true years agoWhen it comes to building a championship roster, the Celtics got that memo. The Clippers didn’t. As a result, the Celtics retained their entire core and have a better chance of defending their championship. The Clippers are primed to remember what could have been, dream of health, and take those lessons into the next era, if only it were to start.