I gave out some harsh grades tonight, but let’s face it: The Spurs are screwing up the curve. There’s no shame in losing to a better, healthier team, but some things are still tough to swallow. Here’s the Lob City Ledger from ESPNLA.com:

 

 

Pregame reading and a game thread, all in one! Hopefully this version of Found Objects will make the time pass a little faster before we get to Game 2 in San Antonio. To the goodies:

• Sports Illustrated’s Chris Ballard on the man behind the machine – Tim Duncan. From the tales of Timmy and Pop spending a weekend together on the beach and becoming soulmates (really) to Duncan relentlessly blasting Danny Ferry with a paintball gun, this is a great read and brilliant profile on one of the league’s greatest (and most reticent) players to ever lace them up.

• What’s the sign of a truly great set? You run it for 15 years, teams know you’re running it, and you still can’t stop it. Kevin Arnovitz looks at the complicated Spurs’ offense in a way hardly anyone else can. Later, if you guys are really nice, I’ll draw out the Clippers’ offense in crayon.

• Speaking of turning everything into something that has to do with me, here’s a little pregame 3-on-3 with Timothy Varner and Andrew McNeill over at the always excellent Spurs’ site, 48 Minutes of Hell. There are concerns with the Clippers’ offense and defense, but at least the special teams (Bledsoe?) are clicking.

• Speaking of Bledsoe, many of you guys will feel vindicated with your EB volume 2 love (shoutout to Nick C. in the comments section, who was all over this a few weeks ago) when you read this breakdown of the Clippers’ backcourts by Jared Dubin over at Hardwood Paroxysm. As it turns out, the Paul/Bledsoe backcourt has been one of the most successful pairings seen in the playoffs. Play that man!

 

In news announced yesterday, Pacers president of basketball operations, Larry Bird, was named Executive of the Year. We report this here on ClipperBlog because many considered Clippers vice president of basketball operations, Neil Olshey, a — if not the — favorite. Instead, he finished third, behind the Spurs’ R.C. Buford.

One could easily write 3,000 words on the award in general and this decision specifically — and for extended analysis, be sure to check out what Steve Perrin wrote over at Clips Nation. Or, a simple argument could begin and end with: “he got Chris Paul.”

Somewhere in between, here are a few thoughts:

• The criteria for this award are perhaps the most nebulous of any award out there, and that’s saying something. How do you isolate the “performance” of an executive over the course of one season? Larry Bird assembled a very good team, one that has a shot to upend the presumptive Eastern Conference champion Miami Heat, thanks to years of smart decisions. He has famously built it without the advantage of any top picks, and has managed the salary cap beautifully, which allowed him to go out and sign key contributors like David West when other contenders were tapped out. No question, this was a move that has been integral to the team’s success. But how much of this do we attribute to work done this year? It occurs to me that the West addition, while crucial, was set up by moves made before the season began. (The same argument might be used in Olshey’s case, that previous moves set the Clippers up to trade for Chris Paul. Again, tough to say how this should factor into the decision, but if you want to include it, then Olshey deserves some credit for those moves. Plus, David West ain’t Chris Paul.)
• Aside from West, Bird’s biggest acquisition was George Hill, and that came at the expense of Kawhi Leonard via a draft day trade. Leonard, as you probably know, is the one draining threes and playing lockdown defense for the best team in the Western Conference. At best, this trade was a wash.
• There has been some talk about the fact that Neil Olshey’s crowning achievement of this year (trading for Chris Paul) was made possible by an earlier trade that the league vetoed, and then helped even further by Paul “choosing” or “forcing his way to” the Clippers, depending how you look at it. While both of these things did happen to some degree, the fact remains that he got Chris Paul. As ESPN.com NBA editor Royce Webb reminded me when I suggested that, had they been more patient, the Clippers might have been positioned to acquire a top point guard without giving up as much as they did: getting a superstar is really, really hard. It’s something you can never take for granted. The Clippers made a bigger improvement this year than the Pacers, and no one can question that they did so because they got Chris Paul. When you get a player of that caliber and the move works as planned, history says you get rewarded with the Executive of the Year award. It doesn’t matter how it happened, when LeBron James signed with the Heat, Pat Riley won the Executive of the Year award. In my mind, when you get Chris Paul, every other executive has to top that.
• In addition to Paul, Olshey also made the type of peripheral moves that would garner executives that didn’t acquire Chris Paul some attention. No one here needs to be reminded of the contributions of Chauncey Billups, Reggie Evans, Kenyon Martin, Nick Young and Solomon Jones. If you do, then I’ll remind you that the first four of those guys each made significant contributions to the best team in franchise history.
• One quick note: I would have voted for Olshey for this award. But can we please stop listing the signing of Caron Butler to a 3-year, $24 million deal as a point in Olshey’s favor? No doubt, Butler has had his moments, and we can all be thankful for some “stability” at the small forward spot, but we should keep in mind the concept of “replacement level.” Caron Butler ranked 34th among qualified small forwards in Player Efficiency Rating. Like any basketball metric, there are things this number does not tell us, but one thing it does say is that he shouldn’t be used to tout the man who signed him as Executive if the Year. We can agree that if his signing helped lure Chris Paul, then it was worth it. But he wasn’t “good” by any objective measure this season, and next year he’ll be 33 years old and still on the books for $16 million through 2013-14.
• For those who ask why we bother to discuss award voting that has proven over and over to be flawed, I’d say that if it exists, it’s probably worth doing “right.” Not that Larry Bird winning was “wrong,” in any moral sense, but I believe it was the wrong decision, because there was a better choice. I, like many of you, lost no sleep over this decision, but based on what we perceive to be the standards of this award, think that Olshey was deserving. But he didn’t even finish second, which I think is ridiculous.

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It is often best to show restraint when it comes to young players. Expectations have a way of getting out of hand when you see eye-popping physical gifts and allow yourself to dream.

You see what they can do, and all of a sudden you find yourself just assuming that a turnover problem or iffy shooting stroke will correct itself with time, because that’s what can happen and that’s what we want to happen. But it doesn’t always go that way, as we know, and so patience is the play before declaring every player with potential the next Dwyane Wade.

The problem with that, of course, is that we risk missing out on the greatest thing in all of sports: being prepared for the arrival of the next Dwyane Wade.

And last night, for those of us who allowed ourselves to dream, the legend of Eric Bledsoe took another giant leap towards reality. His career may not approach the greatness of Wade’s — and the odds say it won’t — but for special players like him, odds only serve to isolate the believers from those who prefer to play it cool.

On a court that featured a minimum of two and up to five future Hall of Famers, only the great Tim Duncan impacted the game like the 22-year old Bledsoe. Which is fitting, because with every breathtaking defensive possession or composed foray into the lane, his facial expression grew more Duncan-like, completely unfazed by the magnitude of the moment.

It was like for 26 and a half minutes, he was playing a game of one-on-one, make it take it, and his opponent was barely touching the ball. Every check ball at the top of the key belonged to Bledsoe — a chain of buckets, boards, dimes and game-changing stops that just wouldn’t end.

The Spurs are a better team than the Clippers, so Bledsoe could only do so much. But so much, he did. Paired next to Chris Paul, the difference in explosiveness was just as striking as the similarities in composure and control of the ball. When he finally got to share the backcourt with Paul, part of you kept waiting for him to defer or something to go wrong, but it never happened.

His performance against Memphis was special to those of us who care, and noteworthy to the masses that hadn’t yet taken an interest. But even his staunchest supporters had reason to wonder if his skill set was just well-suited for that style of play. After all, even his own coach apparently still considers him more of a change-of-pace novelty than a starting-caliber difference-maker. No one could confidently say he had reached a level he could sustain against more complete opposition.

But what we saw last night changed everything. We rightly resist hyperbole, but we’d be doing a disservice to our most primal NBA passions to deny what we are seeing develop in front of our eyes.

Last night, Eric Bledsoe looked like Dwyane Wade. He put up 23 points on 10-16 shooting, five rebounds and four assists against arguably the best team in the league — certainly the best coached — the one that held Chris Paul to 3-13 from the floor. Without so much as a system to fall back on if things weren’t working, he attacked confidently but with unprecedented control, and scored from any spot on the floor.

He took the ball, quite literally, and a team that has made it this far on the shoulders of one player, Chris Paul, lost nothing in the process. The story of this series is yet to be completed, but it’s looking more and more like the the only things that can keep him off the floor are his coach and his gas tank — which itself is a function of the lack of playing time he received throughout the year.

Because the Grizzlies couldn’t stop him, and I’m not sure how the Spurs plan to, either. That’s because he has what it takes to be great: you can bet that he’ll put his stamp on the game, even if his shot isn’t falling like it was last night. That’s special.

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