After Friday’s announcement that Doc Rivers will surrender his front office role to solely focus on coaching, it was the crescendo to a tumultuous dual role for the NBA champion coach, Bill Oram of The Orange County Register writes.
Rivers, for four seasons, was tasked with both assembling a quality roster and then leading it to success on the court. As Oram writes, despite winning 50+ games each year with Rivers at the helm, the Clippers failed to advance past the first round of the playoffs. So, while Rivers is often viewed as one of the NBA’s elite head coaches, his career in the front office is “spotty,” Oram adds.
“Given final say on personnel moves, something Rivers coveted and chased all the way across the country to L.A., the career coach struggled annually to find the right mix of role players,” Oram writes about the man who led the 2007/08 Celtics to the NBA championship.
Despite the controversy that came with it, Rivers’ acquisition of his son, Austin Rivers, was a good move that yielded a quality role player for a team filled with superstar talent. Besides that, the obvious turmoil within the team became obvious, highlight by notable departures of J.J. Redick and Chris Paul this offseason. While Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan remain with the team, the direction of the Clippers with Lawrence Frank assuming Rivers’ former role and it will take a while before a prognosis on that move is available.
Read more about news surrounding the Los Angeles teams:
- Despite his role with the organization being restructured, Rivers will still make every penny of the five-year, $50MM deal he signed with the team in 2014, tweets Sam Amick of USA Today.
- Los Angeles Times’ Brad Turner tweets that the Clippers interviewed Mark Hughes and Shareef Abdur-Rahim for front office roles last week.
- In a separate tweet, Turner reports that Corey Maggette, Lester Conner, and Mo Peterson interviewed for the role of director of player development and special assistant to Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka. Maggette, however, has withdrawn his name from consideration, per Turner (via Twitter).