When Patrick Beverley returned to California with the Timberwolves Monday night to wrap up Minnesota’s regular-season series with the LA Clippers, Beverley let his teammates know right before the game that he “needed this one” against his former team. The Clippers were coming off of an improbable comeback road win against the Brooklyn Nets to end a stretch of five games in seven nights. Point guards Reggie Jackson and Eric Bledsoe were both great at the Barclays Center while starting together.
Advertisement
Beverley brought the hatchet out on them right away, playing a role in the duo combining for six points on 2-for-12 shooting, six assists and nine turnovers.
“It felt good locking Reggie and Eric up,” Beverley said after a 122-104 Timberwolves win that started a three-game Clippers losing streak that continued Thursday against former Clipper Chris Paul’s Phoenix Suns and Saturday against the Memphis Grizzlies, the team Beverley was traded to from the Clippers before being re-routed to Minnesota.
Beverley was out to prove a point to the Clippers, pun intended, as he finished Monday night’s game with 11 points, two steals and 12 assists. The dimes tied a career high, and even though it was the only time the Timberwolves beat the Clippers in four tries, it didn’t make Beverley relish in the feat any less.
“I wanted to come out here and pass the ball,” Beverley said of his career-best playmaking. “One of the reasons why, you know, Clippers always looking for another guard because they say I wasn’t the playmaker. So I wanted to kind of set the tone with that tonight, for sure.”
Beverley directly addressing the narrative here may have come while he was the main subject. But make no mistake, Beverley could have just as easily been referring to Lou Williams, who makes his first return back to LA Sunday to face the Clippers after they traded him last March to the Atlanta Hawks for Rajon Rondo. And Williams comes to town at a time when the Clippers’ current point guards are going through their worst stretch of the season.
His legacy is unique within the Clippers’ history. It should not be overlooked.
Williams is one of my favorite players in the NBA. I’ve known about him since high school, when he was consistently ranked at the top of our shared class of 2005. He was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers in 2005 out of South Gwinnett High School, so Williams spent the first seven seasons of his career in my hometown. When Williams finally left Philadelphia, it was to sign with his hometown Atlanta Hawks. Williams tore his right ACL in his first season with the Hawks, coming back 10 months later.
Advertisement
And it was after that injury that Williams began a legendary run as one of the coldest scorers to ever enter a game after the opening tip. In his lone season with the Toronto Raptors in 2014-15, Williams won his first Sixth Man of the Year award. Yes, before 2019 Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard parlayed one season of hardware with the Raptors into Drake cameos, it was “6 Man like Lou Will.” Williams would sign with the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2015 offseason (seen here with Roy Hibbert and Brandon Bass in silence when asked if Kobe Bryant had spoken to them by the time the new signings were introduced by the Lakers), and Williams was in the running for another Sixth Man of the Year award when the Lakers traded him to the Houston Rockets at the 2017 deadline. Instead, the 2017 award went to Eric Gordon, Williams’ teammate in Houston to end that season.
When Williams was included with Beverley, Montrezl Harrell and four other players in a trade that sent Chris Paul from the Clippers to the Rockets, it wasn’t a lock that Williams would continue his NBA career. Williams ultimately decided to play, and he earned the next two Sixth Man of the Year awards to join former Clipper Jamal Crawford as the only three-time winners of the award. Williams was a finalist again in 2020 when the award went to his pick-and-roll partner, Harrell.
Williams had incredible moments as a Clipper. In his first season, he put up 17 30-point games. He had a 40-point, 10-assist performance off the bench in a win at Memphis. He abused the Lakers for 42 points in a November 2017 win. Williams scored a career-best 50 points in a start in Golden State. Williams would be rewarded with a three-year extension in February 2018, immediately considered a bargain for the Clippers. Williams’ efforts in 2017-18 were the primary reason that the Clippers were able to finish the season with a winning record despite missing the postseason.
As I mentioned last year, Williams embraced being a Clipper. When LeBron James came to the Lakers in 2018, Williams said his team was better until the Lakers proved otherwise. And in that 2018-19 season, the Clippers made it back to the postseason while the Lakers failed to qualify with James. Williams would add more moments, like a 31-point triple-double off the bench in a win at Chicago, a 40-point game off the bench in a win against Paul George’s Oklahoma City Thunder, and his only career buzzer-beater in a comeback win against the Nets.
Sweet Lou’s offense was an art form. There was a checklist of things he could do over the course of the game. You knew he was going left. His recovery from a serious knee injury allowed him to adapt a leaning fadeaway to create space. If you were a rookie or otherwise defending Williams for the first time in your life, he was drawing the pump fake foul like clockwork. 30 seconds left in the quarter? Expect a “Lou-for-1”, a version of a 2-for-1 in situational basketball. Allen Iverson’s protégé would average 5.5 free throw attempts per game with the Clippers. Williams was consistently adept at running the pick-and-roll.
Advertisement
More importantly for the Clippers franchise, Williams won games. Maybe Leonard and George come to play with the Clippers if Williams, Harrell and Beverley didn’t compete and win for two seasons after Paul left in 2017. But there’s no question that Williams and the Bridge Clippers made LA a free agent destination instead of a rebuild. Williams made his mark in LA. His picture still hangs in the media workroom. He is included with other Los Angeles sports greats on a wall inside the arena. For the Clippers, a franchise with no statues, no banners and no retired numbers, it’s basically Sweet Lou and Ralph Lawler. That’s it.
It’s a shame that Williams’ last postseason with the Clippers lives in infamy due to the circumstances within the NBA’s restart in Florida during the coronavirus pandemic that suspended the 2019-20 NBA season. As awkward as it may have been to integrate Leonard and George with an established group led by Williams, Harrell, and Beverley, the Clippers were still very good. They were second in the Western Conference. They were one win away from the Western Conference finals. Williams wasn’t the only one to miss games in the bubble, though getting popped for being at Magic City means that no one will ever forget it.
The bubble broke up the Bridge Clippers. It cost Doc Rivers his job after seven seasons as head coach of the Clippers. Harrell was allowed to walk in free agency, replaced by Leonard’s former teammate Serge Ibaka. Williams would never be the same. Beverley was the starting point guard on a team that everyone determined lacked a point guard.
To Williams’ credit, he spent his final season with the Clippers doing all he could to contribute to a champion. Head coach Tyronn Lue used Williams less as a pure scorer, and Williams adapted, putting together back-to-back games with 10 assists for only the second time of his career last February. Williams dug deep and defended harder than ever. He was a leader, as he was mic’d up telling his team during the second game of a miniseries against the Utah Jazz that “ain’t no way we’re losing back-to-back to the same team.” When Williams scored his 15,000th point in San Antonio, the night before he was traded, he was still focused on something bigger.
“We have a huge goal ahead of us, to try to win an NBA championship,” Williams said after his last game as a Clipper. “So hopefully, everything goes seamlessly, and we just continue to go.”
Williams made it clear that he had no intentions of playing anywhere else but with the Clippers. He threatened to retire even before he was traded. So when he was actually traded, Williams needed some time before he accepted a chance to rejoin the Hawks.
View this post on Instagram
Williams’ second stint with the Hawks hasn’t suggested that he has a whole lot left, and he has been open about his expectation to possibly retire after this season. Williams has scored 20 points or more only twice since the trade, and he hasn’t scored more than 14 points in a game this season. He did not play Friday night in the Hawks’ loss at Los Angeles. Williams has played more than 20 minutes only once this season, and that was on New Year’s Eve after missing two weeks in health and safety protocols.
Advertisement
But it is still a sore spot that the Clippers lost Williams. The player Williams was traded for, Rondo, had a decent impact early with the Clippers. Rondo’s Game 3 performance at Dallas was critical towards starting a series comeback out of a 2-0 deficit in the 2021 Western Conference quarterfinals. But Rondo was unplayable in June, even after Leonard’s serious knee injury, and Rondo’s inclusion in the trade that sent Beverley away and Bledsoe to the Clippers was an unceremonious ending for Rondo. In a way, Rondo represented a failed effort by the Clippers to address the narrative that their point guards were inadequate, and it cost them two players in Beverley and Williams who wanted to be a part of the franchise’s future.
Williams will be celebrated by the Clippers at a time when the current point guards are in a bad place. Jackson, who assumed the lead scoring guard role that Williams vacated, has his worst three-game stretch of the season (30 percent field goals, four assists, 10 turnovers during three-game losing streak). Bledsoe followed up his season-best 27 points in Brooklyn by scoring only 11 points to go with 11 turnovers in the three losses since, adding only nine assists while missing all eight 3s. Even if you include Harrell to fully represent the era, the Clippers are missing the interior scoring presence that Harrell left behind, and Ibaka’s rocky return from back surgery has left him unable to consistently deliver on what he was brought to the Clippers to do as a rim-protecting stretch option up front.
Now, all of this is in the context of a Clippers team that hasn’t had Leonard all year, hasn’t had George much since the beginning of December, and has been hit by a steady wave of health and safety protocol entries for three weeks. The whole league is going through it. Williams’ current Hawks are going through it; both the Hawks and Clippers are under .500 after losing in each team’s conference finals.
This may be Williams’ final game in LA against the Clippers. It will be his first game in front of a Clippers crowd in nearly two full years. He is one of the most important figures in franchise history, and that isn’t a slight. He is the Underground Goat, and here’s to Sweet Lou getting his flowers while he’s still playing. The Clippers miss him, and there will never be another like him.
Welcome back, @TeamLou23! pic.twitter.com/src8hx8Vw0
— LA Clippers (@LAClippers) January 9, 2022
(Top photo of Lou Williams and Patrick Beverley: Harry How / Getty Images)