Imagine if CP3 and Dwight team up in Atlanta next year. The Clips would suck again and the contracts of Griffin and DeAndre would begin to look bad or in DeAndre's case worse.
Ken Berger @KBergCBS Blake Griffin and the Clippers have formally agreed on his five-year, approximately $95 million deal, league sources say. 19 million?!
95 million!!!??? He can't shoot or make free throws. All he does is dunk. He is not a superstar. I dont even think he deserves to be on the 2k 13 cover!
When you have a guy that can attract other star players, as well as sell out the arena anywhere you go, you pay him. Do I think he's worth the Derrick Rose Rule max? No. Do I think it's smart to lock him up due to the fact that drafting him turned your franchise around? Hell to the yes.
Good job by the Clippers. Next up sign Chris Paul. You are nothing in this league without star players.
Omer Asik would be signed at 25M annually, not 95$M total. I'm sorry, but right now Griffin is nothing but a glorified dunker. He makes amazing dunks all game long but he has no post moves, no defense, no mid-range jumper and his rebounding is just average. A large part of that is not his fault, if he had gone to a better coached team it'd be a different story, but as it is Griffin is more of a crowd getter than anything else.
Considering CP3 refused to sign an extension I dunno how big his star attracting power is. I get that some posters here think this is just sourgraping, but honestly good PFs are as common as good pgs nowadays. You can pay Griffin 95M or you can pay someone like Landry 6M a year and he'll give you around 80%-90% what Griffin will give you.
Griffin has career averages of 21.7/11.5/3.5 on 52% shooting. That's about as good as it gets for a 2nd year guy. A guy who is "just a dunker" wouldn't be among the leaders in assists for forwards, and calling his rebounding "average" is basically saying everyone outside of Love and Howard is average too. Now it's possible he'll never improve or regress (aka the Amare Stoudemire effect), but I wouldn't put my money on it. He is 23 years old, from all reports works incredibly hard, and is playing alongside one of the best, if not the best, PGs in the league.
CP3 didn't sign the extension because it's in his best interest to sign next year. See: http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/...ins-why-passed-extension-los-angeles-clippers This is a star-driven league and a team of Carl Landrys isn't going to win the title. That is why you give guys the max.
His FG% is pretty high because all he does are dunks, how many of those aren't gonna go in? His stats get some padding from the "Rashard Lewis" effect, wherein the other big in the rotation is pretty much invisible and Griffin gets some of the stats that the Jordan would have gotten. Griffin is an average rebounder, he's not awful at it but he's not gifted either, he doesn't have the nose for the reb like Kidd and he doesn't have elite boxing out techniques like Love. Even if Griffin works very hard he won't progress much if his teacher is a dumbass (aka Del Negro), you look at his 2nd year playing and I didn't really see a lot of improvement in his game. Landry won't win you the title but the money you save on him could be funneled to other players.
In all fairness, what's with the hate on BG? He is one of the top 2 or 3 PFs in the league, and he wows the crowd. I'd really want to see him put in more efforts on the defensive end, but I'd want him in Houston with that contract.