After spurning Larry Bird and the team that nurtured him into a borderline all-star for a three-year, $27 million deal with Charlotte two summers ago, Lance Stephenson is now on the opposite coast. In July this year he was traded to the Clippers (in a three-team deal including Matt Barnes and Spencer Hawes), ridding Charlotte of their mistake and offering the Clippers a mildly expensive boost off the bench.
Despite the Hornets using Stephenson’s signing to trumpet a new era led by the 23-year-old Born Ready star, Lance doesn’t actually think they treated him like a star. At least in terms of his fiction on the court, as he told Dan Woike of the Orange County Register.
If the Hornets viewed Stephenson as a future star in their franchise, he didn’t see the evidence of it in his role.
“I don’t feel that,” he said. “I was just sitting in the corner. That’s not trying to be a star. A star normally gets the ball.”
Miscast? No. Misused? Stephenson thinks so.
“I think the way they wanted me to be a star isn’t the way my game is,” he said.
Despite a bench unit coach Doc Rivers said doesn’t “even know each other,” Stephenson is now expected to spearhead the second unit’s production. Last season LA’s exhaustion in the Conference Semifinals played a big role in their collapse against the Rockets, so a deep bench is a big part of taking that next step.
Lance seems cool with how the Clippers plan to use him this year– ostensibly with the ball in his hands. But Doc Rivers thinks that’ll only come when the ball is rotated, and Stephenson can attack a defense that’s leaning the wrong way, or scrambling to recover when the ball gets passed sideline to sideline.
That’s a bit different than controlling the tempo of the team and initiating the offense, which he struggled to do in Charlotte last season, when given the opportunity. He can get dribble-happy, especially if he thinks he can clear out and take a guy in isolation, and his casualness with the ball can lead to sloppy turnovers.
In transition he’s still one of the fastest, biggest shooting guards to barrel down the court, as a quicker-than-expected mass of movement. He’s someone who really did match up well with LeBron (minus 40 pounds and three inches) when he wasn’t blowing in his freakin’ ear. And LeBron is a genetic monster normally only found in Mary Shelley’s dreams. So the tools are there, it’s the space between the ears that needs to mature.
Instead of complaining about all that went wrong in Charlotte, Stephenson needs to swallow his pride a little bit and play within whatever structure Doc Rivers assigns him. If that means sacrificing the ball to Jamal Crawford on occasion and working as a safety valve on the weak side, then that’s what he should do. He doesn’t have any right to complain after such an abysmal season in Charlotte.
If Lance continues to think of himself as the all-around force he was in his final campaign with the Pacers, he’ll never find his niche with the Clips and that could hamper any future he envisions in the NBA. Doc has the championship pedigree and the veterans to remove Stephenson from the rotation without it derailing the team in the locker room, and that’s exactly what he’ll do if Stephenson doesn’t pan out. That’s a byproduct of playing on actual title contenders. It’s gotta be a meritocracy, so any “star” treatment Stephenson may or may not have gotten on the court in Charlotte has to be forgotten.
