I think even those of us who were optimistic about this trade knew it wasn’t going to be an easy transition. Adding a player of James’ caliber to any team is going to disrupt whatever chemistry might have existed before his arrival. A giant chunk of the work that was put into this offseason was kinda made null and void once this trade happened. Essentially, these first few games are serving as a makeshift preason for this new version of the team.

Remember the first game of the KD Warriors? They got blown out by the spurs. The Heatles first season together they started off 8-7. These first few games, as we can all see, are the players all feeling things out and trying to get comfortable in their new roles.

Ty has also for some reason not really staggered these 4 stars in anyway that’s made sense so far. We even saw a lineup in the last game were NONE of them were on the floor. In James’ first game, he got some run with an entire bench line up and I think we can all agree this is where Westbrook needs to be, not James. I also feel like Kawhi and PG should be staggered more to the point where at least one of them is always out there to some degree. Seems like Ty’s got a lot more tinkering to do on this end.

And I hate to say it, but the reason why this move made sense in the first place is because of INJURIES. The main reason I thought the clippers should make the trade was due to our 2 stars availability. This team is now constructed in a way that, when one player goes down, the rest of the 3 can pick up the slack and still be very competitive and win games. The benefit of having James is his potential as an ‘innings eater’ and his ability to slot in and keep the team afloat in case one of our stars is out.

It’s a long season and the real hard work will be figuring out how to get all 4 of them working together in a way that makes sense and, most importantly, wins ball games. BUT, when we see one of our stars go down, we’ll see the real advantage of having made this trade. The beginning of the Nets game was a glimpse of the potential of having four future HOFers on the same team and if they can figure out how to extend that over 48 mins, then I think we’re gonna have a lot of fun this season. Keep yo head up Clipper Nation, this is just a rough start to what hopefully ends in CaliFOURnia getting the job done.