{"id":134189,"date":"2025-09-11T02:10:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T02:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/134189\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T02:10:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T02:10:07","slug":"clippers-finally-grant-brook-lopez-his-longtime-wish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/134189\/","title":{"rendered":"Clippers finally grant Brook Lopez his longtime wish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brook Lopez’s arrival with the Los Angeles Clippers<\/a> comes at arguably the perfect time in his career. He’s going to get exactly what he wants playing in Southern California the ability to play exactly the brand of basketball that suits him best. <\/p>\n

Maybe not every Clippers fan knows a ton about Lopez and his strengths and weaknesses just yet. But if we go back to a November 2023 article from Eric Nehm<\/a> at The Athletic, we get a pretty good idea of why playing drop coverage and protecting the rim are two of the strengths that it makes sense for Lopez to lean into. <\/p>\n

Nehm highlights an end of game situation from a Bucks-Knicks game that had recently happened at the time. In New York’s final possession with less than 30 seconds to go, Julius Randle attacked Giannis Antetokoumpo and drove toward the basket. <\/p>\n

After a couple of nifty moves, Randle was able to create space and get up a shot as Giannis fell down. But at the last second, Lopez came swooping in to help, swatting away Randle’s shot and securing the rebound, helping Milwaukee come away with the win. <\/p>\n

Brook Lopez will be able to maximize his defensive game in LA<\/p>\n

Following the conclusion of the game, Bucks coach at the time Adrian Griffin had some words on what he saw. “Oh, man, he was awesome,\u201d Griffin said. \u201cSometimes as coaches, we\u2019re too smart for our own selves and so a couple players came to me, I won\u2019t disclose them, but they wanted Brook deeper in the drop and I was smart enough to listen to them and it paid off tonight.” <\/p>\n

That sequence and those words from his former coach show to us just how great Lopez is<\/a> when he’s allowed to play a lot of drop coverage and hang around the basket to defend. It’s exactly where he thrives most, and he’ll be able to do a lot of that this coming season in Los Angeles. <\/p>\n

Brook’s in a really solid position to thrive as Ivica Zubac’s backup. I think even non-Clipper fans would admit Zubac is a top ten center in the game today, and Lopez now gets to take a little bit of his workload so Zubac doesn’t over-extend himself in the regular season. <\/p>\n

Lopez will thrive most when he’s in the position he found himself in on this play with the Bucks a couple of seasons ago. And he’s going to be doing much of the same thing he did on this possession while wearing a Clippers uniform. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brook Lopez’s arrival with the Los Angeles Clippers comes at arguably the perfect time in his career. He’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-134189","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}