March 03, 2022
The Sixers are expected to sign veteran big man DeAndre Jordan sometime after he clears waivers on Thursday, as ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski reported throughout this week.
It's not too difficult to figure out why Jordan will end up here and what they expect him to do. Jordan's career took off with Doc Rivers leading the Clippers beginning in the 2013-14 season, as Jordan formed one part of the "Lob City" frontcourt that feasted playing with point guard Chris Paul. Young DeAndre Jordan was quite a sight to behold, a big guy with elite athleticism who could go up and finish just about anything you threw at him. In his lone All-Star season, the 2016-17 campaign, Jordan shot a ridiculous 71.4 percent from the field, his shots coming almost exclusively at the rim and after Jordan would screen for one of L.A.'s ballhandlers.
In theory, acquiring Jordan is a cure-all on several fronts. A veteran rim-runner provides the Sixers with a realized version of what you'd hope to get from playing one of their younger bigs, Paul Reed or Charles Bassey, without needing to develop him any further. If James Harden can do anything, it's take advantage of a lob catcher in pick-and-rolls, which he has illustrated even while playing with the ground-bound Paul Millsap the first three games of his Sixers tenure. In backup groups, Harden is routinely hitting his big with a runway to the rim, and even with his athleticism far from what it used to be, Harden will put him in a lot of advantageous positions.
The fault in that logic is that Jordan's production has dwindled despite playing with better teammates than perhaps any player in the NBA over the last few years. If we throw out 19 games he played with the Knicks after the deadline in 2019, Jordan has played with, in order, Luka Doncic, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and finally with LeBron James, four of the most gifted offensive players in a league where offenses have more firepower than ever. His raw production remained decent up through the first season with the Nets in 2019-20, with Jordan providing some value as a bench big behind Jarrett Allen.
He is no longer with the Lakers (or the Nets, for that matter) as a result of how he has looked in the time since. Once blessed with the tremendous second-jump ability and pogo-stick hops from near-standstill, Jordan requires a bit more space to take off these days, which is a problem because of the specificity of his skill set on offense. On the one hand, Jordan is not going to try to do much on offense aside from the task he's assigned, so his passing blunders (one of which popped up the other night) will not be as loud or as frequent as they were with Andre Drummond. But it does mean he has to offer value as a finisher because you can't expect him to do much else. That makes the physical downslide more impactful, and more relevant to his value for Philly.
On the defensive end, most people will assume he offers a tangible upgrade in the rim protection and rebounding departments. His rate stats suggest there may still be an impactful rebounder there in the right context, and Jordan will definitely grab the boards that are in his air space, but his defensive approach has left a lot to be desired in the last two seasons. The effort has been a consistent problem, compounded by the loss of side-to-side speed when he's tasked with keeping smaller/quicker players in front of him. Questions about his defensive decline range back to his half-season run with the Mavericks in 2018-19 — you can find a lot of clips of Jordan simply ignoring any responsibilities in help and laser-focusing on the man and area in front of him. No one has more responsibility on defense than the rim protector, and your guess is as good as mine as to whether he'll live up to it or not.
That approach would be problematic on basically any team, but Jordan has more to do on defense in Philadelphia than he would in most places. They don't have much in the way of defensive steel coming off of their bench, and Jordan will be asked to do a lot of cleaning up behind the other guys if they allow him to sit in drop coverage. If they ask him to be part of a more switch-heavy scheme, a style Harden prefers and they've played with the bench a bunch in his early games with Philly, there are perhaps even bigger question marks there.
The argument in favor of bringing in Jordan assigns Doc Rivers as something of a Jordan whisperer, the guy who will get his head on straight and have him engaged with the plan for Embiid-less lineups. Certainly, it would seem Harden needs to have at least some desire to play with him if he's being brought in because these are the units that No. 1 will ultimately run and control. Banking on a return to high-energy, high-effort Jordan just seems dubious based on the fact that Jordan joined his previous two teams with both groups thinking they'd have chances to contend (even if that looks foolish in hindsight for these 2021-22 Lakers). If Jordan could be spotted routinely mailing it in and failing to move on a Brooklyn team with sky-high expectations and great results with everybody healthy, it's probably not realistic to expect him to all of a sudden turn it up for your team, even if these Sixers are a good and fun team to be a part of at the moment. Jordan could hardly make the Sixers a worse rebounding team, and he'll certainly end some possessions that the Sixers have otherwise squandered, though I have my doubts about his or anyone else's ability to solve their issues there. His fundamentals there aren't exactly pristine, the hope being that he's simply big enough to pluck down a few boards that would otherwise fall to opponents.
To be clear, none of the Sixers' options at backup five are or would be ideal regardless of signing Jordan or not. Betting on either Reed or Bassey to be a reliable option in that spot in the playoffs this season would be fairly dangerous, especially given the lack of consistent time they've gotten all season. Paul Millsap, as we've discussed, has looked pretty well cooked during his minutes to date.
The problem, insofar as there is one, is the reasonable expectation that this will end any battle for the backup center spot. Lakers coach Frank Vogel indicated in a press conference this week that waiving Jordan was about granting him "an opportunity to have a bigger role somewhere else," implying that Jordan will essentially walk into a guaranteed role for the Sixers. Giving him an opportunity is one thing, but the fear has to be that no matter what Jordan offers, he'll basically be a set-it-and-forget-it option behind Embiid at the pivot. For that to be positive, he needs to reverse his career trends fairly late in his NBA life.
If there is anyone who is going to coax Jordan's best out of him at this stage of his career, it's a team with Harden running the point and Rivers leading from the sideline. The best-case scenario is that Jordan reclaims just enough of his old form and perks up ever so slightly on defense, doing enough to allow Harden to kill backup units with Embiid getting some rest. But it would definitely be a change of course from the trajectory he has been on for years now. He is much closer to the average buyout pickup than he is to replicating this season's Andre Drummond experience. Hope for the best, just don't bank on it.
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