Does Blake Griffin Have Anything Left?

As training camp draws to a close and preseason begins, this is usually a point in the season where the only NBA transactions hitting the wire are players being signed for a day or two so as to be able to allocate their rights to the team’s G League affiliate, or cuts of any residual offseason excess. Normally, there are not any rotation-affecting signings made at this point in the process. Normally.

Nonetheless, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN brings news of one; the Boston Celtics have agreed to sign former All-Star Blake Griffin, most recently of the Brooklyn Nets, to a one-year deal. The deal is fully guaranteed, and thus not part of the training camp shuffle – Griffin, it seems, will be a Celtic to begin this season.

Griffin’s signing comes on the back not only of new acquisition Danilo Gallinari’s long term absence due to an ACL injury, but also the more recent news that starting center Robert Williams will miss a longer period of time than previously thought with the lingering effects of the injury that clearly hampered him in last year’s NBA Finals run. Much as the Celtics rely on Williams on the court, the injuries he suffers – borne largely out of his jump-heavy playing style – make it a frequent question as to whether he can suit up.

Similarly, Griffin’s jump-heavy style of play throughout his youth and his prime saw him pile up the knee injuries that have left the former premium athletic specimen far below his own former explosive standards. The burst has largely gone, ne’er to return. What the Celtics will want to see – and believe they will get – is a more nuanced impact beyond that.

A six-time All-Star, Griffin boasts averages of 19.8 points and 8.2 rebounds in 724 career regular season games with the Nets, L.A. Clippers and Detroit Pistons. To be sure, much of that production came at his career apex, when he ran and dunked like few others. Between 2010 and 2019 inclusive, Griffin averaged 21.9 points and 9.0 rebounds per game. With that now gone, though, he has had to reform himself into being a skills-based player, with mixed results.

Last season, his second in Brooklyn, the 33-year-old Griffin averaged 6.4 points, 4.1 rebounds and 1.9 assists per game, but he did so on only 42.5% shooting. This mark was a small improvement on the 42.3% and 35.2% he had posted in his two heavily-disrupted seasons prior, yet it also speaks to the inefficiencies in his game today – the man who used to get so many point-blank looks at the rim every night through his combination of power and explosion now relies largely on a spotty jump shot for his own scoring.

Shooting slightly on the way down, consistency in the outside shot has never been a hallmark of Blake’s, as evidenced by his 26.2% three-point percentage last campaign. And with the exception of a distinct outlier in 2018-19 – when he hit 189 three-pointers at a 36.2% clip – he has never been a plus shooter, merely an occasional one.

What Griffin has done, though, is develop his perimeter skills beyond just the shooting. In pick-and-roll sets, he has gone from being the roller to often being the ball-handler, a much-improved area of his game over the years. And when he does set screens, his big frame means they can be meaningful ones, recording 1.6 screen assists per game even in his limited role.

Also a decent and unselfish passer on the move, Griffin can now create offense with the ball in his hands, where once he was the one who needed creating for. Similarly, he has adapted and developed his game on defense; whereas in his early career he was the one barrelling into defenders, he is now the defender setting those same traps.

Even with all that leap, Griffin never was a shot-blocker, and aside from his first season in the league, nor was he the great rebounder in the NBA that he was in college. What he has however done is find ways to contribute on that end through becoming an excellent rotator, team defender and charge-taker. Indeed, he led the NBA in charges taken per game at 0.46, despite only playing 17.1 minutes a night.

The little things do not entirely negate the absence of big things, and Griffin’s All-Star calibre play of as recently as three years ago has been lost to the constant lower body problems that still linger around him today. But over the course of his 13-year career, he has gotten smarter, wiser and more polished as a player. He may not be ageing like Kevin Love, perhaps, but he is finding ways to contribute on a nightly basis, and where once the poster dunk was something he did better than everyone else, his new something is the taken charge. That gets you work, even with the defending Eastern Conference champions.