Doc Rivers Wants To Remind You That It's Never His Fault

If there’s one thing Doc Rivers has excelled at in his first stint as a general manager with the Los Angeles Clippers, it’s talking a lot of mess that’s meant to deflect attention away from how bad he’s been at building a deep and functional NBA roster.

Last month, right after his team blew a 3-1 series lead to the Houston Rockets in the second round of the playoffs, Rivers spent some time during his postgame interview trying to convince everyone that the Clippers roster he inherited three years ago—one that boasted Chris Paul and Blake Griffin in their primes, as well as rising talents in DeAndre Jordan and Eric Bledsoe— was laughably bad.

Yesterday, he called into the to discuss his recent acquisition of Lance Stephenson, and once again went out of his way to lay the blame for his poorly constructed roster at someone else’s feet:

This is really only my third year, but you can make a case that this is our second year, if you know what I’m saying. If I someday wrote a book and told you a couple of the trades we had in the first year and didn’t do because of other reasons, you’d fall off your chair.

The implication seems to be that racist shitbag Donald Sterling—who was the Clippers’ owner for just the first year of Rivers’ tenure—spent a season vetoing all sorts of super sweet trades that Rivers had lined up, trades that would have obviously resulted in a Clippers’ championship if they had been approved. When Roggin asked Rivers to get specific and tell him about some of these potential trades, Rivers just laughed him off and said, “I’m too young. Not yet.”

This schtick is getting old. Sure, maybe Doc Rivers had a killer trade or two lined up that Sterling nixed, but given Rivers’s history of blaming everyone but himself for his failings as a GM, this comes off as little more than Rivers finding himself a soft target to fire some blame at. Also, I don’t think it was Donald Sterling’s idea to sign Austin Rivers and Spencer Hawes.