Rowan Kavner
LOS ANGELES – One day, head coach Doc Rivers hopes every team gets its own D-League affiliate.
For now, the Clippers are one of eight teams without one. Rivers said that’s still “in the talk phase,” but he thinks eventually every team will need one.
NBA teams are rapidly acquiring the rights to own and operate their own D-League teams. The Hornets, Nets and Bulls have all recently purchased and been granted the right to a team starting in 2016-17, which will give the D-League a record 22 franchises.
“I believe that every team should have a D-League team,” Rivers said. “I hope that happens one day. I think it would help in a lot of ways, not just in the ways that we see right now. I think it would eventually help in even the college kids coming out and almost create a farm system. But I don’t know if that’s around the corner.”
The Clippers announced Wednesday they’d assigned guard C.J. Wilcox to the D-League’s Canton Charge. It marked the fourth career assignment for Wilcox and his second this season after playing with the Bakersfield Jam in November, appearing in seven games and averaging 19.6 points, 4.1 rebounds and 2.7 assists in 35.4 minutes per game.
Wilcox was recalled at the end of November and was with the team the first couple weeks of December, though he figured he’d return to the D-League for a team upon the Clippers’ return to Los Angeles, which is what happened. Rivers said he believes Wilcox has handled moving up and down well.
“Being up, he hasn’t played a lot,” Rivers said. “I think C.J. would rather play. What I don’t like is now he’s on a different team. I don’t know, I’ve never done that as a player, so I don’t know. I just know that wouldn’t be a lot of fun, where you go from one team to this team, and you kind of get a relationship.
“Now we’re sending him to another team. All we do is, we call every team and ask, ‘Can he play? Will you play him a certain amount of minutes?’ The first team that says, ‘Yes,’ that’s where he’s going. We don’t want to send him anywhere and not play, so that’s the thing.”
While Wilcox is in Canton, the Clippers’ Branden Dawson is also in his second D-League stint of the season with his second different D-League team, playing with the Grand Rapids Drive. Dawson played with Wilcox at Bakersfield previously, averaging 6.3 points and 3.8 rebounds per game on 41.5 percent shooting while playing 17.3 minutes per game there. In Grand Rapids, Dawson is teammates with former Clipper Dahntay Jones.
Austin Rivers said he hadn’t talked to either of the young Clippers much from an advice standpoint, because most of the players in locker room aren’t accustomed to going through what Wilcox and Dawson are right now, but he did tell Wilcox to be as aggressive as possible.
“I just tell him when you go down there, go get buckets,” Austin Rivers said. “Establish yourself, be the star player on the team. The focus should just be playing hard and attacking.”
