LA Clippers Insider: Blake Griffin Is Destined for the Season of His Career

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Updated: October 12, 2016

Blake Griffin wouldn’t listen.

It was the first day of Los Angeles Clippers training camp at the University of California-Irvine, and Griffin’s first practice since a quad injury knocked him out of the playoffs in April. He went through the whole session without a break.

Several times, Clippers coaches tried to pull him out.

Each time, he refused.

“I don’t blame Blake,” head coach Doc Rivers said afterward. “If I hadn’t played in a year or half a year, I’d probably do it too. This is his first time he had like red meat in front of him all year, in a long time, so I get it.”

Griffin’s never been one to leave scraps on the table; so far through the preseason, he’s attacked every morsel with a particularly ferocious appetite. He’s brought an energy and focus to his work that’s as familiar as it is fresh.

“Any time something is taken away and you’re not really able to play at the level you want to or not even play at all, I definitely feel like that hunger changes a little bit,” Griffin said. “It definitely changed for me.”

The hunger comes from a thoroughly frustrating 2015-16 campaign.

During a Christmas Day win over the Los Angeles Lakers, he partially tore his left quadriceps. A month later, he fractured a bone in his right hand, the result of a fist fight with Matias Testi, a former team assistant equipment manager and close friend, at a restaurant in Toronto.

Griffin’s hand healed, but his quad never quite got right. He returned late in the season, only to re-aggravate the injury during Game 4 against the Portland Trail Blazers. He’s fully healthy now, thanks in large part to bone marrow treatment on his leg, but his public image may need more time to recover its former luster.

“Last season sucked,” Griffin wrote in a letter to the Players’ Tribune last month.

But it was going quite well up until the quad became a concern.

Through 30 games, Griffin averaged 23.2 points, 8.7 rebounds and 5.0 assists while shooting 50.8 percent from the field in 34.9 minutes per game. He once again looked like a potential MVP, and was just getting comfortable stretching his shot out beyond the three-point line.

All of that went out the window once Griffin went down during the regular season, and again when his quad acted up in the playoffs.

For three months after the April procedure, one of the NBA’s highest fliers was ground-bound. No running, no jumping, no cutting, no picking and certainly no rolling.

Once team doctors cleared him for full basketball activity in late July, he worked. His workouts emphasized three-point shooting, pick-and-pops, face-up jumpers and low-post looks. He got back to ball-handling drills and, by early September, started testing these tweaks in scrimmages with teammates. Come media day, Griffin was operating at full capacity.

“He’s just that committed to working out and training and being great,” Paul said. “When you’re as good of a player as Blake is, you don’t expect anything less.”

So far through the preseason, he has played like a man on a mission. In three games, he’s hit 62.1 percent of his field goals, including 2-of-4 from three, while averaging 24 points, 9.5 rebounds and 4.5 assists per 36 minutes.

“It’s amazing how well he’s moving and playing,” Rivers said. “It’s like he didn’t miss last year.”

The one-man fastbreaks are back. So are the lobs to DeAndre Jordan, the pick-and-rolls with Paul and, of course, the slam dunks.

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He’s fallen into foul trouble during each of L.A.’s losses, (to the Golden State Warriors and Utah Jazz). But Rivers has chalked some of those up to Griffin’s aggressive effort. And the minutes he spends on the floor will be all the more valuable now that his three-point shot looks like a potential threat, if not a bona fide weapon.

“I’m probably the guy that’s on him the hardest about continuing to shoot it …

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