Here on Brooklyn Balling, I’ll try to recap the chaos that was the 2013-14 Nets season with a series of “Season Review” posts on the players, trades, and even coach that shaped how this year turned out. Alan Anderson was last, and Shaun Livingston is up next.
During his 10-year NBA career, Shaun Livingston has played for eight different teams. When you consider that he missed the entire 2007-08 season with a gruesome knee injury obtained on a fall with the Clippers, that’s almost one season per team.
Now, when players such as Livingston jump from franchise to franchise so rapidly, most of them end up out of the league relatively early before making much of an impact. However, thanks to a resurgent 2013-14 season in Brooklyn with the Nets, S-Dot has not become one of those players resigned to the scrap heap.
When the Nets signed him for the veterans’ minimum this past July, they made the low-risk, high-reward move that has given them talented players such as Gerald Green, Andray Blatche, and Andrei Kirilenko over the past few seasons and Livingston was no exception.
Playing a career-high 76 regular season games (plus 12 in the playoffs), Livingston played 26 minutes per game for the Nets and was able to stay healthy for one of the first seasons in his career.
At 6-7, Livingston provided the backcourt size Jason Kidd needed to launch his effective “long-ball” strategy in which Livingston, Deron Williams, Joe Johnson, Paul Pierce, and Kevin Garnett started on the floor together. This gave the Nets enormous versatility on both offense and defense, mainly thanks to Livingston’s long arms and ability to attack the paint to carve up opponents at both ends.
Also, the fact that Livingston’s knees–which have caused the majority of his NBA injury troubles–seemed to be given a second wind, as he was flying all over the court for big steals (1.2 per game) and big dunks at seemingly huge moments in a lot of games. Whenever Brooklyn needed a stop or key bucket–he usually provided them on jumpers in the lane–Livingston was there to get the job done.
The only problem with Livingston is –as with Billy King’s other veteran free-agent “diamond in the rough” signings–that he’s a free agent this offseason and is sure to garner a lot of interest on the open market as a 6-7, 28-year-old point guard who has resurrected his career. The Nets may not have the cap room–or desire to spend–to bring Livingston back next season should he decide to go for a bigger contract, similarly to what C.J. Watson did last summer.
Clearly, losing Shaun to another team would be a big blow for Brooklyn but that’s how these things tend to go in the NBA. As players impress significantly more than expected, they command interest which equates to dollar signs. Hopefully, for Billy King and Jason Kidd, Livingston elects to eschew a presumably more lucrative deal to remain a Net. However, most times, that’s not how it works in the NBA.
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