ATLANTA — An important announcement from the LA Clippers hit reporters’ inboxes Wednesday morning.
There were just 75 days until the NBA’s signature season celebration, the annual All-Star Weekend, arrived at the Clippers’ glittering $2 billion Intuit Dome, and the team was kicking off its official countdown by hosting a contest for Angelinos to win free, officially licensed outdoor basketball hoops with the NBA All-Star logo.
A nice gesture from the team that not only is owned by the league’s richest owner, Steve Ballmer, but will also serve as host of the 2028 Olympic basketball tournament. But the free hoop giveaway, or even the All-Star countdown, didn’t really register on your Clippers’ radar, did it?
That’s because this season, supposed to be a time of joy and celebration, has been a giant disaster. The Clippers’ “other” major news of the day, that they were sending future Hall of Famer Chris Paul home for good, was just the latest outburst in an extremely noisy last few months for all the wrong reasons. The Clippers’ 115-92 victory over a depleted Atlanta Hawks team on Wednesday night doesn’t change that narrative.
Namely:
- A scandal. The NBA is investigating allegations that The Clippers circumvented the league salary cap thanks to a “no show” contract for Kawhi Leonard from one of the team’s sponsors.
- A roster that is imploding. It’s not even Christmas yet, and neither Paul nor Bradley Beal, another highly decorated veteran acquired over the summer, are with the team. Paul, who signed as a free agent, will either be traded or bought out of his contract, and Beal, who the Clippers traded for, broke his hip on November 8requiring season-ending surgery.
- Injuries, of course. Not only to Beal, who finished his year, and to sharpshooter Bogdan Bogdanović, who has only played nine games so far and missed the last seven due to a bad hip, and to Derrick Jones Jr., who sprained a knee ligament and could miss two months, but also to Leonard. The oft-injured star suffered a significant right foot sprain on Nov. 3, and the Clippers went 1-9 until his return.
- Losing. Staggering losses. They went from the 2nd to the 13th in November. Trailed by 38 Monday in Miami. Ended a five-game losing streak by beating the Hawks, and is still 10 games under .500 at 6-16. Even if they continue to lose, the Clippers don’t own their 2026 first-round pick, so they wouldn’t benefit from it in the draft.
“It’s been tough,” admitted coach Tyronn Lue before Wednesday’s game. “I’ve never had a losing season (as coach) and a few guys in the locker room have never had a losing season. It’s been tough trying to figure that out.”
Lawrence Frank, the Clippers’ president of basketball operations, said: “Right now, we’re playing bad basketball on both ends. We’re a bad basketball team.”
James Harden is averaging nearly 27 points and 8.5 assists this season for a 6-16 Clippers team. (Katelyn Mulcahy/Getty Images)
Yes, it’s bad. The Clippers have the league’s ninth-highest payroll and oldest roster, but rank 19th in offense and 24th in defense. This is a team considered early in the season to be a title contender (to the extent that anyone else is a contender, given Oklahoma City’s depth and impressive defending champion).
Things are bad, but apparently not catastrophic. Frank was emphatic Wednesday in favor of Lue as coach, calling him “my partner,” a “hell of a coach, and offering that Lue “is going to continue to be the coach here for a long time.” The same could be true for Frank and his leaders.
Ballmer and Frank value continuity above all else, and it doesn’t appear that any major changes are on the cards. Multiple league sources briefed on the discussions said Frank and his associates were close to receiving contract extensions, with one source saying those extensions “have been in the planning stages for some time. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will.” Clippers sources emphasized ownership’s commitment to continuity, but said discussions about contract extensions were “premature.”
The Clippers also remain steadfast in their insistence that they have done nothing wrong in their dealings with Aspirationthe former Clippers team sponsor and a now-bankrupt environmental company that also gave Leonard an endorsement deal. Sources outside the organization share the Clippers’ belief that the league’s ongoing investigation will ultimately not uncover wrongdoing.
Ballmer invested $50 million in Aspiration in 2021, and he and Clippers minority owner Dennis J. Wong made subsequent investments afterward, while in 2022 Leonard received a four-year, $28 million contract from Aspiration that did not require Leonard to do any work (although there were expectations outlined in the document, there was a clause that gave Leonard final opt-out on anything he did not didn’t want to do.)
But the league wants proof that Aspiration explicitly gave Leonard the contract at the Clippers’ request, so he could make more money without it counting against the NBA salary cap, and the team insists that’s not what happened.
So if no one is in danger of losing their jobs and the Aspiration cloud passes, what’s left is a Clippers team with two extremely talented older stars, a championship coach and a committed front office trying to clean up this mess.
“It’s not going to happen right away,” said James Harden, who scored 27 points in the Clippers’ victory on Wednesday. “It’s one day at a time, and it’s just about focusing. We don’t have the leverage to cancel plays. We have to be sharp and consistent for 48 minutes. That’s just who we are.”
Asked before Wednesday’s game if he could pinpoint where the Clippers went so wrong, Lue quickly responded: “We messed up when Kawhi got hurt and Bradley Beal got hurt on the same night, and they missed 11 straight games.” None of this is entirely accurate, as Leonard’s injury lasted two full games before Beal went down, and Leonard only missed 10 games. But the feeling is right. The Clippers were a respectable 3-2 record before the game Leonard was injured and haven’t been right since.
The team also made some roster decisions in the offseason that didn’t work out, such as trade Norman Powell to Miami so the Clippers could acquire John Collins (from Utah in a three-team deal). Paul’s signing, obviously, didn’t go as planned, and Powell’s replacement, Beal, didn’t stick around long.
But Frank said the Clippers should always be better, much better than that, especially on defense. Ivica Zubac was a contender for Defensive Player of the Year last season and is still the mainstay of Los Angeles’ defense. Yet a very good defensive team from last season has become one of the worst in the league so far this year.
“Obviously we’re in a results business – we can’t keep losing games, but that’s what we look like,” Frank said. “You watch us play, we went from an elite defensive team to one of the worst defensive teams. And even with the trades, we had success this offseason, we didn’t really trade any of our defensive players. And then offensively, having a flow or a rhythm. That’s what it looks like. And then just the effort and everything else. And if we start doing those things, then our talent will show what we are. I just think we’re a lot better than where we are. We did not deserve to win and we must deserve to win.
Rejecting the Clippers’ latest loss Monday, in which they never got close and Lue pulled his starters early in the second half, LA had often been competitive during its losing streak — particularly in the first two or three quarters. The team suffered from defensive lapses and poor offensive possessions either throughout the fourth quarter, with the game on the line, or coming out of the locker room after halftime in an almost inexplicable fashion after strong first halves.
In their first game without Paul on Wednesday, the Clippers were decidedly better with their defense and composure. Atlanta was playing without Trae Young, Kristaps Porziņģis and Jalen Johnson, who became their leading scorer with Young out, but the Clippers nonetheless built on a modest first-half lead and refused to give it up. Leonard added 21 points, Zubac finished with 14 points and 17 rebounds, and rookie Kobe Sanders added 17 points coming off the bench.
Harden, who had a good season despite the team’s struggles, is now just 39 points away from the top 10 on the NBA’s all-time scoring list. He shot just 11 of 24 on Wednesday and 5 of 14 from 3, but added three steals on a night where the Clippers reduced their points allowed by 48 points from their previous game.
It was a start, a step in the right direction, with a very, very long way to go before the Clippers could celebrate anything.
“I thought we had the right intention and the right mindset,” Lue said. “I don’t really talk after games, but tonight I just told the guys it’s going to be our defense that gets us over the hump. If we want to get back in contention and play better basketball, it starts with our defense and when we get steals and get down in transition, we’re a totally different team and we understand that.”
Only 74 days left until All-Star weekend arrives in Los Angeles. Where will the Clippers be by then?
