ATLANTA — A big announcement from the LA Clippers hit reporters’ inboxes Wednesday morning.
There were just 75 days until the NBA’s marquee in-season celebration, the annual All-Star weekend, came to the Clippers’ sparkling, $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 cool gesture from the team that is not only owned by the league’s richest owner, Steve Ballmer, but will also serve as site host for the 2028 Olympic basketball tournament. But the free hoop giveaway, or even the All-Star countdown, didn’t quite register on your Clippers’ radar, did it?
That’s because this season, supposed to be one of joy and celebration, has been one giant disaster. The “other” major Clippers news of the day, that they were sending future Hall of Fame Chris Paul home, for good, was just the latest explosion in what’s been an extremely loud few months for all the wrong reasons. The Clippers’ 115-92 win over a depleted Atlanta Hawks team Wednesday night doesn’t change that narrative.
To wit:
- A scandal. The NBA is investigating allegations that the Clippers circumvented the league’s salary cap through a “no show” contract for Kawhi Leonard from one of the team’s sponsors.
- An imploding roster. It’s not even Christmas yet, and neither Paul nor Bradley Beal, another highly decorated veteran acquired over the summer, are basically no longer on the team. Paul, who signed as a free agent, will either be traded or bought out of his contract, and Beal, whom the Clippers traded for, broke his hip on Nov. 8, requiring season-ending surgery.
- Injuries, of course. Not only to Beal, who’s done for the year, and to sharpshooter Bogdan Bogdanović, who’s appeared in just nine games so far and missed the last seven with 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 went down with a significant right foot sprain on Nov. 3, and the Clippers went 1-9 until he came back.
- Losing. Staggering losses. They went 2-13 in November. Trailed by 38 on Monday in Miami. Snapped a five-game losing streak by beating the Hawks, and are still 10 games under .500 at 6-16. Even if they continue losing, the Clippers don’t own their 2026 first-round pick, so they wouldn’t benefit at the draft.
“It’s been hard,” coach Tyronn Lue admitted before Wednesday’s game. “I’ve never had a losing season (as a coach) and a few guys in the locker room never had losing seasons. It’s been tough trying to figure it out.”
Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations for the Clippers, said, “Right now we’re playing bad basketball on both ends. We’re a bad basketball team.”
James Harden is averaging almost 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 its oldest roster, but rank 19th in offense and 24th in defense. This is a team considered at the season’s outset to be a title contender (insofar as anyone else is a contender, given how deep and awesome defending champion Oklahoma City is).
Things are bad, but apparently not dire. Frank was emphatic Wednesday in support of Lue as coach, calling him “my partner,” one “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 the executives under him.
Ballmer, and Frank, value continuity above almost all else, and it doesn’t appear any major changes are in consideration. Multiple league sources briefed on the discussions said Frank and his associates were on track to receive contract extensions, with one source saying those extensions “have been in the planning stages for a while. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will.” Clippers’ sources emphasized ownership’s commitment to continuity, but said discussions of contract extensions were “premature.”
The Clippers also remain steadfast in their insistence that they did nothing wrong in their dealings with Aspiration, the former Clippers team sponsor and now bankrupt environmental firm that also gave Leonard an endorsement contract. Sources outside the organization share the Clippers’ belief that the league’s ongoing investigation ultimately will not uncover wrongdoing.
Ballmer made a $50 million investment into Aspiration in 2021, and both he and Clippers minority owner Dennis J. Wong made subsequent investments thereafter, while in 2022 Leonard received a contract from Aspiration for $28 million over four years that did not require Leonard to do any work (while there were expectations outlined in the document, there was a clause that gave Leonard final refusal on anything he didn’t want to do.)
But the league wants proof that Aspiration gave Leonard the contract explicitly at the Clippers’ request, so that he could earn 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 a job, and the Aspiration cloud passes, what’s left is a Clippers team with two supremely talented, older stars, a championship coach, and a committed front office trying to clean up this mess.
“It’s not going to happen at once,” said James Harden, who scored 27 points in the Clippers’ win on Wednesday. “It’s a day at a time, and it’s just focusing. We don’t have the leverage to take plays off. We gotta be on point and consistent for 48 minutes. That’s just what we are.”
Asked before Wednesday’s game if he could pinpoint where the Clippers went so wrong, Lue quickly offered: “We went wrong when Kawhi got hurt and Bradley Beal got hurt the same night, and they missed 11 straight games.” None of that is exactly right, as Leonard’s injury was two full games before Beal went down, and Leonard only missed 10 games. But the sentiment is right. The Clippers were a respectable 3-2 heading into the game where Leonard suffered his injury and haven’t been right since.
The team also made some roster decisions in the offseason that didn’t work out, such as trading Norman Powell to Miami so the Clippers could acquire John Collins (from Utah in a three-team deal). The Paul signing, obviously, didn’t go as planned, and Powell’s replacement, Beal, wasn’t around long.
But Frank said the Clippers still should be better, much better, than this, especially on defense. Ivica Zubac was a contender for defensive player of the year last season and still anchors LA’s defense, yet a very good defensive team from last season has become one of the league’s worst so far this year.
“Obviously, we’re in the results business — we can’t just keep losing games, but it’s how we look,” 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 made this offseason, we didn’t really trade any of our defensive players. And then offensively having a flow or rhythm. It’s what it looks like. And then just the effort and all the things. And if we start doing those things, then our talent will show out what we are. I just think we’re a whole lot better than where we’re at. We haven’t deserved to win and we have to deserve to win. You have to earn it.”
Throwing out the Clippers’ last loss on Monday, in which they were never close and Lue pulled his starters early in the second half, LA had been competitive often during its losing streak — especially in the first two or three quarters. The team was suffering defensive lapses and bad offensive possessions either down the stretch in the fourth quarter, with the game on the line, or out of the locker room after halftime in almost inexplicable fashion after solid opening halves.
In their first game without Paul on Wednesday, the Clippers were decidedly better with their defense and their poise. Atlanta was playing without Trae Young, Kristaps Porziņģis, and Jalen Johnson, who has emerged as their leading scorer with Young out, but the Clippers nevertheless built on a modest first-half lead and refused to relinquish it. Leonard added 21 points, Zubac finished with 14 points and 17 boards, and rookie Kobe Sanders added 17 points off the bench.
Harden, who has had a strong season despite the team’s struggles, is now just 39 points from cracking 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 cut their points allowed by 48 points from their previous game.
It was a start, a step in the right direction, with a long, long way to go before the Clippers can celebrate anything.
“I thought we had the right intent and we had the right mindset,” Lue said. “I don’t really talk after the games, but tonight I just told the guys it’s gonna be our defense that gets us over the hump. If we want to get back into the race and play better basketball, it starts with our defense and when we’re getting steals and we get down in transition, we’re a totally different team and we understand that.”
Just 74 days to go until All-Star weekend arrives in Los Angeles. Where will the Clippers be by then?