The LA Clippers are in shambles.
Bradley Beal has been ruled out for the season due to a fractured left hip. Kawhi Leonard missed his fifth-straight game with a previously announced right ankle sprain and a foot sprain that was not known until Wednesday night. At 36 years old, James Harden is carrying the team and averaging 34.4 minutes per game. Chris Paul, who started all 82 games with the San Antonio Spurs last season before reuniting with the Clippers, has fallen out of the rotation completely.
Not to mention, the Aspiration investigation still looms.
Wednesday’s 130-116 loss to the Denver Nuggets only made matters worse. Nikola Jokić outscored the entire Clippers starting lineup, 55 to 54, by himself. The Nuggets came back from a 10-point, first-half deficit to blow out the Clippers in a game where LA trailed by as many as 22 points in the second half.
The Clippers are 3-8 and off to their worst start in 15 years. They are now headed to Dallas to begin a seven-game road trip with the league’s 20th-ranked offense and the 26th-ranked defense. How do the Clippers get their season back? How did it even get to this point?
The shirts the coaches wore on the first day of Clippers training camp in September were defensive coordinator Jeff Van Gundy’s idea: an acrostic spelling out a certain profane four-letter word that made it clear what the team’s points of emphasis was going into a new season. In the middle of the words “get the” and “back,” the shirts said:
- Floor balance
- Urgency
- Consistent communication & concentration
- Know we lost to Denver because of transition
Get the f— back.
The entire Clippers offseason seemed dedicated to addressing the issues that came up during the Western Conference quarterfinals series that ended with the Clippers’ Game 7 loss to the Nuggets. The coaching points were one thing, but Lawrence Frank, the Clippers president of basketball operations, said the team needed to target more ballhandling options and the frontcourt.
So, they signed Brook Lopez, a backup center who could shoot 3s and protect the rim. Shooting guard Norman Powell, seeking a new contract, was traded to the Miami Heat in a three-team deal and Utah Jazz power forward John Collins was sent to the Clippers. The Phoenix Suns bought out the final two seasons of Beal’s contract, and Beal chose the Clippers, giving them a consolation prize for having to trade Powell. Finally, future Hall of Fame point guard Paul came back to the franchise eight years after his departure.
The stars were still there. Leonard was fully healthy and James Harden was coming off of his first All-NBA season in five years. The defenders were still there, led by All-Defensive team selection Ivica Zubac, small forward Derrick Jones Jr., guard Kris Dunn and power forward Nicolas Batum. And the depth was still there, too, with 2025 midseason trade acquisition Bogdan Bogdanović on the roster to theoretically give the Clippers 11 playable veterans.
Forget getting the f— back on defense. The Clippers were ready to contend in the West.
The Clippers knew of Beal’s extensive injury history over his 14-year career, including a right knee scope at the end of a 2024-25 season and 29 missed games with Phoenix due to a variety of injuries: elbow, calf, ankle, knee, toe, calf, hamstring.
But still, there was optimism he would be a good fit.
“Players of this caliber are very rare, and they’re hard to come by,” Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said in the Clippers’ official press release announcing Beal’s signing. “Brad has been an All-Star. He’s been in a race for the scoring title. He’s been the best player on his team. You can put him in so many different spots and he’ll find ways to score: out of pick-and-roll, coming off screens, catch-and-shoot. He can create his own or he can play off the ball. He’s a great cutter. He’s also a great playmaker who is going to make everybody else better. I’m excited he’s with us.”
In training camp, Lue built his offense around Harden, Leonard and Beal, despite acknowledging that Beal’s limitations — a 20-minute restriction, no games on zero days rest, limited participation to begin training camp, no preseason games until the finale — were a result of the procedure Beal needed after playing through pain with the Suns.
In the season opener, the Clippers trailed by as many as 37 points in an embarrassing loss to the Utah Jazz, the worst team in the league last season. Beal was out of the lineup two games later due to a back injury. When the Clippers failed to score 80 points in a 98-79 loss to the Golden State Warriors, part of Lue’s reasoning for the bad offense was Beal’s absence.
“We are missing a key component, which is Bradley Beal, who gives us a shooter, a guy who can playmake, a guy who can handle the basketball as well,” Lue said. “You add that to the mix, it does make us better.”
Lue has always played the long game, envisioning the player he wanted Beal to be eventually, and using a 10-game sample size to evaluate everything within a structure where Beal was a starter. But the question begged, why were the Clippers putting so much of their identity into a player in Beal who did not seem to be ready for such a big role?
“I think physically, he definitely can do it,” Lue said in Phoenix last week of Beal’s ability to scale-up offensively. “Just the minutes he’s going to be playing, I don’t think he can score 35, 40. But the most important thing is he’s feeling better. He’s slowly working towards where he’s trying to get to. And then tonight is just one of those days. Just adding, stacking games, stacking days. And this would be another one he’s trying to stack.”
By the time the Clippers visited Phoenix, it was clear Beal was too limited to be the player that Lue envisioned using. Beal missed 12 of 14 shots and scored just five points. In the rematch Saturday night at Intuit Dome, Beal suffered what Frank called “a freak injury” to his hip that a surgeon said was “almost the equivalent of if you were in like a car accident.”
This is the moment Bradley Beal fractured hip, according to Lawrence Frank pic.twitter.com/FUgSsFagGF
— Law Murray ⛲️ (@LawMurrayTheNU) November 13, 2025
Beal’s season-ending injury ends another phase where the Clippers have been trying to fit a buyout market acquisition into the team, a process that went great for the Clippers in 2020-21, with Reggie Jackson and Batum being prominent figures on the franchise’s only Western Conference finals team, but has seen mixed results at best since.
The Clippers now need to be reconfigured.
While Leonard will go on this road trip, his return to play status leaves him uncertain to participate in games. Harden is off to a strong start, but he’s the only player capable of consistently creating shots in the rotation. Collins can put up strong numbers due to his unique combination of size and skill, but Lue has repeatedly suggested that Collins has to be better with his awareness on both ends of the floor.
“We’re trying to figure that out now,” Lue says of Collins’ offensive fit as a starter. “I think the biggest thing for him that he would accumulate more shots is just his spacing. Just understand, like spacing the floor, especially on the floor with Zu and James, it’s not really a lot of room in that paint area or that 15-foot area.”
None of the offensive challenges matter if the Clippers can’t defend. No team allows more 3s per game than the Clippers, who allow 15.5 3s per game. LA regularly fails to identify good shooters, as it allows opponents to make 39.4 percent from 3; only the Brooklyn Nets (39.6 percent) have been more permissible. The Clippers are still the sixth-best team in the league at prohibiting points in the paint, a Van Gundy staple. But the Clippers allow the ninth-most fast-break points despite playing the slowest pace in the league, the defensive rebounding has fallen from 1st last season to 21st this season, and the Clippers have had breakdowns galore that have evaporated leads.
The Clippers had instances against the Nuggets where they couldn’t match up properly, giving up amateur-hour buckets on a night Jokić was already torching them.
“It’s part of basketball,” Lue said of the Clippers’ assignment issues on defense. “You’re gonna get lost, you’re gonna make some mistakes. But just try not to make too many. So when you’re playing against a guy like Joker, you make a mistake, he’s gonna make you pay.”
LA’s margin for error is just about gone. The goals of reducing Harden’s workload have eroded. The ideals of getting off to a fast start so the team can spend the final weeks of the regular season managing minutes for a playoff run are quixotic. The Clippers are in a hole, and there’s no assurances that they have reached the bottom of it. The feeling right now is that Lue and Frank’s jobs are safe, but as we’ve seen, things can change quickly in the NBA. Every loss is an opportunity to remind everyone that the Clippers don’t have a first-round pick in 2026 and don’t control their own first-round pick until 2030.
With Beal gone for the year and the Clippers reeling, they can get their season back. It’s a dark place, no doubt. But as Lue reminds us, it’s not a completely unfamiliar one.
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know why people are so shocked,” Lue said. “It happens every year. We go through the same thing every year. And just unfortunately, we deal with the situation we’re dealing with. So we’re accustomed to it: having to play different styles of basketball, guys being out, having slow starts. We just gotta figure out our rotations and who we need to play.”