The Los Angeles Clippers have fallen far and fast from their 50-32 season finish a season ago.
Although they’re in the midst of a four-game win streak, the Clippers still sit at a miserable 10-21 record about a third of the way into the 2025-26 regular season.
LA has already lost one aging former All-Star to locker room issues, and another to a hip tear. The club has generally looked miserably mismatched defensively, and has failed to mesh enough on the other end. 37-year-old former All-Star center Brook Lopez, a North Hollywood native whom the Clippers had inked to a two-year, $18 million deal, had fallen out of head coach Tyronn Lue’s rotations prior to an Ivica Zubac injury.
It’s understandable, then, that a rival NBA executive is convinced it’s time for the Clippers to bail on all their aging players.
Even the Clippers’ two best players, former All-Stars James Harden and Kawhi Leonard, are 36 and 34 years old, respectively. 36-year-old forward Nicolas Batum and 32-year-old guard Bogdan Bogdanovic rank among LA’s other over-the-hill pieces. 31-year-old guard Kris Dunn may be on the wrong side of 30 as well, but he doesn’t have nearly the same playoff mileage or injury history as most of the other declining players on this LA roster.
“I would be trying to get rid of the old guys, bring in some young guys that I like and let the consequences of the record being bad be what they may,” an Eastern Conference executive told Tim Bontemps and Brian Windhorst of ESPN of the Clippers’ situation.
That said, the exec seems convinced that majority owner Steve Ballmer will instead look to patch together some additions to improve the club’s roster, with the All-Star Game slated to tip off on LA’s home turf, Intuit Dome, in February.
“But that doesn’t strike me as what Ballmer would do, which in the past has been, ‘The only thing I want to do is win and to try to be competitive, and I don’t have interest in tanking and rebuilding.'”
Harden, in the first year of a two-season, $81.5 million contract, remains an offensive marvel. Teams may hestitate to fork over significant equity for an older star who has forced his way out of multiple situations in the past, but he’s still an elite scorer and ball handler even in his NBA dotage. He’s also earning a salary fairly commensurate with his on-court production.
Leonard, meanwhile, is owed $100.3 million over this season and next. He’s such a health question mark that extracting value for his money could prove an uphill battle.
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