Not to be overly dramatic, but when the Los Angeles Clippers dropped back-to-back games against the Memphis Grizzlies and Dallas Mavericks last week, it felt like they reached some kind of precipice. Stuck in the season from hell as a massively disappointing, inoperably wounded graybeard of a team, those losses revealed an emptiness that I haven’t seen since the bubble.
And then, somehow, the Clippers discovered a brand new rock bottom on Monday night in a soul-sucking loss against the Miami Heat. Not even two minutes into the second half, coach Ty Lue pulled all five of his starters. He’d seen enough. Los Angeles was about to lose for the 14th time in 16 games. Who could blame him?
As someone who thought this could be the best team in franchise history and is annually consumed by a generous amount of Clippers optimism, right now, at what looks to be the end of an era, I can’t decide if we should analyze their ATOs or recite an elegy.
The Clippers have been disengaged since their humiliating loss against the Utah Jazz on opening night, but I still can’t get over how low they sunk last weekend. Both games were against struggle-bus teams headed straight to the lottery. Both were played at the Intuit Dome. And, most troubling of all, both featured excellent performances by Kawhi Leonard, who, despite being on a minutes restriction, still scored a highly efficient 69 points in 58 minutes. He then followed that up with a masterful 36-point, seven-rebound, three-steal performance against the Heat. Leonard was plus-8 in 30 minutes and the Clippers lost by 17, which doesn’t make any sense.
Kawhi Leonard controls the ball against Jaime Jaquez Jr. in Miami on December 1
NBA seasons are very long. Even in an unforgiving conference, so much can still happen in the 61 games left on their schedule. But none of that changes a few incontestable truths: The Clippers are 5-16 overall and 1-13 against teams that are plus-.500, they’re dead last in spread differential, and currently projected to miss the play-in. After finishing the 2024-25 season with the NBA’s third-best defense, the Clippers currently rank 27th and are egregiously pitiful getting back after missed shots, which, considering that transition defense was a specific point of emphasis during training camp, isn’t ideal. Instead, they allow the most points off turnovers and the second-most fast-break points in the league.
After watching the Oklahoma City Thunder win the title by showing how valuable the possession game can be, the Clippers find themselves at 27th in turnover differential, and the only team that’s attempted fewer shots than their opponent this season is the Los Angeles Lakers. It’s very, very hard to win in today’s NBA when you give the other team more bites at the apple.
Los Angeles’s once-deep roster has been irrevocably compromised by injuries and Father Time: Bradley Beal is out for the season; Derrick Jones Jr. is expected to miss another month with a sprained MCL; Brook Lopez is out of the rotation; Chris Paul was just sent home by the team in the middle of his retirement tour; Bogdan Bogdanovic’s hip contusion has become a near catastrophe; and, adding insult to injury, Norman Powell—a savior on last year’s team who they didn’t want to pay—looks like an All-Star in Miami and just torched them on Monday night. Building the oldest roster in the league has clearly been more problematic than I thought. It took six weeks for half of Lue’s rotation to curdle into a gallon of expired milk.
“I know we’ve had some tough circumstances in the last five years, which is six years, but I have been able to figure it out,” Lue recently said. “But this year, it’s been tough … We’ve tried a lot of different things, so we’ll keep trying.”
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The Clippers are bedeviled. The Clippers are dispiriting. The Clippers are painfully slow and frequently make a bunch of head-scratching mistakes. Some are the result of Lue needing to give two-way players and 12th men regular minutes. Their “youth” movement is too little too late, though. Kobe Brown, Kobe Sanders, Cam Christie, and Jordan Miller are far from a short-term solution to anything that ails the Clippers.
On the surface, defensively, the team has ostensibly endured some bad 3-point shooting luck that should course-correct as the season goes along. But so many of the 3s they surrender are actually the result of unforced errors. There’s enough miscommunication, step-slow effort, and game-plan gaffes to make you wonder if Jeff Van Gundy will ever smile again.
The surges that revive positive memories from last season—i.e., full rotations, timely help, actual ball pressure—are almost always blotted out by an avoidable faux pas, like the one John Collins and Kris Dunn make below, screwing up a switch and leaving Tristan da Silva open on the backside. As the ball falls through the net, you can see Dunn pleading for better communication:
All this is self-inflicted and disturbingly common. But what’s even worse is how all their on-court dysfunction has come amid James Harden enjoying his best season since he left the Houston Rockets. The 36-year-old ranks seventh in offensive estimated plus-minus and, when he isn’t drawing double-teams 30 feet from the basket, can still get downhill with his left hand against schemes that stubbornly choose to guard him one-on-one.
And then there’s Leonard, who is still T-1000-ing his way through the league whenever he wants. Despite only 9 percent of his shots coming at the rim—by far a career low—Leonard is averaging more points per shot attempt than ever before. He’s never sped up, shrugs off contact, and has approximately infinite moves to create an unguardable look for himself in the midrange:
At his root, Leonard has always been an expressionless sherpa for wayward offenses. He could take over games by dominating every area in which they’re won before spending the entirety of crunchtime locking down the other team’s star. For about a decade he’s lived on the shortlist of two-way stars who’re able to yank an entire team up by the collar and drag them out of harm’s way. His peak was a nose higher than the competition when it mattered most, nudged up by robotic precision and a blemish-free skill set.
He’s pretty much still that guy. The 34-year-old is off to the most efficient start of his entire career, scoring more points in his first 11 games of a season than any other. But, in a concerning plot twist, the Clippers have also been outscored by 42 points this season when he’s on the court—by far his worst plus-minus over that same span and a total 180 from how Kawhi’s teams typically function.
Endings in sports are rarely pretty, but few arrive under such gloomy circumstances. The Clippers aren’t just bad, they’re screwed: Oklahoma City owns their 2026 first-round pick, a potentially unprecedented case of the rich getting unreasonably richer. This—plus the fact that the Clippers don’t have total control of their own pick until [squints hard enough to make my eyes water] 2030—takes a transparent tank job off the table. But it doesn’t necessarily rule out an intentional step backwards.
There are several options to consider, but most lie somewhere between bleak and rash. They could fire Lue, but what good would that do? They could attach salary to a future first-round pick and try to inject some adrenaline into a lifeless body, but someone like DeMar DeRozan, Zach LaVine, LaMelo Ball, Ja Morant, or even Anthony Davis can’t salvage this fiasco. Nothing sturdy has ever been built on a landfill.
Ty Lue during a game against the Atlanta Hawks on November 10
Another route: Do nothing. Wait for everyone to get healthy, hope the defense clicks, cure the turnover problem, and aim for a postseason miracle. The bones of an elite offense still exist and—assuming everyone stays healthy—no team will be particularly excited about facing Leonard in a playoff setting. A championship is obviously not realistic, but there are worse outcomes than going down with a fight and keeping a top-five pick away from Oklahoma City—thus saving face and competitive balance in the NBA for the next 15 years.
And then there’s the shiny red button that may or may not still be a pseudo Get Out of Jail Free card: Trade Kawhi Leonard. Rip off the Band-Aid and end a relationship that promised perennial title contention but provided national embarrassment. The juice is no longer worth the squeeze. It’s a freeing thought. It’s also unbearable and just a smidge apocalyptic for 28 other NBA teams should a Kawhi trade lead to the Thunder landing AJ Dybantsa, Cam Boozer, or Darryn Peterson. But if the Clippers are really going to be this bad with Leonard, it makes sense for them to explore exchanging his production for something that better sets up whatever comes next.
Health, age, and price are all factors worth considering before you even get into Uncle Dennis–related shenanigans. But there are still a few teams that would seriously consider taking Leonard on if the cost wasn’t too prohibitive.
My favorite hypothetical would send Kawhi to the Portland Trail Blazers for Jerami Grant, Robert Williams III, and two first-round picks. If you’re the Blazers—an organization that has no identifiable timeline—Leonard is in many ways the grounding force they’re looking for. If they can land him and keep all their own first-round picks, it’s an opportunity they should absolutely consider. If you’re the Clippers, don’t fall victim to a sunk-cost fallacy. Get some picks, two good players who won’t kill your cap flexibility, and move on.
Another option to consider: Leonard and Dunn to Chicago for Patrick Williams, Kevin Huerter, Coby White, and two unprotected first-round picks. If the Bulls are looking for their own Pascal Siakam, here he is! The list of contenders who have enough picks and young talent to strike a deal is pretty small. How many would even want to risk disrupting their own equilibrium? If one did, it’d probably look like the Detroit Pistons offering Jaden Ivey, Duncan Robinson, and Tobias Harris for Leonard and Nicolas Batum. Could the Clippers squeeze a pick from the Atlanta Hawks along with Trae Young?
Some of these are more theoretical than others, demonstrating just how hard it would be for the Clippers to move on from their inscrutable, spectacular, high-risk franchise player. Talent is talent, though. And Leonard still oozes it.
It’s been a frustrating half decade for the Clippers. But as the saying goes: All endlessly tantalizing things must come to an end. L.A. appears to be there. What they do now will dictate how fast it’ll take for them to successfully turn the page.
