In somewhat shocking mid-August news, Shams Charania of ESPN has reported that the Clippers are bringing back veteran guard Bradley Beal on a two-year, $13.2M deal, with the second year being a player option. Law Murray of the Athletic confirmed the story, with the add-on that the player option only has $3M guaranteed.
This is shocking on multiple levels. First off, the Beal signing last offseason was a disaster, one of the moves that sunk the Clippers in the first two months of last season. Beal, of course, only played six games last year before being ruled out for the rest of the season with a fractured hip. He was miserably bad in those six games (albeit a tiny sample size), ranking as one of the worst players in the NBA. I was more or less a fan of the Beal signing last summer, figuring it was a decently high-upside swing at low cost, but that turned out not to be the case. Beal just turned 33, so it’s not impossible he can return to being a positive rotation player, but getting a raise and a player option after the season he just had seems like poor value.
Beal was a free agent because he opted out of the player option on the two-year, $11M deal he signed last summer (the Biannual Exception or BAE). It seems quite clear that he opted out with an understanding for the Clippers that they would re-sign him if he couldn’t find a better deal in free agency. Whether that also rules as tampering (it could be argued he signed for a “discount” last offseason because this deal was in place) is questionable, but it definitely looks very, very silly in hindsight. Again, it’s not impossible that Beal is a fine player even on this deal, but on the open market he was going to be a veteran’s minimum player. He is now making nearly double that, plus getting the second-year player option as a security blanket. I wrote in his exit interview that I thought that Beal would be back, but it’s because I thought he would pick up his player option. In the end, I guess he did.
The second reason this is surprising is because Beal, of course, is a guard – and the Clippers already have too many guards. Beal is filling the 15th spot on the roster, and that’s not counting Bennedict Mathurin (still sitting in restricted free agency) or the two-for-one trade of Kawhi for Brandon Ingram and Gradey Dick (even more guards!). This means that if the Kawhi trade goes through, the Clippers will need to cut at least one player.
I will just get out ahead of things and say I don’t think this means anything in regards to the Kawhi trade. Yes, Beal’s signing would make a ton more sense on a roster that had Kawhi and not BI or Dick, but there has been no reporting or even rumors that the Kawhi trade is being called off.
If the trade does go through, the Clippers’ roster before cuts would look like this:
PG: Darius Garland – Keaton Wagler – Jalen Pickett (two-way)
SG: Kris Dunn – Bradley Beal – Gradey Dick – Cam Christie
SF: Brandon Ingram – Derrick Jones Jr. – Jordan Miller – Nick Martinelli (two-way)
PF: Rui Hachimura – Kobe Sanders – Johni Broome – Baba Miller
C: Brook Lopez – Isaiah Jackson – Yanic Konan Niederhauser – Jamarion Sharp (two-way)
This is not counting Bennedict Mathurin, and the Beal signing sure seems to indicate Benn won’t be back. As discussed previously, considering Kobe Sanders, Jordan Miller, and DJJ are all more 2/3s than 3/4s, and the Clippers presumably want Keaton Wagler to play with Darius Garland, they are insanely overloaded at the guard positions even without Mathurin. Even cutting the non-guaranteed contract of Christie (seems inevitable) leaves 7 players in the 1-3 positions on the court that should be in the rotation, and that’s fudging Sanders over to the 4 while leaving Gradey Dick (a totally viable reclamation project!) out of the rotation entirely.
Thus, even though the Clippers are not trying to contend this year, their roster is obviously out of balance in a way that could make the locker room difficult and building cohesive lineups very challenging. I therefore think that a trade of some kind is coming to clear some room. The most obvious names are Kris Dunn and Derrick Jones Jr., though almost nobody would surprise me. The question, of course, would be who gets traded – and for whom.
At the end of the day, it would be hard for Beal’s second year with the Clippers to go worse than his first. Hopefully he bounces back and has a decent season, and can maybe even rehab his value enough to be tradable at the deadline. For now, his signing complicates the Clippers’ roster, and indicates further moves. If the Clippers do not make any other moves besides letting Mathurin walk and cutting Christie, I would be dismayed. At this point, we just have to wait and see.