According to Andrew Greif of the LA Times, the LA Clippers are looking to trade or buy out veteran point guard John Wall in the near future. The NBA trade deadline is Thursday, February 9th, and the league’s informal “buyout season” typically begins after the deadline, with teams hoping to trade away unwanted salary rather than have to buy players out of their contracts. This is especially relevant for the Clippers, who are deep into the NBA’s luxury tax (a system where teams with expensive payrolls pay additional penalties for every added dollar of team salary, with the pot of money collected from “taxpaying” teams being distributed among the remaining teams each season). If they cut Wall, they still owe him the remainder of his $6,479,000 salary… and still have to pay the luxury tax penalty on that amount, somewhere between 4 and 5 times the amount of his salary. If they trade him, that money comes off of their cap sheet entirely, saving a small fortune in penalties.
Still, that isn’t the deciding factor–a team with a payroll approaching $200,000,000 this season has clearly already thrown all caution to the wind when it comes to spending. What this really comes down to is Wall’s performance and fit on the team. After missing substantial time in recent years (in part due to injury and in part due to an agreement that the tanking Houston Rockets would prioritize playing younger players), there was hope in the Clippers’ organization that Wall could experience a revitalization on a contending team in Los Angeles. Like many of the Clippers’ hopes for this season, that hasn’t materialized. Wall has been exceedingly inefficient offensively and mostly absent on defense as poorly-constructed three-guard bench lineups betrayed a weakness in the team’s roster construction: for all the talk about the team’s depth, they kept too many established veteran guards who needed consistent minutes but didn’t fit well on the floor together. In that flawed setting, Wall was the worst individual performer of the bunch by a comfortable margin.
As the season has worn on, the result has been Ty Lue shortening his rotation to a 9-man crew with Terance Mann starting at point guard and Reggie Jackson and Norman Powell playing together on the second unit, with one of Paul George or Kawhi Leonard joining them in the small forward spot. John Wall has been out for three weeks with an abdominal injury, and the rotation is still a little too crowded–a healthy Luke Kennard didn’t play in last night’s loss to the Milwaukee Bucks. There is a debate to be had over the merits of Kennard’s shooting vs Jackson’s playmaking (a Luke-Norm pairing is going to result in a lot of stagnation where nobody is making something happen, but Reggie’s chaotic decision-making means that even though something is happening it’s often not good), and there’s a lot of talk about them adding another guard via trade, but whatever way the Clippers go it seems unlikely that there is a place in the squad for Wall when he returns.
The priority for the Clippers will be including Wall in a trade–not to save luxury tax money, but to help match salaries to bring back the type of guard upgrade they are pursuing. As mentioned above, Wall makes about $6.5M this year (with a team option for $6.8M next year that can be easily declined), providing some useful mathematical filler as the team tries to put a package together to chase any of several more expensive guards on the trade market. Just to provide a couple of examples, Fred VanVleet ($21.3M) and Mike Conley ($22.7M) both make enough money where Kennard’s $14.4M salary wouldn’t make a deal work by itself, but adding Wall would make for a clean swap. Reggie Jackson’s $11.2M deal would need a little more help than just Wall, but Wall would still close the gap and put you within striking distance where one of Amir Coffey, Brandon Boston, or Jason Preston would complete a deal.
As for a buyout… well, one would think that having Wall around as a change-of-pace emergency option would still be better than nothing, especially if he can bring some leadership and camaraderie in the locker room. There’s also the factor of his team option–while the Clippers would likely want to decline it, they would still be able to pick it up and use his salary as filler in a deal next summer if needed. If they’re really considering buying him out without a trade, it’s likely a sign that some additional considerations are at play. One possibility is that there could have been some informal agreements made as part of his recruitment to join the team, among them that if things didn’t work out they would let him become a free agent again instead of hanging on to his contract like the Rockets did. Another could be general frustration about not being in the teams’ plans resulting in him being a distraction that the team doesn’t want around. Either way, a buyout would give Wall the opportunity to try and latch on somewhere else and see if he can fit in better at this point in his career, although it does feel unlikely that he’d have many suitors for a major rotation role. Last season, the Clippers traded struggling veteran point guard Eric Bledsoe to Portland at the deadline. Bledsoe never appeared for the Trail Blazers last year and didn’t receive a contract from an NBA team for this season.
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