According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the LA Clippers have traded Luke Kennard to the Memphis Grizzlies in a 3-team deal that will net them the Houston Rockets’ Eric Gordon:

Exact details on deadline trades can often take hours (or even days) to trickle out, especially for minor matters like “which 2nd round picks got thrown into this trade?” The current reporting on this deal suggests that the Clippers sent Kennard to Memphis for 3 second-round picks, while they sent John Wall and swap rights in the first round in this year’s draft to Houston for Gordon. Veteran wing Danny Green is heading from Memphis to Houston as part of the trade to facilitate salary-matching. Notably, the Clippers also sent out 3 second-round picks today, 2 for Bones Hyland and 1 for Mason Plumlee. However, we’ll have to wait for the dust to settle before we know if those are the same picks or if there is a value differential between what was sent out and brought in. (Update: Andrew Greif has the details on the 2nds the Clippers got in this trade–though which of them remain in the team’s war chest is unclear.)

Getting three second-round picks for Kennard is not an amazing return that blows you a way, but it makes sense–the Clippers likely missed an opportunity to sell high on Luke last summer and it was always going to be hard to move a $15M salary for a player that was only on the fringes of their rotation. It certainly has seemed for weeks that the emergence of Norman Powell meant that the writing was on the wall for Luke, and recouping some value while repurposing his salary into a player that was a better fit for what Ty Lue is searching for in the rotation. There is the element of what Kennard brings to the Grizzlies, a conference rival and potential opponent of the Clippers. While I don’t want to dismiss his shooting or the Grizzlies’ quality (they could easily beat LAC in a series with or without Kennard), I think it is probably wise that the Clippers are focused more on making moves to improve themselves than worrying about Memphis. Both teams have significantly larger concerns in the form of the Denver Nuggets and Phoenix Suns.

The real question is if repurposing Kennard’s salary slot into Eric Gordon was the move that the Clippers needed. The former Clipper draft pick is now 34 years old and makes just under $20M this year before getting a raise to $20.9M next season, and isn’t quite the scoring volume/efficiency monster that he was as a support scorer for James Harden in Houston years ago. He’s still a better scoring option than the guards he is replacing–he creates for himself far more than Luke Kennard is capable of doing and does so much more efficiently than Reggie Jackson or John Wall. However, he’s more like Norman Powell as a player than the “point guard” archetype that the Clippers had been linked to–Mike Conley, Fred VanVleet, Kyle Lowry, etc. What he does still do effectively is drive, so he brings a potential value add of initiating the Clippers’ paint-and-spray offense, even if he isn’t going to be a super dynamic playmaker.

Gordon’s contract is team-friendly, as the $20.9M salary for next season is fully non-guaranteed. Typically for a veteran deal, there would be a trigger date where he would have to be waived before free agency opens to allow him to find a new team, but Spotrac doesn’t show that for his contract–I’d take that with a grain of salt just because it’s unusual. Regardless, it’s a big expiring for next year that doesn’t have to be guaranteed if he is moved in a draft-day deal, meaning that acquiring Gordon–much like Eric Bledsoe not too long ago–might be a deal made with the next trade in mind, especially because they did not move any future first round pick capital at this deadline and are set up to be able to put pretty compelling offers together this summer.

The pick swap here hurts, in my opinion. The upcoming draft is very deep and the Clippers are starving for youth, athleticism, talent, and upside. Currently their own pick is slated to be 18th, while the Milwaukee Bucks pick that Houston will have the right to swap is slated to be 28th. The draft order will change as the standings do, but it’s going to be a notable shift backwards in the first round. Losing John Wall is a non-factor for the Clippers, as he was unlikely to play for the team again. He, funnily enough, heads to the Houston Rockets, who will buy him out for the second time in under a year. It appears unlikely that his NBA career will continue.

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NBA Trade Deadline: Clippers swap Luke Kennard for Eric Gordon
Lucas Hann

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.

213Hoops is an independently owned and operated L.A. Clippers blog by Clippers fans, for Clippers fans. If you enjoy our content, please consider subscribing to our Patreon. Subscriptions start at $1 a month and support from readers like you goes a long way towards helping us keep 213Hoops sustainable, growing, and thriving.

Report: Clippers Considering Trading or Buying Out John Wall
Lucas Hann

As was heavily rumored earlier this week, free agent point guard John Wall has officially signed with the LA Clippers, his agency Klutch Sports announced Friday morning. His contract is worth $13.2M over 2 years, the value of the Clippers’ non-taxpayer mid-level exception.

I wrote a bit about the decision-making process with the taxpayer MLE yesterday when the Clippers lost Isaiah Hartenstein, a valuable member of last year’s team who could have only been re-signed using this tool (although there’s no guarantee it would have been accepted, since Hartenstein got more money from the New York Knicks). Wall’s contract being finalized gives us a couple of data points: first, it confirms that he is indeed taking the tpMLE instead of the league minimum despite making over $40M from Houston this season; but it also gives us the key detail that Wall will sign a two-year deal at that number instead of just a one-year deal.

That makes a little more sense. Having a second season on the initial signing of a buy-low free agent is advantageous for the same reason that the Clippers just lost Hartenstein–it’s much easier to re-sign overachieving guys after 2 seasons with your team than it is after 1. Let’s say that John Wall has a good year for the Clippers. He doesn’t have to magically regain his All-Star form at 32 years old after major injuries, but let’s just say this gamble works and he is a significant contributor. If he had signed a one-year deal at the taxpayer mid-level, the Clippers would have only been able to offer him a new contract starting at $7.7M next year–less than the non-taxpayer mid-level exception and likely not enough to retain him. If he had signed a one-year deal for the minimum, that number would have been even less, below $4M. On his current 2-year taxpayer MLE deal, the Clippers will have the option to re-sign Wall with his early bird rights (the same contract Reggie Jackson and Nicolas Batum have gotten) for up to $11.7M in the 2024 off-season, which should be right around full MLE offers that he might get from elsewhere. Early bird status also comes with a built-in advantage with raises: after one year, a player can get 5% annual raises; after two, he can get 8%.

There’s also the immediate value gain, again in the scenario where the Wall gamble pays off and he plays well, of just having a second year of him at 6.7M before he hits free agency again and you have to worry about it at all. Between that and the aforementioned re-signing tools, the Clippers have put themselves in a position where they have insured their gamble/investment in Wall a bit more than they have been able/willing to with other signings in the past. And from Wall’s perspective, while the increase from a $2.9M vet’s min deal to the $6.4M tpMLE salary this season feels negligible for a player that has made $232M in salary (before endorsements) to date with another guaranteed $40.8M coming from Houston this year*, guaranteeing himself another $6.7M next year is a bit nicer of a perk. Not only does he get that marginal gain over the vet min again, but it guarantees another year of drawing an NBA paycheck, which isn’t always a given for injury-prone players in their 30s. He could suffer another major injury and still get that cash next year. There’s also something to be said, from Wall’s perspective, of signing with a front office that is clearly going out of its way to give themselves a path to keep you long-term and make you feel like a part of the organization moving forward and not just a rental.

*As a side note, some people have asked me about if Wall’s money from Houston will be reduced at all based on his new contract with LAC. The answer is really that we don’t know–the NBA does have a “set-off” rule where, when a player is waived, the amount his old team owes him is reduced by 50 cents for every dollar he gets above the one-year veteran’s minimum on his new deal (not the 10-year, $2.9M number he would have actually gotten had he signed for the minimum). So, for Wall to come in at $6.5M, set-off would reduce the money Houston owes him by about $2M… except that while set-off is the law of the land in straight-up waiving of guaranteed deals, in buyout situations like Wall’s, where a player negotiates his freedom by giving money back, the set-off provision is a negotiable part of the deal. As far as I know/have seen reported, there has been no indication as to whether or not Wall’s money will be subject to set-off or if Houston agreed to get rid of that right as part of the buyout agreement.

Beyond the contract analysis, Wall brings a serious amount of experience and pedigree to the Clippers’ roster, with a higher upside that anyone else available at this price point. It’s not every day that you get to add a player with All-NBA, All-Defense, and All-Star awards in his trophy cabinet for so cheap–although when players that decorated do become available for cheap, it normally is under these circumstances: in their 30s and/or after major injuries. After making the All-NBA 3rd Team in 2016-17, Wall played just 41 games in 2017-18, 32 in 2018-19, 0 in 2019-20, 40 in 2020-21, and 0 in 2021-22. Last season, he was not out due to injury but rather away from the team due to an understanding with the Houston Rockets that they were focusing on developing their younger talent but didn’t want to insult Wall by benching him or cut a $40M+ contract with multiple years remaining. However, not playing is still not playing–and while he didn’t have the chance last year, he still hasn’t proven that he’s physically capable of playing a full NBA season without significant injuries.

Known in his prime as perhaps the fastest player in the league, a blur with the ball in his hands who was elite at blowing past defenders and surging forward in transition to collapse defenses and either finish at the rim or find open teammates, Wall’s athleticism has inevitably declined as he’s dealt with injuries and aging, but he will still be able to get downhill with the ball in his hands to some extent, which is sorely needed on a Clippers roster that, while talented, does certainly lack a bit of on-ball juice. With Paul George hopefully playing a full season, Kawhi Leonard returning, and Norman Powell properly integrated, the Clippers should have an easier time creating advantages on offense than they did a year ago, when their attack built around Reggie Jackson and Marcus Morris was one of the worst offenses in the league. Wall is another piece of that puzzle, perhaps no longer a standout at creating dribble penetration but still capable, and immediately the best pick-and-roll playmaker on the team by default.

There is little question that Wall will be able to create offense with the ball in his hands, the question is moreso how efficient that offense will be, and what he does when he doesn’t have the ball. In the 40 games he played two years ago in Houston, Wall put up 20.6 points and 6.9 assists per game, but on very poor efficiency. He had the highest three point attempt rate (how many threes he takes vs twos) in his career, which is not a good thing for a poor shooter like Wall, because he struggled to create dribble penetration at the same prolific level as in his youth, and he had the worst assist to turnover ratio of his career. But he was on a truly dreadful Rockets team that went 12-28 in the games he played and a staggering 5-27 in the games he didn’t (which is why they asked him to sit out 2021-22 while they tanked) and playing his first games back from an Achilles injury. It’s perfectly fair to expect that he would both be better on a better team, where he isn’t forced to have the ball in his hands constantly and settle for many of the inefficient jumpers he took in Houston because he now has teammates to pass to, and it’s also reasonable to note that it can take a full year or so for a player to really round back into form after returning from an Achilles tear.

The Wall that the Rockets got in 2021 is fine at the taxpayer mid-level–he can run the second unit offense and carry reps on nights when other guys are out through the regular season, even if his efficiency and off-ball struggles keep him from being a major piece of the team’s rotation when fully healthy and in the playoffs. If he does in fact play better for the Clippers than he did for Houston in 2021, there is the potential for him to be a core piece of this team, but it becomes a matter of degrees and fit. First of all, how much better is he than he was two years ago? And perhaps more importantly, how does he fit around Paul George and Kawhi Leonard when those guys have the basketball? Wall is a historically poor three-point shooter, though his numbers are misleadingly low due to taking a high number of difficult, off-the-dribble threes as a ball dominant star. He’s been an adequate catch-and-shoot guy, but he’s not a shooter–he’s more at Terance Mann’s level as a floor spacer than Reggie Jackson’s or Norman Powell’s, let alone Luke Kennard’s. On the other end of the floor, will Wall’s athleticism return enough for him to be a high-impact defender? If so, he could solve a lot of LAC’s problems and be a major piece, relieving Terance Mann of some of the point of attack defensive load. But if he’s only mediocre as a floor spacer and point of attack defender, then in the biggest moments Ty Lue is almost certainly going to prefer going with a better shooter (Jackson, Powell, Kennard) or defender (Mann or bringing another of Batum/Covington onto the floor) over Wall’s self-creation.

213Hoops is an independently owned and operated L.A. Clippers blog by Clippers fans, for Clippers fans. If you enjoy our content, please consider subscribing to our Patreon. Subscriptions start at $1 a month and support from readers like you goes a long way towards helping us keep 213Hoops sustainable, growing, and thriving.

NBA Free Agency: Clippers sign John Wall to 2-year contract
Lucas Hann