The Clippers have been a nonstop punching bag the past couple months, starting when they once again meekly bowed out of the playoffs in the first round and with the heat going to a fever pitch when they let Paul George walk in free agency, ending the 213 era. There’s plenty of blame and criticism to go around for that failure, from the front office to the coaching staff to the players. However, I’ve been seeing a lot of criticism and revisionist history on the Paul George trade with the Thunder, and I just want to say that if you’re going to blame the front office, it shouldn’t be for that move, but for what they’ve done – or haven’t done – since that trade.
The actual trade for Paul George was PG to the Clippers for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Danilo Gallinari, the Clippers’ unprotected first round picks in 2022, 2024, and 2026, a 2021 unprotected Miami Heat pick, a 2025 lottery protected Heat pick, and pick swaps with the Clippers in 2023 and 2025. That’s a lot. Unquestionably too much for the Paul George the Clippers have received (though the move was widely praised at the time). But when you factor in this deal was for Kawhi Leonard as well, it looks better – albeit still not great.
However, thinking about it like this ignores the context. The Clippers knew that in 2024 that the deal would probably be aging poorly, as Kawhi and PG headed into their mid-30s while Shai entered his prime and their draft picks started to bear fruit. The bet was that the Clippers would have won enough to have made the massive haul worth it. And after two years, with the Clippers going to Game 7 of the second round in 2020 and the Western Conference Finals in 2021, that seemed to be on track. From there, however, is where things have dissolved, with the Clippers losing in the play-in in 2022 and the first round of the playoffs in 2023 and 2024. That’s the part that the Clippers have not upheld.
And, when looking at why the Clippers have failed, a lot is stuff they can’t control, namely the health of Kawhi Leonard (and PG to a much lesser extent). However, they also, by the end of the Mavs’ series, were down to just 5 guys who could actually play somewhat helpful minutes – James Harden, George, Terance Mann, Norm Powell, and Ivica Zubac. The rest of their roster was basically unplayable. The Clippers’ depth has been one of the biggest reasons they’ve fallen short the past couple years, and the blame for that falls squarely on the front office.
Moreover, the Clippers let Paul George walk for a myriad of reasons, but one of the biggest was that the team was not good enough, and if they’d brought back PG on a 3 or 4 year deal would not have had the flexibility to get good enough. That does of course trickle back to the massive haul the Clippers gave up for Paul George, but there were many other decisions and roster building choices that made the 213 era untenable moving forward. Let’s start by examining the Clippers’ draft record in the 213 era.
The Draft
Before we talk about the Clippers’ selections, I want to squash the idea that “the Clippers have only had late picks, you can’t expect anything from those”. Bullshit. Nearly every single team in the playoffs this past year had at least one homegrown late 1st rounder, 2nd rounder, or undrafted player who was a key part of their rotation. You can’t hit on all of those types of selections, but getting rotation guys from those spots is critical to build out contending rosters, as such players are cheap, cost-controlled, and are usually young with upside. We can go roster-by-roster through the eight teams who made the 2nd round, looking at the 2020 draft and beyond (as the Clippers did great in 2019 with Terance Mann and Amir Coffey despite the Mfiondu Kabengele miss and that was also pre-213).
Celtics: Payton Pritchard (26th pick, 2020), Sam Hauser (undrafted, 2021)
Knicks: Deuce McBride (36th pick, 2021), with Quentin Grimes (25th pick, 2021) being a contributor and then trade asset for Bojan Bogdanovic and Immanuel Quickley (25th pick, 2020) being a trade piece for OG Anunoby
Cavs: An exception
Pacers: Andrew Nembhard (31st pick, 2022), Isaiah Jackson (22nd pick, 2021), Ben Sheppard (26th pick, 2023)
Thunder: Aaron Wiggins (55th pick, 2021), Jaylin Williams (34th pick, 2022)
Nuggets: Christian Braun (21st pick, 2022), Peyton Watson (30th pick, 2022)
Wolves: Jaden McDaniels (28th pick, 2020) with Naz Reid being undrafted in 2019
Mavs: Josh Green (18th pick, 2020 draft), Jaden Hardy (37th pick, 2022)
Here’s who the Clippers have drafted since 2020. Daniel Oturu (33rd pick, 2020), Jay Scrubb (55th pick, 2020), Keon Johnson (21st pick, 2021), Jason Preston (33rd pick, 2021), Brandon Boston Jr. (51st pick, 2021), Moussa Diabate (43rd pick, 2022), Kobe Brown (30th pick, 2023), and Jordan Miller (48th pick, 2023).
Forget a star. Forget a key playoff rotation player. The Clippers have not drafted (or found undrafted) even a single depth rotation piece since 2019. The closest they’ve come is Boston, who played nearly all of his “rotation” minutes in the Clippers’ lost 2022 season. Keon was traded for Norm and RoCo (more on that below) but he’s hanging in the NBA by a sliver. Miller and Brown still have a bit of leeway, but everyone else here is out of or on the very fringes of the NBA.
Again, while you can’t nail every pick, there were real NBA players surrounding all of those Clippers’ picks. Mfiondu Kabengele at 27 in 2019 was followed by Jordan Poole at 28, Keldon Johnson at 29, and Nic Claxton at 31. That’s not counting Bruno Fernando (at least has had an NBA career) at 34 or Daniel Gafford at 38. Kabengele was the 27th pick in the draft but is 49th in his class in NBA minutes of all draftees (Mann at 48 is 11th to be fair).
Daniel Oturu at 33 in 2020 was another total bust. He has played just 188 NBA minutes, 50th in his class. Jay Scrubb has played 235 minutes, ranking 49th. Xavier Tillman, a better player at the same position in the same conference as Oturu, went 35th. Tre Jones was 41st, Nick Richards 42nd, Isaiah Joe 49th, and Paul Reed 57th. None of those players are stars, but all would have helped the Clippers over the past four years.
The 2021 draft was even more of a disaster, with Keon Johnson at 21 ranking 38th in minutes played and Jason Preston at 33rd placing 50th. Even considering Keon was nearly immediately flipped in a nice move, the Clippers could have selected Herb Jones (35th), Miles McBride (36th), or Ayo Dosunmu (38th) at 33rd instead of Preston. Whoops.
The Clippers’ draft record has been abominable. Their inability to draft any rotation players since Terance Mann is a big reason they were so old, slow, unathletic, and shallow the past two seasons. The back half of their roster was composed largely of these young guys, who were not playable or at the least not trusted by the coaching staff. Just a single young rotation guy could have helped in 2023 or 2024, even if they might not have flipped the Dallas series. Missing on picks in the 50s is fine, but the Clippers not getting anything from three players picked at 27, 33, and 33 is not. That is not just a miss in terms of current rotation depth, but also future projects, outlook, and assets.
That final bit is key. Young players with talent are not important just in what they bring on the court, but also in terms of trade assets. If the Clippers had drafted better, they could either have kept those players or at the very least moved them for better veteran rotation pieces. The Clippers do have some young guys on their roster still, but those pieces have virtually no trade value, which is part of why the Clippers’ future looks so bleak. Maybe the Clippers wouldn’t have won a championship with Isaiah Joe instead of Oturu or Miles McBride over Preston, but every bit matters, and the Clippers getting zilch from their drafting from 2020 to 2023 was devastating.
The Hartenstein Situation
However, perhaps the single biggest mistake of this Clippers’ front office happened quietly, two years ago. Coming off a breakout 2022 season playing a key role on the rag-tag Clippers team that somehow won 42 games, Isaiah Hartenstein entered free agency. The Clippers had the tax-payer mid-level to give him, and signed John Wall instead. Hartenstein got more money from the Knicks that summer but has been on the record multiple times saying he would have come back to the Clippers for that 2 year, $13.2M deal.
What a sliding doors moment! John Wall was mostly awful for the Clippers (though he had some fun games) and was dumped at the trade deadline in February 2023. He has not played in the NBA since. Hartenstein, still just 26, is coming off two productive seasons for the Knicks, helping them reach Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals last year and earning a massive bag from the Oklahoma City Thunder – yet another connection between OKC and the Clippers.
The mistake looks bad in a vacuum, but is even worse in context. The single biggest roster flaw of the 2023 Clippers was the lack of a backup center. The plan to play small-ball backfired abysmally, with three- and four-guard lineups absolutely sinking the Clippers on both ends. Moses Brown was the full-time backup for a few weeks, for god sakes! The 2023 Clippers had to dump Reggie Jackson and a good second round pick to get Mason Plumlee, who was fine but way older and worse than Hartenstein. The Clippers finished 44-38 in a disastrous 2023 season, and it’s not unreasonable to think that Hartenstein instead of Wall would have added 4-5 more wins, at least. How much does that change? Who knows, but it could have been a very different outcome.
This past season wasn’t quite as grim in terms of the big man situation, but Hartenstein would have been a huge upgrade over Plumlee and Daniel Theis. Not just that, but he would have had real trade value that the Clippers could have parlayed into a roster upgrade elsewhere if they didn’t want to pay his deserved bag this summer. Again, the bleeding away of assets and trade pieces comes through here, just as it does in the draft.
Would keeping Hartenstein instead of signing Wall have saved this iteration of the Clippers? Maybe not. But Hartenstein is a good enough player, and Wall was a bad enough player by that time, that the signing of one over the other completely derailed one of the five 213 seasons and inflicted major harm on another one. That decision, made largely due to prompts by PG, Kawhi, and Ty Lue for a “pure point guard”, was catastrophic.
The Eric Gordon Trade
Another disaster occurred in the 2023 season at the deadline, when the Clippers, as part of a three-team deal, moved Wall, Luke Kennard, and a pick swap for Eric Gordon (and a couple seconds, one of which became Cam Christie). Gordon played 22 regular season and 5 playoff games for the Clippers, was merely fine, and then was waived last summer for tax savings purposes. Yikes.
Let’s rewind. As mentioned, the 2023 Clippers were more or less a trainwreck. Wall was a bust, Reggie Jackson had dropped off, and the Clippers had no backup center. The trade for Gordon was actually for him to serve as the “point guard”, playing more off-ball and adding some more size and three-point shooting. Ignoring that Gordon is just an ok player at this point of his career, the Clippers front office was bullied into signing Russell Westbrook a couple weeks later, diminishing Gordon’s role and making the trade mostly moot.
While Luke Kennard was overrated by Clippers’ fans, he was a much younger player than Gordon. More importantly, his $14.4M deal this past season could well have been a trade asset used to get someone better fitting than Gordon. Of much more consequence, that pick swap with the Rockets cost the Clippers dearly, moving the Clippers’ pick from 20 to 30. The Clippers chose Kobe Brown, a fine, but older prospect who hasn’t played much. The Rockets selected Cam Whitmore, who averaged 12.3 points and 3.8 rebounds in 18.7 minutes per game as a rookie, shooting 36% from three on 4.7 attempts and demonstrating awesome athleticism as a 19-year-old. Yikes.
This is the exact kind of move an asset-starved Clippers team just can’t make (though they did have a lot more assets replenished before the Harden deal). Let’s just say they didn’t make the trade, actually drafted Whitmore, and he showed roughly similar promise as he did as a Rocket (all big ifs, to be fair). Whitmore would be a guy who the Clippers could look towards as a candidate to be an actual building block in a post-213 era – or as a blue-chip trade piece to get a more win-now piece. Kobe Brown might be an NBA rotation player, but he is neither of those things. All that sacrificed for 27 games of Eric Gordon as a decent bench player.
Other Items
At the trade deadline in 2021, the Clippers traded Lou Williams and two second round picks (Portland 2023 and their own 2027) for Rajon Rondo. Lou was in decline but was a fan favorite, an important locker room voice, and was having a much better regular season than Rondo. The Clippers made the move seemingly due to pressure from their stars and Ty Lue for a “pure” point guard. Rondo ended up being unplayable in the 2021 playoffs and was traded that summer, while Lou was a key bench piece in helping the Hawks in their improbable 2021 Conference Finals run. Not great, even if it was a minor transaction.
That offseason, another Clippers’ fan favorite, Pat Beverley, was traded alongside Rondo and Oturu for Eric Bledsoe. Bledsoe was just 31, but his play had nosedived from a strong 2020 season in Milwaukee to a pretty disappointing campaign in 2021 for the Pelicans. Bledsoe was blah for the Clippers for half a season and was then moved for Norm Powell at the deadline. He was waived by the Blazers and never played again in the NBA. Beverley was also clearly in decline, but has stuck as a real NBA rotation player the past three seasons and mostly played on quite good teams. Another minor deal, but one where the Clippers paid more to get a worse player.
All of this adds up to a steady erosion in the Clippers’ talent, future assets, and team identity. The Clippers went out to get Russell Westbrook partly due to his leadership and charisma to fill the Pat/Lou void, and while he had some positive on court moments over his 1.5 years with the team, he was a disaster in the 2024 playoffs and blocked the Clippers from going younger with other players. Outside of Ivica Zubac, Nic Batum, and Terance Mann (and Norm to a lesser extent) the Clippers have just not been able to get the right role players around their stars.
The Good Stuff
That’s not to say the Clippers’ front office has made no good moves. The signing of Reggie Jackson late in the 2020 season after he was bought out by the Pistons bore immense fruit, as did the signing of Nic Batum to a vet minimum deal in the 2021 offseason. The initial signing of Hartenstein was a brilliant pickup of a clearly talented young player who had struggled with injuries and fouling – an actual example of taking advantage of a market inefficiency (contrast that with the baffling Josh Primo move last year).
One of the few successful “major” moves over the past three years was the Norm Powell deal, where the Clippers got Norm and Robert Covington for Bledsoe, Justise Winslow, Keon Johnson, and a 2025 Detroit second round pick. The Johnson pick was another draft whiff, but the Clippers were able to get real value for him by bailing on him early – despite being on a bad deal, Norm Powell has been a very useful player over the past two seasons, and RoCo was certainly better than Bledsoe or Winslow.
So, all of this is to say the Clippers’ front office has not bungled everything over the past five years. Even moves that didn’t work out, like the Serge Ibaka signing, were reasonable at the time. They have smart people working in the front office, and have also been clearly hampered by the demands of their star player and coach. At the same time, part of the role of the front office is to get everyone on board and in alignment, and the Clippers’ failure to do so led to some of their worst moves. It has not been good enough, even when the Clippers’ biggest issue has been star availability. Better margin moves could have alleviated the stars’ burdens and also kept assets alive for other moves to supplement the roster. Alas.
Conclusion
The 213 Clippers were maybe never going to win a title. Their two stars never fit perfectly together, and one of them has chronic injury issues that make both roster building and deep playoff runs very difficult. But their current predicament has less to do with the Paul George trade and is instead due to the way the margins of the roster were mismanaged over the past five years. It is unreasonable to expect any front office to be perfect and nail every single decision. But the Clippers’ horrific drafting and several abysmal roster management choices are why they stand in mid-July 2024 with almost no assets and no sure-fire young players.
Front offices of the future, including the Clippers, should not revisit this era of the Clippers and conclude the Paul George trade itself was the decision that doomed the Clips. Instead, those executives should note the critical role of the draft, especially in this new CBA, and the paramount importance of finding young, cheap, cost-controlled talent. They should examine the Clippers’ stars awful roster management wishes (and the excessively poor track record of star impact on roster decisions elsewhere) and try to focus their efforts on placating their stars in other ways. The Clippers obtained their stars, but once the Lou Will-Trez-Pat Bev support cast was gone they seemingly didn’t have an identity on the court or in the locker room. For all of the joking around Heat Culture, it is important to have an underlying identity to an organization, albeit while remaining flexible as eras change.
To sum up, this is my 3,000+ word rebuttal to the constant jokes made regarding the Paul George trade and what the Clippers got for what they sent out. The gamble was worth it, and the first two seasons of the 213 era were absolutely championship-level. Unfortunately, the Kawhi Leonard ACL tear in 2021 and the front office missteps the last three years built a team that could not win a title and ultimately had to be torn down with almost no future assets on the docket. Ultimately, the 213 era was not lost in the Paul George trade, but in the draft and on the margins, and in order to regain any flexibility for the future, the Clippers had to let George himself walk. How ironic.
