Still I think it’s hard to grade how a front office drafts at the end of the draft and apply that to how they will draft in the lottery.

Legitimate proven rotation NBA players, since Blake Griffin in 2009, they got SGA and I guess TMann. 2 guys in 16 years just isn’t good enough, regardless of where you’re picking. Moussa Diabate is probably the 3rd best player they’ve taken in 16 years. JMill looks good, but also 27 years old and on the fringes of the rotation. Kobe and YKN are still wait and see guys. Cam I’m less hopeful on by the day, but at least he’s still young.

Just very hard to trust them finding a star in maybe the one chance they have in the next decade at picking this early. They haven’t had a top 5 pick since Mike Dunleavy Sr. drafted Blake Griffin. Cameron Boozer wasn’t even 2 years old yet when that happened.

The guy they take with the 5th pick will relatively quickly gain or lose value. Likely that pick has the highest value right now as the “unknown mystery box” than it will as a rookie project. Or if he’s immediately great (very very rare), there is no way the Clippers trade him.

So basically I think in terms of tradable assets, they are at their peak right now. Kawhi is at his peak value, the picks are at their peak value, and the Clippers have less future assets now than if they did not have the 5th pick. So to me, they’re in a much more pressure situation to choose a path. Keeping Kawhi and drafting a 19 year old, just feels like a path to mediocrity…. which is maybe par for the course for the Clippers honestly.

Just shocking to me that the Clippers actually have this pick. Feels like the options are endless, in that they can use this pick to try and get players to compete now around Kawhi, or in the complete opposite vein, start the rebuild around this pick. To me they have to commit to one of these two extremes, either:

1. Trade the pick for Giannis, and try and compete
2. Draft someone for the future and trade Kawhi for more building blocks

Option 1 is probably still unlikely, but I think much more on the table than it was 24 hours ago.

These days, with the top picks basically all being freshmen, means I think at best, even if you hit on a star with the pick, they’re probably still like 3 to 4 years away from them contributing to a championship. SGA didn’t even make an all-star game until year 5. That pretty squarely takes them out of the Kawhi window. So if they use the pick on the player, I think you have to move Kawhi for other young pieces and start the rebuild.

Worrying part to me is, I said at the end of the season that I really don’t trust this front office and the draft. Feels like they have gotten so many picks wrong. I mean most of those have been in the 20 and 30’s, so you always kind of give them a pass, but year after year, guys like Kobe Brown, Fi, Oturu, Michineau, Diamond Stone, Keon Johnson, Jawun Evans, even Jerome Robinson, felt like they never even showed a flash of being an NBA player. Just bad picks from the moment they stepped on the court.

I know this is supposed to be a loaded draft, but plenty of top-5 picks never even make a dent in the NBA. Every single year, it’s like at best a 50-50 shot to get an all-star caliber player in the top 5. It’s not like the Clippers are a bad team or even own most of their own picks where you can strip it down and get multiple top 10 picks year after year and build out a young core, so it’s just very scary to say that your plan for the next 5 years is to build around this 5th pick and Darius Garland.

At 34 turning 35, this is essentially his last season where his value could be this high before age and injury history truly suppress what teams are willing to give.
The suitor landscape is real and competitive:

Golden State is the most heavily connected. The Warriors need a Plan B after Butler tore his ACL, and they want to reopen their competitive window while Steph Curry is still playing at an All-Star level.

Miami Heat is the other top suitor. If they fail to land Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Heat would shift focus to Kawhi. A return package could include Kel’el Ware, Tyler Herro, and the Heat’s 2026 first-round pick.

Dallas Mavericks just added an interesting wrinkle. The Mavs hired Masai Ujiri as team president — the same executive who traded for Kawhi in 2018 and rode that gamble to a championship. Ujiri has strong relationships with players around the league, including Leonard.

Houston has also been floated, with ESPN outlining a scenario where the Rockets would trade Sengun, Sheppard, Jalen Green, a lottery pick, and veterans to land Leonard alongside Kevin Durant.

The Clippers’ stated position vs. the real picture
There’s a tension worth naming clearly. Lawrence Frank has publicly said “our plan is to win with Kawhi,” but the organizational behavior tells a different story — they traded Harden and Zubac at the deadline and are clearly building younger around Garland. At 34, Leonard’s value is unlikely to ever be higher, and this may be the Clippers’ last real chance to turn that value into the future of the franchise.

The Aspiration investigation complicates everything — if penalties include loss of draft picks, the calculus changes again.
Trading the fifth pick is genuinely interesting leverage. Before the lottery, analysts noted the Indiana pick would be one of the best trade chips on the entire market if the Clippers decided to go that route.

A top-5 pick in what’s considered a loaded class has real currency.
The most logical scenario: if the Clippers trade Kawhi, they likely keep the pick to build youth. If they keep Kawhi and try to win now, they could package the pick to acquire a frontcourt piece — a starting center — which is their most glaring need. Combining the pick with expiring contracts to land an established big who fits next to Garland would be the accelerated path.

The honest summary is that the Clippers are at a genuine fork, and how they handle Kawhi largely determines everything else — including whether the fifth pick gets used to build or gets flipped.

So here’s a deal:

LAC trades: Garland, DJJ, Bogi (team option), Lopez (team option), Beal (player option)+ 2026 Rnd 2 pick + 2030 Rnd 1 to Milwaukee

Milwaukee trades: Giannis, Myles Turner, Jericho Sims (player option), Pete Nance to LAC.

(LAC would have to fill a roster hole of getting 2 extra players, but that could probably be worked out)

LAC would then use the #5 pick to draft a point guard: Acuff. Wagler, Philon, Brown Jr

This would be the type of have one’s cake and eat it too trade that Lawrence Frank dreams of doing.

This might actually work as Milwaukee knows that Giannis is effectively in the final year of his contract and will opt out of his player option. They owe Dame Lillard another 68M over the next 3 years and Myles Turner another 82M over the next 3 years. LAC would be helping take that salary load off, give them 2 picks and some quality players to begin to rebuild.

LAC gets Giannis and Turner and have a shot at competing while rebuilding with their #5 pick and the young players already on the roster.

The critical thing for me is that I don’t want anymore guys who are old and/or have reached their ceiling (eg Nurkic, Vooch, Clarkson). And even though I like Collins and have hope for Benn we shouldn’t tie up a lot cap space for those two when these other options are out there to round out the roster. Cam Johnson has probably hit his ceiling but he’s not dreadfully old and would be worth taking on to get Watson. We could also easily let Collins go then too. 

We are NOT competing for a championship for at least the next 2-3 seasons so we need to be focused on developing a core of pre-prime players and see what we have when Haley’s comet comes around and can land a transformational player again. PLEASE no KD or LeBron or any other marquee has beens either. We can build something organic if the brass has the self esteem to do it. 

This type of roster would be fun to root for and could compete for a 6-8 seed, but Ty is definitely not the coach to bring the joy necessary to maximize vibes. I LOVE the idea of Nico as coach.