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Tim Bontemps
Tim Bontemps
ESPN Senior Writer
- Tim Bontemps is a senior NBA writer for ESPN.com who covers the league and what’s impacting it on and off the court, including trade deadline intel, expansion and his MVP Straw Polls. You can find Tim alongside Brian Windhorst and Tim MacMahon on The Hoop Collective podcast.
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Brian Windhorst
Brian Windhorst
ESPN Senior Writer
- ESPN.com NBA writer since 2010
- Covered Cleveland Cavs for seven years
- Author of two books
Dec 5, 2025, 06:00 AM ET
It has been a downright terrible opening stretch for the 2025-26 LA Clippers.
Between the Aspiration scandal, the ensuing salary cap circumvention investigation involving Kawhi Leonard and this week’s messy public breakup with future Hall of Famer Chris Paul, there’s been a steady stream of bad news coming from Inglewood. Not to mention the Clippers are 6-16 and 13th in the Western Conference, a disastrous start given a welcome respite by Wednesday’s blowout victory over the Atlanta Hawks. LA’s spot in the standings has already led to some leaguewide angst.
Remember: The Clippers infamously owe their 2026 unprotected first-round pick … to Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti and the defending champs.
“We might need to get everyone in the league on a Zoom and brainstorm some ideas [to fix the Clippers],” one executive joked. “Invite everybody except Sam.”
The fact the Clippers don’t control their draft pick makes this situation far more complicated. If they did, the process might be simple: Sink to the bottom and hope for lottery luck in a loaded 2026 NBA draft.
What should the Clippers do? It’s a question we posed to coaches, scouts and executives across the NBA this week, to get a sense of how league insiders would attack the nearly impossible situation facing the franchise.
Three potential paths emerged.
Jump to a section:
Why L.A. should add talent
Why L.A. should trade talent
Why L.A. should stand pat
Why the Clippers should look to acquire players
Brian Windhorst: The Clippers have more than $50 million in expiring contracts and, in the apron era, that is the type of fodder that carries value as teams look to shed future money. They are light on draft assets — the Thunder also have swap rights to the Clippers’ 2027 first-round pick — and have just one distant first-round pick and three second-round picks available to trade. But, as one rival executive told me, “They can just wait for a blue light special.
“There will be teams who will be willing to dump players in two months,” they said. “Guys who might be able to help them.”
The Clippers are less than $2 million from hitting the first apron and are hard-capped, so they don’t have much monetary flexibility.
“For their issues with the age of their roster and their lack of athleticism, their two best players have played pretty well,” one West scout said. “I’m not saying [James] Harden and Kawhi are having career years, but they aren’t the problem. And you expect [Ivica] Zubac will get hot.
“You give them a piece or two that helps them defensively, and you might have a different outlook.”
play
1:45
What’s next for Chris Paul, Clippers?
Brian Windhorst joins Rich Eisen to break down possible next steps for Chris Paul and the Clippers.
Tim Bontemps: That “blue light special” comment was in line with what another West scout brought up to me. They even named a specific player.
“What about Zach LaVine?” they asked.
LaVine would, in theory, check some boxes for the Clippers. The Sacramento Kings guard would give them a serious dose of scoring and athleticism on the wing; the franchise lost both after it traded Norman Powell to the Miami Heat over the summer. LaVine, 30, has a $49 million player option for next season before his contract expires, meaning it wouldn’t cut into LA’s clear ambitions to become a cap space team by the summer of 2027.
He also shouldn’t fetch anything more than a few of the Clippers’ many expiring contracts. I’d argue the Clippers could even get an asset or two back from the Kings in such a deal, given they’d be saving Sacramento close to $50 million in salary next summer.
That means the Clippers could be one of the few teams, if not the only team, interested in taking on LaVine, thanks in part to the hefty price when he presumably picks up next season’s player option. That they could, in theory, be a fit only underscores the predicament in which the franchise finds itself.
“That’s a bad situation,” one West executive said.
Why the Clippers should look to trade their stars
Bontemps:Arguably the last time a team was in LA’s position — picks leveraged into the future and an aging, struggling roster — was the Brooklyn Nets in the mid-2010s. That team chose to change lead executives, moving on from Billy King and hiring Sean Marks, who chose to acquire future draft assets and intriguing young players rather than chase wins.
Different executives I spoke to this week both praised and excoriated the idea of the Clippers implementing that strategy.
“I would be trying to get rid of the old guys, bring in some young guys that I like and let the consequences of the record being bad be what they may,” said an Eastern Conference executive who pushed for the Clippers to take that path.
“But that doesn’t strike me as what [owner Steve] Ballmer would do, which in the past has been, ‘The only thing I want to do is win and to try to be competitive, and I don’t have interest in tanking and rebuilding.'”
“It’s hard to sell when you don’t have your pick,” another East executive said. “I remember the Nets did that when they owed their pick to Boston. I basically said, ‘F— that.’ I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure you don’t get a great pick from me.”
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Some sources have indicated that the Clippers could try to move up their free agency timeline from the 2027 offseason to next summer, which would require finding trade partners with cap room to take on Harden ($42 million player option for 2026-27) and Leonard (owed $50 million in 2026-27).
The feedback from league insiders has been that, while a team would take on Harden, it may be more difficult to find a landing spot for Leonard because of his injury and the Aspiration case still ongoing.
“James has maybe neutral value,” an East scout said. “Kawhi has negative value.”
Windhorst: The Clippers transitioning into sell mode may not make a lot of sense on its face because of the pick situation. And Ballmer has always coveted a competitive team regardless of its ceiling. But there are teams that are wondering if the Clippers would go against the grain this time.
“There are a lot of ways to use cap space, and if they don’t believe in this core they could really turn their team over in a year if they got flexibility,” an assistant GM said. “You look at what they figured out in Phoenix. They had a team that was too old and turned over that roster and it changed their entire outlook.”
Luxury tax implications are also worth monitoring. You don’t typically think much about money when it comes to the modern-day Clippers, as they are owned by the deepest-pocketed owner in American sports. Let’s put it in perspective: Wednesday saw Ballmer lose more than $4 billion in net worth, but he probably ended the day happy after the Clips won. He was accused of overpaying for the Clippers in 2014 when he paid $2 billion; Sportico now values the franchise at $6.7 billion.
And outgoing owner Donald Sterling was in disbelief when, as told in ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne’s “Sterling Affairs” podcast, Ballmer said a bank wasn’t needed as he had the cash on hand to make the purchase.
But the Clippers do have some incentive to get out of the luxury tax, which they’re currently in by about $6.7 million. LA is in the repeater tax and last year made sure to pay off the Utah Jazz to take P.J. Tucker so they could eventually slip less than $100,000 out of the tax, the first time they did so in five years.
Getting out of the tax again this year would reset their repeater tax clock — not an insignificant goal.
Why the Clippers should stand pat
Windhorst:Of the executives, coaches and scouts I surveyed this week, it was interesting that the more veteran ones tended to preach patience.
“There are going to be several teams ahead of them in the standings that are eventually going to tank and [the Clippers] will be able to pass them,” a veteran executive said. “They won’t admit it now, but there are stealth tankers already at play. You’ll be coming to me asking about the tanking epidemic in the spring.”
“They are not as bad as their record says they are,” a veteran scout said. “If Kawhi gets hurt again, well then they won’t be, but they will course-correct.”
NBA Christmas Day on ESPN and ABC
Thursday, Dec. 25
Cavaliers at Knicks, 12 p.m.
Spurs at Thunder, 2:30 p.m.
Mavericks at Warriors, 5 p.m.
Rockets at Lakers, 8 p.m.
Timberwolves at Nuggets, 10:30 p.m.
All times Eastern
This version of the Clippers wasn’t built to sneak into the play-in and hope to get hot. It was built to contend, last season’s 18-4 finish and the excruciating seven-game series loss to the Nuggets convincing the Clippers they weren’t far off. Simply authoring a turnaround to avoid handing over a lottery pick — the Clippers have already sent one to the Thunder and it turned into Jalen Williams (ouch) — is hardly an incentive.
That doesn’t mean staying the course is the most prudent path.
Bontemps:This was the most consistent message I heard this week, but mostly because those sources I talked to genuinely don’t know what the best course of action is for LA to escape this hole.
“I’m not sure what you can do,” the second East executive said. “All roads lead to the same place.”
The best thing the Clippers have going for them is the incredible drop-off in the West standings after the top few spots. The top six — the Thunder, Los Angeles Lakers, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets and Minnesota Timberwolves — are pretty well established. After that, the Phoenix Suns are a great story but are still projected as a .500 team by ESPN’s Basketball Power Index. The Golden State Warriors are below .500 and are dealing with injuries to Stephen Curry and Jimmy Butler III.
The belief is that this group will start to play better — the win over the Hawks is a start, albeit with both Trae Young and Jalen Johnson sidelined for Atlanta — and at least give the Clippers a chance to reach the playoffs and avoid sending OKC a pick in the lottery.
Paul will not be around to see if that turnaround happens, as multiple sources said the situation had reached a point of no return. But the underlying issue is that this was a team expecting to contend for home-court advantage in the West — at minimum a top-six spot.
It’s a group that seems a lot like last season’s Philadelphia 76ers, but at least the Sixers were able to parlay a lost season into keeping their protected pick. With no such fortune headed for LA, the majority opinion among sources I spoke to was that the Clippers don’t have much of a choice but to hope things improve.
“It’s got to be better than this,” another West scout said. “Ty Lue is a great coach. With Zubac, Harden and Kawhi, you’re just too talented to be this bad all season.
“You have to hold. We’ve only seen [22] games of it. Yes, it’s been terrible, but what can you do?”
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