Clipped dreams for one of L.A.’s basketball teams
When it comes to sports towns, none can top L.A. Not when it comes to championships. Since the turn of the century 12 championships have been won among the Lakers, Rams, Dodgers, and Kings.
The outlier is the Clippers. Of course, they are hamstrung under the auspices of the worst owner in all of sports—Donald Sterling. Oh wait (checks notes), that’s not the case; he was stripped of his ownership of the team in 2014. The team was auctioned off to the highest bidder, which wound up being Steve Ballmer, who paid $2 billion for the woebegone franchise.
Ballmer was everything Sterling wasn’t. Where Sterling sat atop a real estate empire and was often referred to as a slumlord, Ballmer is a critically important early employee of Microsoft. His stock in the company is currently worth approximately $166 billion, making him the wealthiest owner in the NBA by a wide margin.
Yup, the Clippers were effectively the Jeffersons, going from the outhouse to the penthouse. And he changed literally everything.
Notoriously cheap under the previous regime, Ballmer took the Clippers first class. He invested heavily in their front office, adding significant resources to scouting, analytics, and player development. When Ballmer bought the Clippers, they were effectively a third-rate tenant at Staples Center, behind the Lakers and Kings. He changed all of that by investing another $2 billion into their own state of the art arena in Inglewood.
Since Ballmer took over it’s been booming times for the Clippers. Except for one thing. He engineered and signed off on the very worst trade in sports history.
There are a couple of trades that probably come to your mind that question whether what the Clippers did was really the worst. In 1919 the Red Sox sent Babe Ruth to the Yankees for about $125,000. Supposedly this propelled the Yankees into about a century of dominance, and the Sox didn’t win a title for more than a hundred years. Those things did happen but nothing about that deal precluded the Sox from otherwise assembling great teams and winning it all occasionally.
The other trade that comes to mind is the Dallas Cowboys trade of Hershel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings for some players and a bevy of draft picks, who became the foundation of the Cowboys dynasty that won three Super Bowls.
The Cowboys cashed in on that deal, but that alone doesn’t make it a bad deal for Minnesota. In fact, not only did the Vikings make the playoffs that year, but they also made it in eight of the next 11 seasons.
L.A. LOVES their championship sports teams. Can the Clippers ever hope to join that group?
Photo by Ashwin Vaswani
Back to the Clippers. It’s 2019. Kawhi Leonard is a free agent, fresh off carrying the Toronto Raptors to an NBA championship. The Clippers had traded franchise cornerstone Blake Griffin and were seemingly starting over, but they’d just given the great Golden State Warriors all they could handle in a playoff series loss, with an upstart roster that included rookie Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
The Lakers had just acquired Anthony Davis to pair with LeBron James. Ballmer’s countermove was to get Leonard.
As was and still is typical in the NBA, stars want to play with stars. The Clippers effectively asked Leonard what it would take for them to sign with him; his response, go get Paul George.
George’s team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, was also coming off a first-round playoff loss, with an aging roster. The Clippers called and said they wanted George. OKC had to know it was so that they could get Leonard, and therefore they knew they had the Clippers over a barrel.
The price for George, and therefore the price to get George and Leonard, was two players and five draft picks. But those picks were all first rounders, and one of the players was Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
Today SGA is the best player in the NBA and has won the last two MVPs. Dealing five first round picks severely diminished the Clippers’ ability to improve the team over the next several years. That might have been palatable had the Leonard/George duo won, but that did not happen. In their five years together they were often injured, rarely on the court together, and the best the team could do in that time was a single conference finals appearance.
Worse yet, after a yearlong league investigation of the team based on reports from journalist Pablo Torre, it was determined that the Clippers circumvented the league’s salary cap by arranging endorsement deals for Leonard. They apparently did so with four different companies that did business with the Clippers—a violation of league rules—and in some cases steered Clippers’ business to those companies as an inducement for them to pay Leonard.
Why would the Clippers do this? Probably because this seemed like an acceptable price to pay to compete with, and hopefully eclipse, the Lakers. Also, equally important, Leonard’s representatives apparently made it known that they expected this type of outside pay and expected it to be arranged by the team.
The Clippers should have known this was against the rules. Maybe they did, and maybe they thought it was worth the risk.
The results of the circumvention are devastating; the league has stripped the team of five more first round picks. Meaning, the total cost of the acquisitions of Leonard and George is 10 first round picks and the best player in the league, SGA—a staggering sum for two players who led the team to nothing.
I still think Ballmer is a great owner; he’s incredibly wealthy and passionate about winning. Unfortunately, that passion has apparently caused him to make a terrible error in judgement. The man who made his money off Windows just saw his team’s championship window slammed shut.
Category: Entertainment
