Adam Silver and the NBA brought the hammer down.
Among the painful punishments for the Clippers — such as suspending owner Steve Ballmer for a year and not letting him be around the team — nothing is as devastating as losing five first-round draft picks. Those are the lifeblood of team building in the modern NBA.
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How do the Clippers not just get through this but find a path forward? What happened to the Minnesota Timberwolves when they were stripped of five first-round picks a quarter century ago? Is there a more recent roadmap for the Clippers? Let’s break it all down.
What happened to Minnesota?
The only other team hit with this kind of punishment — losing five first-round picks — was the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2000, when they were caught circumventing the salary cap for Joe Smith. That precedent is what Adam Silver used to take five Clippers picks away.
So what happened to Minnesota? It’s not apples-to-apples, but it also foreshadows concern for Clippers fans.
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Those Timberwolves had Kevin Garnett in his prime — including during his MVP season — so for the first three years after the ruling came down, they won at least 50 games and even reached the Western Conference Finals in 2004. With all due respect to Darius Garland, the Clippers don’t have anyone of that caliber on their team.
Then things got ugly for Minnesota. It missed the playoffs for the next 13 consecutive seasons and 16 of 17. Garnett was traded in the middle of that. Minnesota made just two first-round picks between 2001-2005, but only one of them, Rashad McCants, really produced for them. To be fair, a lot of the years the Timberwolves continued to miss the playoffs were after they got their picks back — the NBA restored two of them for essentially good behavior — but the Timberwolves’ issues went well beyond just losing picks. They were their own worst enemy for a while.
That’s where things are a little better for the Clippers — they have a couple more picks in this mix, and they have been smart about picks and player development in recent years.
What do Clippers do?
Talking to league sources in the past few days, when you talk about the Clippers’ path forward, one example comes up:
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The Brooklyn Nets.
Back in 2013, Brooklyn traded three first-round picks and a couple of swaps to the Boston Celtics to land Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. Needless to say, the Garnett/Pierce era in Brooklyn was a mess. Just as the Nets were coming out of that around 2016, all their picks were gone for years.
What did the Nets do under GM Sean Marks? They found players deep in the second round or that other teams had given up on and developed them into quality players, such as Spencer Dinwiddie. They opened up a lot of cap space and took on bad contracts to get good players along with them (for example, they took on the Lakers’ Timofey Mozgov as long as the Lakers threw in D’Angelo Russell). The Nets nailed the picks they had, such as big man Jarrett Allen.
That’s the Clippers’ path — and they have more talent on the roster now than the 2016 Nets did. Darius Garland is a quality point guard at age 26. They just drafted Keaton Wagler, and we’ll see how he develops, but he has potential as the two guard next to Garland. In the short term, they have a floor-raising two-time All-Star in Brandon Ingram that they could look to trade in the coming couple of years. They have solid veterans on the roster right now in Derrick Jones Jr., Brook Lopez and the just-signed Rui Hachimura, all players who make them respectable in the short term but could be traded for picks or players to develop into the future as well.
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Plus, the Clippers have a couple of first-round picks and a swap coming via the Kawhi Leonard trade. Those are unprotected Raptors picks. The swap can help too: Next year the Thunder have the right to swap first-round picks with the Clippers and almost certainly will, but the Clippers then have the rights to swap with Toronto (which could very well be a better team than many fans realize, but is not going to rack up regular-season wins like OKC).
Brooklyn under Marks built up a core of good young players who made it to the playoffs, but they always kept their books open knowing a big free agent was the way they wanted to go. They eventually convinced Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving to play for them instead of the Knicks, and that Brooklyn super-team had its moments but never reached the Finals. Still, it was an impressive turnaround.
That is a path forward for the Clippers: Find and develop players, draft well when you have the chance, be smart and patient, build a culture, and wait for your opportunities. They will come.
Just know the next seven or eight years (at least) are going to be rough. That’s the point of the punishment.
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