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Originally Posted by BishopMVP

But they're specifically talking about rebuilding on the fly and trying not to bottom out this season by getting guys like Harris & Bradley.

That's what I'd be saying too if I were trying to get good value in exchange for Williams and Jordan. If they can't get a deal done for those two, then sure they can stay in the run for the 8-9 seed since the team has done alright without Griffin and it's not an enormous drop-off from him to Harris at this point.

The worst-case outcome for the Clippers would be for them to finish the season exactly where they currently are in the standings, and either way it'd be a solid trade just for getting picks and opening up more cap flexibility without majorly downgrading the team in the current year. The schedule was kind to the Clippers in January (six games against the Grizzlies, Hawks, and Kings plus wins over the Rockets and Warriors who had star players out due to injury/resting) and it would not have been surprising for them to have fallen back over the next few months regardless.

We'll see if they trade DJ/LouWill strictly for picks, or go after rotation players in return again. But it looks like they'll end up with two picks in the 12-16 range unless they get very lucky with their pick during the lottery, and unlike last year with it's crazy depth this draft appears to have a clear top 5 & fall off after 11-12 players.

I don't want to talk too much about the upcoming draft, but by my count there are 7 players who would be a solid choice at #1 overall in a lot of years. Even if they 'only' got down to 8th-worst, that's about a tenfold increase at the chances of getting lucky and moving into the top 3. Conversely, the Pistons are just as close to picking 6th as they are to the playoffs at the moment, and with Blake's injury history and the possibility that he and Drummond may take some time to gel there's a higher chance it would end up 5th-8th than any later than 15th-16th.

The Clippers are extremely reliant on DJ and Williams (I mean, Williams is putting up Curry-like offensive numbers over the last month or so and the team is still just .500). It would not be a stretch to see them winning like 3 games the rest of the year without those two. Avery Bradley is just an expiring contract at this point who won't be helping a team win regular season games; he is more valuable to a team like the Cavs that desperately needs someone who can guard point guards.

If LeBron is going to an LA team that has cap room he'll go to the Lakers, who are also doing anything they can to open up space, and have Kuzma/Ingram/Ball on rookie scale deals who are better trade assets than anything the Clippers have. If LeBron wanted to play with him having Blake as an established star in his prime would've been their trump card.

For the second and hopefully final time, the trade has nothing to do with LeBron; when I said more likely I meant along the lines of increasing it from a 0.1% chance to 0.2%. Even if the Clippers were seriously trying to acquire him, I can assure you that the prospect of playing with Blake Griffin, who is a worse fit next to LeBron than Kevin Love at this point and obviously didn't get along that well with LeBron's good buddy Chris Paul, would not be a draw. If the Lakers think trading Deng and a couple young players/future picks for Jordan will give them a better chance of signing LeBron, that's definitely alright by me.

idk, I get the concerns about Griffin considering his injury history, and other teams have kind of pulled off the rebuild without bottoming out, but it just seems like he was a guy you should trade for a premium asset, not a bunch of B- or worse ones in Tobias Harris (1 more year before UFA), Bradley (UFA this summer who wants to get paid), and a Pistons pick that'll probably end up 13th-16th. Ironic that it's happening as the Clippers finally have some bench depth, bu it seems like they'll be sitting there in a year or two saying we really need to find a star.

IDK, he was not a particularly controversial omission as an All-Star this year, is probably having his worst season since his rookie year, and will be making $39 million in the 2021-22 season. It would be charitable to say he's on a B- contract when Paul George, Jimmy Butler, and DeMarcus Cousins have been traded in recent months in large part because their teams did not want to sign them to the kind of contract Griffin currently has. He's not the kind of addition who would appreciably improve a good team's chances of beating the Warriors (especially if that team had to give up a starter or two to make salaries match) and is good enough to keep a bad team from good lottery position. I had a hard time thinking of what team would have actually been able to trade for him without sending the Clippers a lot of bad salary in return.