As a close observer of an NBA franchise that has spent the past few decades in various states of putrefaction, an exercise I like to undertake from time to time is to consider which of the 30 NBA teams faces the bleakest medium-term future. This excludes most teams presently in the thick of the playoff race, because maintaining such a position is easier than attaining it. It also excludes most of the teams currently populating the depths of the standings, who have youthful talent and/or future draft picks with which to make their way out of fallow periods. Before the current season began, one may have thought the Phoenix Suns—who finished 11th in the West last season and do not control their first-round pick until the end of the next presidential administration—were the answer, but they have turned out to be super feisty. No, despite serious competition, the league's worst future outlook belongs to the Los Angeles Clippers.
The Clippers are 5-15 on the season, having just wrapped up a 2-13 month that a Clips beat writer argued could be one of the worst in the history of one of the NBA's losingest franchises. Given the unmitigated bleakness of the pre–Chris Paul era, and the fact that the Clippers nearly knocked off the second-best team in the NBA in a killer seven-game playoff series like six months ago, that might seem almost impossible to believe. It's also totally fair.
Everyone on the Clippers is old, cranky, and slow. Kawhi Leonard, their theoretical best player, doesn't play much, isn't good when he does play, and is still the subject of a huge NBA investigation into a shady endorsement deal. In the offseason they retooled their bench around a group of established veterans, in hopes of creating a platoon-style second quintet that could play together or in mixed groups with the starters and give head coach Tyronn Lue 10 skilled veterans to toggle around in hopes of out-skilling younger, potentially wilier opponents. Paul has already announced his forthcoming retirement, which presently looks several years overdue. Bradley Beal broke his hip. Brook Lopez has been benched because he is incapable of moving his feet. Bogdan Bogdanovic's legs stopped working. John Collins has been pressed into a starting role he's not really ready for after Derrick Jones Jr., the only Clipper suited to the modern game, got hurt.
All of that certainly makes the Clippers the most disappointing team in the NBA, here in the present. The team's future is so bleak because it has zero starter-level young players and no real means of acquiring any, and owes its next four first-round draft picks to the Oklahoma City Thunder and Philadelphia 76ers. Every Clippers loss improves Oklahoma City's draft lottery odds, raising the alternately horrifying and thrilling possibility of the league-bestriding Thunder adding one of the three top-pick–level talents in the 2026 draft class to what is already far and away the best roster in the league.
What would someone like BYU's AJ Dybantsa look like on a Thunder team that might win 70 games this year, whose best players are all like 24? Is Victor Wembanyama the only person who can save the rest of the conference from a blue and orange future? Is his career going to be forever derailed by this? Why even try to compete if you are any other team?
These are questions outside of the normal spectrum of possibilities. For their salience we have the Clippers to thank, because they mortgaged their entire future in exchange for a permanently injured podcast host who currently plays for another team, and a different permanently injured guy who is totally untradeable, because the team seems to have acquired him in such an illegal way that the punishment will further strip an already barren cupboard. (Here is a fun place to note that the Clippers have won a grand total of three playoff series in the six full seasons since signing that mortgage, and none in the last four.) Perhaps those circumstances can explain some of the team's malaise, though if you actually watch a Clippers game, you'll see a team that is not good at anything and is incapable of keeping up with the times.
If you haven't heard, the NBA is all about pressure now. Every defense is geared up to attack the ball and create havoc, and every offense designed to create launch vectors at the basket for both ball-handlers and rebounders. The game is fast and violent now. The Clippers, by contrast, are set up to play methodical, careful hoops. They would like to have James Harden stand around and dribble and proceed through pick-and-rolls at medium pace, and while he has been decent in the role, averaging a hair under 28 points and nine assists a game, that sort of plodding attack doesn't fly against modern defenses. The space the Clippers want to play with is closed off to them by more athletic, intense teams. On defense, in turn, they just stand there and watch. Despite assistant coach Jeff Van Gundy's best sartorial efforts, the transition defense is among the worst in the NBA. The Clippers' turnover differential, which is more important than ever, is Washington Wizards–level.
The 20-game mark is right around when a team's performance becomes more predictive than its preseason projections, which means that the Clippers are probably not going to turn things around. What evidence that they might could there even be? Perhaps some of the veterans will become more normal, though one downside of betting on older players is that those players get hurt more often, so it's not likely that the Clippers' dire injury situation is much of an outlier.
The optimist might point out that the bottom of the Western Conference is, to put it mildly, rotten. There are six real teams in the conference, then the surprising (good) Suns and the surprising (bad) Golden State Warriors, then a clump of seven sub-.500 teams, the bottom two of which (the Sacramento Kings and New Orleans Pelicans) are super-mega dead. Of the five striving teams between the Warriors and Kings, the Clippers are the worst at present; with the Portland Trail Blazers headed south, the Utah Jazz always at risk of joining them on the way, and the Dallas Mavericks in the process of de–Nico Harrisonization, one could make a case for the Clippers as a candidate to salvage one of the last spots in the postseason play-in games.
Maybe they advance from there, probably they do not, but in this optimistic case at least the Clippers wouldn't be stuck sending a likely top-five pick to what might by then be the repeating champs. Their long-term strategy, such that the following logic can be characterized as strategic, is to win as much as they can now while preserving salary-cap space for the summer of 2027, with the goal of signing either Donovan Mitchell or Giannis Antetokounmpo in free agency. That would be super risky even in a version of the NBA where superstars switch teams in free agency, but that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. Also, those free agents are aware of the looming Kawhi Leonard fallout, and would presumably like to win basketball games. The Clippers don't do that anymore.
The franchise has not had a losing season since Chris Paul came to town in 2011, and is the sole team in the NBA with that honor. The streak seems doomed to conclude this year, an ending that couldn't have come at a worse time.
