It’s 2019 and the Clippers just landed Kawhi Leonard on a three-year, $103.1 million deal. Leonard is fresh off a championship and Finals MVP with Toronto. The Clippers, at the direction of Leonard, also landed Paul George in a trade from the Thunder for five first-round picks, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Danilo Gallinari. It was euphoria for Clippers fans at the time, as they even seemed to take some buzz away from LeBron James and the Lakers that offseason.
Now seven years later, you can make the case that this was one of the most disastrous superstar gambles in NBA history. We’ll start with the Paul George trade. Not only did you send five first-round picks, but you gave them SGA! SGA is not just some solid All-Star they gave away. He may quite possibly be the best player in the NBA right now. With a championship, a Finals MVP, 2 regular season MVPs (back-to-back the last 2 seasons), and 4 All-NBA First Teams under his belt by the time he turned 28 this July. So perhaps the best player in the league plus five first-round picks gone for George. Paul George left the Clippers in 2024 for the 76ers (he’s now on the Celtics).
The Paul George trade has been mocked for a while now, but it’s this recent punishment handed down by the NBA for circumventing the cap with Kawhi Leonard that makes that 2019 offseason look so much worse. They did this to themselves, as of course no one made them break the rules, but here’s the full punishment handed down by the NBA:
Another five first-round picks! You may be wondering why the stripped first-rounders are from 2029-2033. And that would be because the Clippers do not own the rights to their own first-rounder in 2027 or 2028. The Clippers are in an absolutely brutal position now in regards to not controlling their own first-round pick until 2034. Ari Gold may have put it best.
To make matters worse, Leonard averaged just 47 games per season during his seven years in LA and played more than 60 games in only two of those seasons.
So all in all, five first-round picks went to OKC, five more were just taken away by the NBA, you lost maybe the best player in the league (SGA) and Danilo Gallinari (perhaps slightly less important). That’s TEN first-round picks tied to this fallout from the 2019 offseason.
However, it would be unfair to ignore the results of this duo with the Clippers, so let’s see how each season played out with them:
- 2019-2020: Lost in Western Conference Semifinals (blew a 3-1 lead)
- 2020-2021: Lost in the Western Conference Finals after losing Leonard to injury in Western Conference Semis
- 2021-2022: Missed playoffs (Leonard missed entire season with an ACL injury)
- 2022-2023: Eliminated in first round of playoffs
- 2023-2024: Eliminated in first round of playoffs
- 2024-2025: Eliminated in first round of playoffs (first season without Paul George)
- 2025-2026: Missed the playoffs
So after the first two seasons, they never made it out of the first round again.
But somehow, after all of this, Kawhi Leonard was traded back to Toronto this offseason. The deal was held up during the investigation, but will move forward now. The Clippers are receiving Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, two first-round picks, two second-round picks, and a 2027 pick swap. Considering Leonard is now 35 with a history of missing games, you can certainly question what Toronto is seeing in this deal. I know I sure am. Still, at least for the Clippers, they were able to recover a little bit of the draft capital they had lost.
Maybe the Clippers can recover even more picks via other trades, but right now this looks devastating. They went from thinking they had built a championship team themselves in 2019, to actually watching the player they gave away go win one with OKC instead.
But here’s the thing: I’m not convinced the Clippers made a bad decision in 2019. Leonard was coming off a championship and Finals MVP, George was coming off an MVP-caliber season, Leonard wanted George there, and if the Clippers didn’t do it Leonard may very well have gone to their rival Lakers instead. That’s what makes this so interesting and crazy. At the time the moves weren’t bad. In fact almost any GM would have taken that swing and been thrilled with the acquisitions. It’s so unfortunate for the Clipper fans to see just how horribly this worked out in hindsight. It seems almost everything imaginable went wrong afterward. With part of it being entirely the organization’s own fault for circumventing the cap after acquiring Leonard, of course.
So was the 2019 Clippers offseason actually the worst in NBA history? Of course that’s impossible to say definitively. Plenty of franchises across all sports have made catastrophic decisions. But it’s really hard to find another offseason where a team gave up this much in terms of money and draft capital, received this little, lost a future MVP-level superstar in the process, and literally lost five more first-round picks because of the punishment directly related to Kawhi Leonard. Again, it’s hindsight, but it definitely has to be at least one of the worst in history after seeing how it all played out.
The Clippers kind of feel like the Jets to me: the little brother team in their city where somehow nothing ever goes their way, even when it looks like they finally did something right.
Lakers are out here trading for superstars like Luka Doncic, and the Clippers are a dumpster fire. So all looks normal in LA again at least in NBA terms.
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