The Los Angeles Clippers finally did the thing. They finally traded for James Harden.
The Clippers traded Robert Covington, Nic Batum, Marcus Morris, K.J. Martin, and four draft assets to Philadelphia for Harden, P.J. Tucker, and Filip Petrusev.
The Clippers don't own the rights to any of their draft picks until approximately 2083, but who cares? They're all in on this core four of Harden, Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, and Russell Westbrook.
That team, on paper, is a championship contender. On paper, that's an NBA dynasty over the past decade. It's a 73-9 greatest team ever 16-and-1-in-the-playoffs champion in 2017, on paper.
But why is everything about the Clippers only ever on paper?
The Clippers are a deeply unserious franchise. So much so that the team just acquired a fourth star and the response around the NBA seems to be one giant collective meh.
This is a former MVP, giving the team four guys who have finished top-three in MVP voting since 2017, all currently healthy and still playing good basketball and people just … don't care.
We're all finally too smart for this. Remember as a kid when it was fun to run your finger through a candle flame, to see how close you could get to burning yourself without actually doing it? At some point, you grow up and realize you don't have to do that anymore. You don't have to touch the burner anymore to see if it's still hot. You can just … stop.
We've done this before with the Clippers, too many times to count.
For years, it was Chris Paul's Clippers. Year after year, this was the team that would finally break through and make the Finals for the first time in franchise history, and year after year, CP3 or Blake Griffin would get hurt in the playoffs and the team would come up short.
Then the Clippers got Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, and they were supposed to be the pieces who would finally break the curse and win a championship. So what happened? Leonard and George combined to play 350 of a possible 616 games the past four seasons as the Clippers won three postseason series total. (It takes four to win a championship, you might recall.)
The Clippers are Schrödinger's cat. I'll spare you the details. The franchise is a walking theoretical paradox.
Every year, the Clippers might win a championship.
Every year, they don't.
Yes, the L.A. Clippers are a deeply unserious NBA franchise — but doesn't it feel like this team might be different?
A healthy Leonard is still as good and as valuable as any basketball player on earth, period. We're talking LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Nikola Jokic level good.
Since 2016, Leonard has lost only one playoff series healthy, and he was up 3-1 in that one. During that stretch, he's averaged 29.6/8.5/4.5 on 51/39/89 shooting in 62 playoff games with an elite 125 ORTG, an elite 107 DRTG, and a god-level 10.9 Box Plus-Minus (BPM).
That's all-time elite playoff production, basically 30/10/5 on 50/40/90 with elite efficiency and great defense, championship-winning stuff.
Harden gets a lot of crap for choking in the playoffs. He wasn't as good in Philadelphia and has certainly had spectacularly bad individual moments, but he put up mostly outstanding numbers from 2015 through 2021 in the playoffs.
During that stretch with Houston and one season in Brooklyn, Harden played 82 postseason games — a full season of data — and put up 28/6/7.5 on 59% True Shooting with an elite 8.2 BPM. That's not quite god-level, but those are top-five MVP type numbers.
George was famously awful playing hurt in the 2020 Bubble. Outside of that postseason, since 2016, he's played 41 MPG in 41 playoff games and averaged 27/8.5/5 on 58% True Shooting with a 3.8 BPM. That's not MVP level, but it's pretty great for a third banana.
No NBA team can match that trio of stars, on paper. Not this year, maybe not ever.
The Bucks have Giannis Antetokounmpo, Damian Lillard, and Khris Middleton. When healthy, Leonard is at least at Antetokounmpo's level, Lillard has never come close to Harden's level of playoff production for any extended stretch, and George is better than Middleton. The Suns have Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal, and you can basically make the same comparisons there.
The Clippers also might have the better, deeper team around those stars.
Ivica Zubac, Mason Plumlee, and P.J. Tucker are good, versatile big men who give the team real lineup options and flexibility. Terance Mann is a high-energy defender and glue guy the team fought to keep in this deal. Norman Powell is as good a sixth man scorer as there is in the league. Amir Coffey, Bones Hyland, Brandon Boston, and others provide further depth.
And of course, there's Russell Westbrook.
We'll see what Westbrook can give the team at this stage of his career, particularly in the playoffs, but he should at least be a great regular season innings eater. He's the guy who can go all out, night after night, the only way he knows how, while Harden and Leonard keep their bodies healthy for the postseason.
The Clippers were already a great team whenever Leonard and George both played. Now you add one of the league's best and most efficient facilitators on top of that formula.
The offense has top-five potential, maybe even good enough to be the best in the NBA. The defense can still be pretty good too, at least league-average in the regular season and better in the playoffs if Kawhi and PG can still play elite D for two months.
A top-five offense and a league-average defense? That's already a pretty good regular season formula, basically the Nuggets or Bucks.
Now all the Clippers have to do is get to the playoffs healthy, stay healthy for two months once they get there, keep four superstars happy all season, stop Harden or Westbrook from asking out on another trade, find team chemistry on and off the court, figure out how to share the ball with so many mouths to feed, make sure Ty Lue is the right coach, do about 25 other things, and this team might actually do it.
Books reacted to the Harden trade by moving the Clippers to around +1200 to +1300 to win the title, implied 7%. They're around +650 to +700 to win the West, implied 13%.
The Clippers have approximately the same odds as the Warriors now. They're behind the Nuggets and Suns, just ahead of the Lakers, and then everyone else comes after that out West.
If the playoffs started today, how many teams would you pick in a seven game series against — and may I remind you, they're all healthy right now — the Clippers?
I've got the Clips over the Mavericks, Grizzlies, Thunder, Kings, Timberwolves, etc. I'll take them in a heartbeat over the Lakers. I'd absolutely take them against the Suns — the one team that remains horribly priced, but that's its own article — and I'd strongly consider them against the Warriors.
I'm still not picking them against the Nuggets, a team that's absolutely owned them, considering this trade did nothing to help on that end. I'm still not picking them over the Celtics or Bucks in a theoretical NBA Finals matchup.
The Clippers are a tier below those three teams. But they might be next.
The healthy version of this team can absolutely make the Western Conference finals, and if you can make the NBA's final four, then by definition, we have to take you seriously as a title contender.
So why is it still so hard to take the Clippers seriously?
Probably because every hyperbolic sentence in this article has had to include the words "healthy" or "on paper," and frankly, there's just no reason to believe we'll ever actually see that version of the team.
Not in real life, not for two playoff months. That version of James Harden may not exist anymore. And that version of Kawhi Leonard sadly seems long gone now.
The Clippers look great, on paper, because it's the only version of this team that will ever exist.
You cannot — CANNOT — bet this team's futures right now. Can't do it.
We're six months away from the postseason, and everything for the Clippers can only get worse from this moment forward. You might get a worse price for the Clippers in April, but the extra information you get over the next six months of waiting will be invaluable.
Even if you kinda, sorta like the Clippers and think they're the second or third best team in the West, they're effectively already priced that way. So even in your heart of hearts, you're still not getting much value unless you think this team is at the top tier. And even then, you have to factor in the huge injury risk potential.
The Clippers are too good now to not take them seriously, but too unserious to think they're actually that good.
The Clippers are Schrödinger's cat.
Are they dead? Are they alive? We'll never really know until we start the playoffs, and even then it's a mystery.
Don't open the box.
