The Clippers aren't satisfied with being merely good

The L.A. Clippers want everyone to believe that they don’t plan on rebuilding from scratch after trading Blake Griffin, their best player and franchise cornerstone. The team put out word through the whisper pipeline on Monday that while DeAndre Jordan and Lou Williams were indeed on the market, and Avery Bradley could absolutely be had at the right price, the Clippers planned to continue to compete.

This is true in a sense: whatever players L.A. rustles up from the G League will indeed continue to compete this season. Tobias Harris, the best player coming back from the Pistons, will compete. If any of Jordan, Williams, and Bradley stick around, they will compete. The Clippers have survived a storm of injuries this season already. It’s a minor miracle — and a credit to coach Doc Rivers and the Lawrence Frank-led front office — that L.A. is in the playoff race.

But if the Clippers continue to compete in the near-term, it will be in spite of this trade. The move to unload Griffin for Harris, a lightly protected first-round pick, and a second- is a big swing for the future of the Clippers. Not today. Not this season. Not even next season.

This is the platform for the next great Clippers team.

That’s likely how Steve Ballmer, the passionate and forward-thinking franchise owner, sold it to himself in the middle of a playoff chase. The Clippers sat just a game outside of the No. 8 seed as the deal was reached. They’d watched one of their rivals for a playoff bid — the New Orleans Pelicans — lose its second-best player days ago, and then beat that rival Sunday night.

What is another playoff berth to the Clippers at this point? The once-moribund franchise had racked up five straight 50-win seasons, six straight playoff appearances, and three ultra-thrilling series victories. (The Clippers remain the last Western team to beat the Warriors in a playoff series. Jordan is the last guy left from that team.) This Clippers team, if it snuck into the postseason, would be ejected quickly by Golden State or Houston, and with no clear path to massive improvement next season.

Eventually, given the team’s cap situation and shallow talent pool, building a team better than merely good would require an incredible stroke of luck — like LeBron James deciding he wants to play in L.A. but not on any team starring a member of the Ball family — or a rebuild.

The Clippers are suggesting they intend to be in the bidding for LeBron this summer. This is hilarious. As such, the way to climb back to the level the Clippers reached at their height — when the team was a Josh Smith tornado of triples from a date with the Warriors in the Western Conference Finals in 2015 — is a rebuild. That’s what this Griffin trade constitutes, even if L.A. somehow stays in the mix for a playoff spot. This is all about that Pistons first-round pick.

Reports suggest the pick is protected in the top four. Detroit is currently on track to pick No. 13 in June, meaning the pick would transfer. If the Pistons do make the playoffs with Griffin (and despite giving up two of their shooters in the deal), they won’t rise so high as to move the pick out of the teens. L.A. would be hoping for the Pistons to continue their freefall and end up around No. 10 or maybe a couple spots better.

This will be an interesting race, to see which pick — Detroit’s or L.A.’s — ends up more valuable. Regardless, it’s likely to be two picks in top 15 in a loaded NBA draft. L.A. owes a future non-lottery pick to the Celtics because of Jeff Green, naturally, and would have had the Rockets’ late 20s pick this summer if not for needing to pay off the Hawks to absorb Jamal Crawford. Flipping any of Jordan, Williams, and Bradley won’t likely result in a lottery-range pick for 2018 — there just aren’t many options out there — unless the Blazers or Nuggets bet on themselves, trade their pick for one of those guys, and fall out of the race. (The eternal fight between the Blazers and Nuggets to goof up deadline deals is humorous. You say Afflalo, I say Plumlee.) Odds are the Clippers have two picks in the top 15 in 2018 because of this trade and one lesser first in 2018 or unknown first in 2019 for every one of Jordan, Williams, and Bradley they trade between now and February 8.

It’s hard to imagine any of Jordan, Williams, or Bradley re-signing in the summer. Williams ought to be chasing the best contract given his age and career earnings; the same applies to Bradley. The Clippers would be foolish to pay market rate for either given where they are headed. Jordan’s future is a mystery, and you wonder if he doesn’t now wish he’d taken Mark Cuban’s dough instead of cozying back up to the Clippers. (Jordan’s bro-ship with one-time Cuban wingman Chandler Parsons would have been painfully short-lived.)

The Clippers have the benefit of owing out no lottery picks — again, that pick owed to the Celtics is lottery-protected for years until it turns into a second in 2022 — so they can afford to be bad for a season or two to earn a high choice. Thanks to lottery reform, beginning next year they don’t even have to be absurdly bad for a real shot at a top pick. Should Patrick Beverley come back from injury to partner with Harris, Danilo Gallinari, and the rookies L.A. picks up this summer, that team should be good enough to not be embarrassing but bad enough to add another blue-chipper. They’d have to worry about keeping Harris in 2019 free agency, but that’s a worry for another summer and not today.

By trading Griffin now — a Griffin who has topped out in L.A. both individually and at the team level — Ballmer and the Clippers begin the search for their next Griffin. The trade return isn’t eye-popping from that standpoint, but then neither is Griffin. You get what you can get once you decide to go a different direction. That applies now to the other trade pieces in L.A. We’ll see if the market meets the Clippers’ needs.

Perhaps this course change is best considered as a manifestation of the course change within the Clippers organization itself. This summer Doc Rivers was stripped of power in the front office, with his trusted benchmate Lawrence Frank taking over those duties. The legendary Jerry West decamped from Golden State just after the NBA Finals to be Ballmer’s Rasputin. Doc Rivers would never have done this deal. It has West’s bold, decisive fingerprints all over it. Without the benefit of truly knowing Ballmer’s organizational philosophy translated to the NBA, it feels like a Ballmerian move, if that makes sense.

It feels like the Clippers’ new brain trust decided good is not going to be good enough, and a post-CP3 Griffin-led Clippers team wouldn’t be more than just that: good. This is the reboot. We’re so much closer to the beginning of it than the end. But it’s here, and it’s going to be fascinating to watch unfold.

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