The death penalty doesn't exist in basketball, but the Los Angeles Clippers came about as close to it as any NBA team ever has. On Wednesday, the league stripped the Clippers of five first-round picks for violating the CBA's rules against cap circumvention, and with the NBPA agreeing to the punishment, the Clippers lack a straightforward path to arbitration and an appeals process. They may attempt to fight this out in court, and appear eager to do so, but for now, the Clippers have been struck with the most severe penalty the NBA has ever handed a team for any rules violation.
The question now is where they go from here, and they technically can't even begin charting a new course at the moment. Owner Steve Ballmer has been suspended for a year, and head of basketball operations Lawrence Frank has been suspended six months, so any big-picture strategic changes will have to wait until after the trade deadline, when at least Frank returns to his post. Ballmer will now presumably miss not only the 2026-27 season, but the active portion of the 2027 offseason as well.
Yet the team will still need to move forward, and it will attempt to do so with a far lighter pool of assets at its disposal. So where do the Clippers go from here? Let's attempt to figure that out.
So how many first-round picks do the Clippers still have?
The answer here is slightly more encouraging than you'd think. The Clippers -- either because doing so made sense in a vacuum or in intentional preparation for this sort of penalty -- began a teardown at the trade deadline. Aside from turning James Harden into Darius Garland, they managed to extract two first-round picks for Ivica Zubac before agreeing to swap Kawhi Leonard for two more and a swap in June. That deal has not officially been consummated, but Leonard is eventually expected to join the Toronto Raptors as his contract was not voided and he was not suspended as part of the investigation.
Thanks to those moves, the Clippers awoke Wednesday with nine total first-round picks, a genuine surplus. The NBA stripped them of five of those picks: four of their own (between 2030 and 2033) and one from the Indiana Pacers in the Zubac trade (2029). That leaves them with four first-round picks, assuming the Leonard trade is ultimately completed:
- In 2027, the Clippers owe a first-round swap right to the Oklahoma City Thunder (who can send the Clippers their own pick or the top-five protected pick originally belonging to the Denver Nuggets). However, once that swap is completed, the Clippers will have the right to swap whichever first-round pick the Thunder give them to the Raptors for their 2027 first-round pick. In all likelihood, this means the Clippers will be using Toronto's 2027 pick.
- In 2029, the Clippers owe a first-round swap to the Philadelphia 76ers. However, that swap is top-three protected. Therefore, should the Clippers land between the No. 4 and No. 10 slots on lottery night, they can give themselves up to a 24% chance of keeping their pick. If the pack does not land in the protected range, they will simply wind up with the less favorable of their own pick and Philadelphia's.
- In 2031 and 2033, the Clippers will receive Toronto's unprotected first-round picks.
Essentially, the Clippers therefore have a first-round pick in all odd-numbered years moving forward. However, none of those picks are within their control. The odds suggest they will be making someone else's pick in each of those seasons, so if those teams are good, they won't be especially valuable.
Also notable here is the sequencing. The Stepien Rule states that teams must control at least one first-round pick in every other draft moving forward. Well, the Clippers control no picks in 2028, 2030 and 2032. That means all four of these picks are Stepien-locked and cannot be traded. Assuming they don't add any first-round picks, the earliest they will be able to trade a future first-round pick will be two years from now, when their 2035 pick unlocks. However, any draft pick can be traded after it has been made, so the Clippers can trade that 2027 pick on draft night or later.
Is there a template here for the Clippers to follow?
The closest any team has ever come to a punishment of this magnitude would be the Minnesota Timberwolves, who circumvented the salary cap with Joe Smith and were docked five first-round picks in 2000. However, there are a number of important distinctions to be drawn here.
The obvious one is that the Timberwolves were eventually given two of those first-round picks back. This was essentially for good behavior. Perhaps the Clippers will eventually get some of their picks back as well, but notably, the Timberwolves admitted fault in the Smith matter. The Clippers, to this point, have not. If they're going to fight this as vigorously as they seemingly intend to, that would make it less likely that the NBA would reward them with any of these picks back.
Second, the Timberwolves had prime Kevin Garnett. The Clippers don't have anyone in his stratosphere. There is no franchise player to guide the Clippers through this. Darius Garland is a two-time All-Star and Keaton Wagler was just the No. 5 overall pick, but both leave plenty to be desired as centerpieces. Even if the punishments were similar, the circumstances really aren't.
If there's a success story involving a team in similar circumstances, it's one that put itself there through bad decisions rather than rules violations. In 2013, the Brooklyn Nets traded several deep future first-round picks to the Boston Celtics for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. The trade was a disaster. In 2016, right as the first of those picks was about to convey, the Nets hired Sean Marks to take over perhaps the NBA's worst roster with no pick control through 2018. Three years later, he'd built the bones of a roster that would eventually come a pandemic away from a possible dynasty.
How did he do that? In the short term, he simply made smart, low-cost additions. The Lakers needed to dump Timofey Mozgov, so the Nets took him to get D'Angelo Russell. They found Spencer Dinwiddie on the scrap heap. They nailed the late first-round picks they could get their hands on, with Jarrett Allen and Caris LeVert being good finds late in the first round. By doing all of this, Marks took the Nets from terrible to reasonably competitive. They made the playoffs in 2018.
But this was just a means to an end. The real endgame was free agency. The Nets preserved their cap space knowing that their enormously desirable market (New York) would help them recruit stars if they could just prove basic competence. That is ultimately what happened. Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving spurned the glitzier but less successful New York Knicks to come to Brooklyn. It didn't ultimately lead to a championship, but it's probably the single best example of a team digging its way out of an enormous asset deficit.
Can the Clippers follow the Brooklyn blueprint?
There are replicable components to what the Nets did, but the Clippers will have to adapt the plan at large. The good news for the Clippers is that they have maintained a fair bit of cap flexibility. Depending on where they draft next June, they could have around $50 million in 2027 cap space. Not a single Clipper has guaranteed money for the 2028-29 season, so the Clippers could theoretically remake their roster completely after two years. They're in Los Angeles. Players will want to play for them.
There are two pretty significant holdups here. The first is lottery reform. The Nets showcased competence in a less competitive league. Now, everyone is trying to win. As things stand now, the Clippers are hardly even a safe bet to make the Play-In Tournament. The Nets were a No. 6 seed when they recruited Durant and Irving. The Clippers are going to have a pretty hard time getting there in a very competitive Western Conference.
And then there's the reality that Durant- and Irving-level players simply don't move through free agency anymore. That summer of 2019 -- which also happened to be when the Clippers signed Leonard -- was the last true free agent frenzy the NBA has experienced. Both Durant and Irving were reigning All-NBA players when they signed with the Nets. No reigning All-NBA players have changed teams through free agency since. The NBA's subtle changes to contract extension rules over the past several CBAs have all but eliminated high-level free agency.
There are star-level players theoretically slated for free agency in the near future. Nikola Jokić next summer is the most obvious among them. But players like that no longer rely on market and cap space to make these decisions. If Jokić decides he's leaving Denver next summer, he'll pick the team first and deal with the specifics later. When stars want to go somewhere, they force a trade there. If a team needs to create cap space for someone, it can usually do so. Being in a desirable market and demonstrating organizational competence matters, but there probably isn't as obvious a path to championship contention for the Clippers as there was for the Nets. It was a different NBA.
Nonetheless, Brooklyn's basic approach was probably what the Clippers need to mimic. The basic hope here would be that the Clippers can identify some future star on the open market that the league has missed on, as the Knicks did with Jalen Brunson, but even if they can't, there are ways to use cap space besides free agency. The Clippers can start to restock their draft coffers by using their cap flexibility to absorb bad contracts. They can take high-risk, high-reward swings on players other teams might deem too dangerous. Say, Zion Williamson or Joel Embiid types, should players of that ilk become available. They can use their cap space as a restricted free agency boogeyman, throwing big offer sheets around or merely wielding the threat of such an offer sheet as a tool to convince teams to sign-and-trade them their younger players on favorable terms.
The Clippers are starting from a stronger position than the Nets were. Garland was more accomplished than any player Marks inherited or acquired before Irving and Durant. Wagler is probably more promising as a rookie than Russell was two years removed from being the No. 2 pick. If one or both of them become centerpieces, that makes this easier. The Nets were starting from scratch. The Clippers at least have talent to build on.
But the reality here is that any high-level contention probably relies on some sort of outlier. They're going to have to find their own Brunson, or they're going to have make a low-cost trade for a high-upside player that pans out. There's no easy path to building without picks. The Nets were able to do so because they existed at a point in league history in which teams frequently acquired top players without having to give up picks. The Clippers don't. They'll have to build their success on the margins.
Is that doable? Sure. It just requires absolute precision and quite a bit of luck. Remember, the Indiana Pacers made Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals without a top-five pick on their roster. They had more to work with than the Clippers do, but their success relied on a home run trade for Tyrese Haliburton, a reasonably low-cost star addition in Pascal Siakam that exceeded expectations, and a ton of success in identifying undervalued talent on other rosters. The odds aren't great, but it's doable. The Clippers are in a bad position, but it could be much, much worse.
