The Clippers’ Season is Over, But There’s a Huge Silver Lining

Let’s review. Blake Griffin is out for the season. Baron Davis mails it in most of the time. What was supposed to be a playoff season for the Clippers has turned into a 21-33 disappointment.

And now? Mike Dunleavy has (in essence) traded defensive stalwart Marcus Camby for Drew Gooden, Sebastian Telfair for Steve Blake, and starting SF Al Thornton for an injured Travis Outlaw.

Ouch. Cancel the playoff travel plans.

Camby has been instrumental to the team’s (albeit limited) success, and he will be missed. But is it possible that Mike Dunleavy is secretly a genius, and that there’s a master plan behind all this? It’s not likely, but it’s possible.

When everything is considered, the Clippers are actually looking really good for next year. At the risk of cursing and jinxing again, this team has the potential to assemble a surprisingly relevant team for next year. The cap is on their side, and so is the draft… and oh yeah, then there’s these weird trades.

Heck yes, cap space.

Guess how many players the Clippers have on the books for next year?

Baron Davis, Chris Kaman, Eric Gordon, DeAndre Jordan, and Blake Griffin. Five.

That means they have 13 players with expiring contracts (assuming they don’t extend a qualifying offer to Mardy Collins), for a total of about $30.5 million of cap space when the summer rolls around.

To give that some context, the max contracts that LeBron James and Dwyane Wade will get will equal 30% of the salary cap. The 2010 cap was, last July, projected to be in the neighborhood of $50-$53 million; that means those max contracts will amount to $15-16 million for the first year. Not bad.

Don’t get ahead by dreaming of two max players; they still need to fill up a full roster (they need at least 12 guys total). But there is plenty of cap space for one max guy, plus a roster full of role players. And perhaps most compelling is that the players that are still around are the players you’d want to keep—Davis, Kaman, Gordon, Jordan, and Griffin, almost a starting five—and so any potential free agent acquisitions wouldn’t have to worry about joining a talentless team.

Bill Simmons seems convinced that LeBron James is going to sign with the Clippers. I think the smart money is on him staying in Cleveland, especially now that they’ve added Antawn Jamison to help him out, but the Clips make a compelling case should he choose to leave. They’ve got a solid core of talented players, the big market of Los Angeles, no face or legacy bigger than him, and their gaping roster hole happens to be at small forward—LeBron’s position.

A slim chance, yeah, but pretty compelling. And, at this rate, they’ll have a good draft pick too.

Blake Griffin and… John Wall?

It’s entirely possible that Blake Griffin’s injury is a long-term boon for the franchise.

If he hadn’t gotten injured, many predictions had the Clippers making the playoffs, if only barely, this year. It’d be nice to see—their fifth playoff appearance since being named the Clippers—but it could be a success ceiling. The Clips traditionally have a difficult time securing top-level free agents, and so it’s likely that the team wouldn’t get any better after that and Griffin’s strong play would be lost on an underachieving team.

But now? The Clippers have a unique opportunity here. They’re on track for another lottery pick; it’s a long shot, but they could get the #1 pick for the second year in a row. That would mean landing the draft’s biggest prize in point guard John Wall.

They took Griffin last year as the #1 pick and the far-and-away best prospect in the draft. If he can arrive next year and put in production on par with what Tyreke Evans, Stephen Curry, and Brandon Jennings are putting in, plus Wall? Well, this would be a good team with plenty of room to grow.

But yeah, it’s a long shot. The Clips only have a 1.1% shot at getting the #1 pick.

The Portland Trail Blazers had this opportunity two years ago, with #1 pick Greg Oden riding the pine and a .500 season giving them another lottery pick. They only had a 0.6% chance of getting the #1 pick, however, and they didn’t defy the odds—they ended up taking Brandon Rush with the 13th pick, and then trading him to Indiana for Jerryd Bayless. If they got back-to-back #1 picks, they could conceivably have both Oden and Derrick Rose.

Since the NBA-ABA merger, only two teams have gotten #1 picks in consecutive years, and only one team kept both picks—the Houston Rockets, who in 1983 and ’84 took Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon. The Orlando Magic is the only other team to get so lucky: they took Shaquille O’Neal in 1992, then Chris Webber in 1993—but immediately dealt him to Golden State to get Penny Hardaway (which seemed to work out pretty well for them).

That all said, would the Clippers be disappointed with a top-5 pick, or even a top-10 pick? No sir. The point is that they’ve got Blake Griffin—and now they can grab another top young player.

The trades… were good?

All this amounts to a new perspective on Dunleavy’s trades.

He managed to shed Thornton and Telfair’s contracts, which opened up some cap space. It’s likely that Drew Gooden will be waived, so his salary isn’t worth fretting about. Camby’s expiring contract was traded for Blake and Outlaw’s expiring contracts, so that’s a wash financially.

So why the Camby trade? Well, it’s not something to be proud of. But trading their star PF for a backup point and an injured SF is a quick way to lose some games.

And the more games the Clippers lose, the better their chances in the draft lottery.

It’s probably unfair to say that the move amounts to tanking, as their starters are still on the floor every night (and there’s still 28 games left). But a better pick come June 24th is a very nice side effect to trading away some of the team’s best talent.

So, we’ll see what happens. If none of it pans out, then it’s par for the course for a franchise that has seen its share of personnel arrangements go bad. The best-case scenario, however, is obvious—a starting five of John Wall, Eric Gordon, LeBron James, Blake Griffin, and Chris Kaman, a dozen NBA championships, and the chance to tell the Lakers that there’s a new king of the Staples Center.

I’d like to go on record as a Clippers fan now, before that happens.