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.
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: 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.
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