The Los Angeles Clippers may have been eliminated in the first round of the 2025 playoffs, but they could reasonably believe themselves to be the third-best team in the league after that run.<\/p>\n
No one pushed the eventual champion Thunder harder than the Nuggets, and L.A. took Denver to seven games in the opener.<\/p>\n
Yeah, it’s a bit of a mental dominoes game, but when healthy, the Kawhi Leonard- and James Harden-led Clippers performed like bona fide title contenders. And this offseason, on top of bringing back most of the most important pieces from 2024-25, they bolstered their rotation with Chris Paul, Bradley Beal, Brook Lopez and John Collins.<\/p>\n
This is now, unquestionably, one of the deepest teams in the NBA.<\/p>\n
But it’s also the oldest. Collins is the only rotation player in his 20s. And Leonard has famously had a terrible time avoiding injuries throughout his career.<\/p>\n
There’s a world in which age and various ligaments and joints derail L.A. at some point this season, but it might have accumulated enough raw talent to overcome those concerns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Los Angeles Clippers may have been eliminated in the first round of the 2025 playoffs, but they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-68667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}