INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The LA Clippers kept giving themselves chances to avoid this ending.
When they visited the Portland Trail Blazers on the final Friday of the regular season, they had an opportunity to all but secure two cracks at clinching a playoff spot. Instead, they were outplayed by a younger, hungrier Trail Blazers squad and left Moda Center looking like a group that had squandered its margin of error.
Tyronn Lue saw it coming.
Ten days earlier, after his team failed to match Portland’s energy in L.A., the Clippers head coach, who rarely speaks to his group before games, made it clear the rematch required a different level of urgency.
“Our last game, when we played in L.A., they didn’t step up the way we needed to,” Lue said. “So, yeah, we’ll mention it tonight.”
Only, the Trail Blazers took the lead on the eighth seed by beating the Clippers even more convincingly in Portland.
None of it mattered. Not the 6-21 start and comeback. Not the injuries, trades and talk around the Aspiration investigation. Not the fact that they kept giving themselves another chance, another week or another shot to extend their season. They kept believing the season could be salvaged.
“I think pretty much everybody in the locker room has been through some adversity, but it’s like a little bump,” Darius Garland said following the loss in Portland. “We’re still in the Play-In, we still got a chance to be in the playoffs, so one loss don’t really change anything for us.”
What happened days later was a season-ending 126-121 loss at Intuit Dome to a 37-45 Golden State Warriors team that had lost 15 of its last 20 games. It was a disappointing and premature end to a Clippers season full of twists and turns, trials and triumphs and instances of play that shifted between terrific and terrible.
So, this is where the Clippers are. A team that was never going to tank (and can’t tank anyway, since the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder still owns its first-round pick) but also not good enough to break through to contender status. This is now five straight years without a playoff series victory. The Clippers extended the NBA’s longest streak of consecutive winning seasons to 15, but they have now failed to survive the Play-In Tournament twice this decade.
In 2022, there was at least the promise of Leonard’s return to look forward to. Now in 2026, Leonard’s future with the Clippers is as uncertain as ever. The franchise remains under investigation, and its next era leaves many question marks about the future.
Kawhi Leonard faces an uncertain future with the Clippers. (Katelyn Mulcahy / Getty Images)
This wasn’t supposed to be the version of the Clippers we saw this season.
A year earlier, they had re-established direction. Despite being projected to win fewer than 40 games, they won 50 while being led by James Harden, Ivica Zubac and Norman Powell. Their defense climbed into the top five with the additions of Derrick Jones Jr., Kris Dunn and the return of Nicolas Batum, alongside new lead assistant Jeff Van Gundy.
Leonard made his season debut in January and ramped up in time to help the Clippers win 18 of their final 21 games. They avoided the Play-In, clinching a playoff spot on the final day of the regular season in Golden State.
They pushed the Denver Nuggets to seven games before losing on the road, a result that set the Clippers on a pathway to retool the roster and stay competitive.
The plan was to build on that. Upgrade the frontcourt. Improve the shooting. Add more ballhandling. Stay competitive while preserving flexibility to eventually transition into the next era.
The Clippers did that, but they didn’t get any younger while addressing their needs. They leaned older.
With the Phoenix Suns signaling that Bradley Beal would not have a future with the team, James Harden went to work on recruiting his new backcourt mate. While Harden worked on Beal, the Clippers traded the extension-eligible Powell to the Miami Heat in a three-team deal that allowed the Clippers to acquire contract-year forward John Collins from the Utah Jazz. The 32-year-old Beal agreed to join the Clippers, theoretically backfilling the loss of Powell, the best trade chip the Clippers had. Batum, 37 in December, re-signed. Longtime Milwaukee Bucks starting center Brook Lopez, who turned 38 this month, joined to be Zubac’s backup. And franchise legend Chris Paul, 40, was the last piece.
“They’ve been calling us The Unction!” Paul said in an emotional meeting at Intuit Dome with season-ticket holders.
It was supposed to work. Then, the drama started.
News broke in September that the Clippers were accused of circumventing the salary cap through an endorsement deal involving Leonard and Aspiration, a bankrupt climate tech company. The NBA launched an investigation into the Clippers organization, hiring law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct it. The scandal clouded the Clippers leading into training camp.
Then the issues sprouted on the basketball court.
The Clippers opened the season with a humiliating blowout loss in Utah — a team that lost 65 games last season and went on to lose 60 more games this season. A week later, the Clippers failed to score 80 points against Golden State on the second night of a back-to-back. It took a buzzer-beater from Leonard just to survive a Halloween win over a New Orleans Pelicans team that would go on to lose 56 games.
At least the Clippers were 3-2 at the end of October. But November would produce a significant descent into the abyss.
Leonard turned his ankle against the Miami Heat and missed 10 games. Paul was out of the rotation. Beal suffered a season-ending hip fracture against the Suns before ever playing a single minute in the fourth quarter. Kobe Brown and Cam Christie were burned so badly against the Hawks that they immediately lost minutes. Collins was moved into the starting lineup in the wake of Beal’s serious injury and failed to have a single assist for eight straight games. Jones Jr. suffered the first of two left knee MCL sprains this season against the Boston Celtics. Bogdan Bogdanović went down again, this time with a hip contusion. Lopez fell out of the rotation completely as he struggled to keep up as a backup center.
The low point came right before Thanksgiving.
That’s when Paul announced his impending retirement during a November game in Charlotte, N.C., his home state, catching the organization off guard. Even though Paul was widely expected to be playing his final NBA season, he never addressed the media. Days later, the disconnect between Paul and the coaching staff became more visible.
The Clippers lost 13 of 15 games that month. A December road loss to the Heat wound up being the last of Paul’s career. After a late-night meeting with president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank, Paul announced on social media that the Clippers were sending him home from Atlanta in the middle of the night.
By Dec. 20, the Clippers were 6-21.
Even their turnaround would come at a cost. Harden carried a heavy load at age 36 — the only player age 35 or more averaging 35 minutes per game at that point of the season was Kevin Durant. On the night the Clippers began to stabilize, Zubac suffered a Grade 2 left ankle sprain, opening the door for Lopez to re-emerge and rookie Yanic Konan Niederhäuser to show that he could play.
By the end of January, the Clippers had put a decent month of basketball together and Zubac was back. But they were still just 22-25 and 10th in the West.
On Feb. 1, Harden decided to take control of his situation and speed up a process that the Clippers may have preferred to wait on until the offseason to address. He was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Darius Garland, who is younger and under contract through 2028 but also hadn’t played in weeks because of a toe sprain.
The next day, Zubac, along with Brown, was dealt to the Indiana Pacers in a move that reshaped the Clippers’ future. The return was tremendous. It brought back 2026 restricted free agent Bennedict Mathurin, Isaiah Jackson and substantial draft capital. In the deal, the Clippers acquired a 2028 second-round pick from the Mavericks, an unprotected 2029 first-round Pacers pick and either a 2026 lottery pick if it does not land in the top four, or a 2031 unprotected first-round pick.
The Clippers also traded Paul to Toronto, where the Raptors waived him, allowing him to retire just before All-Star Weekend at Intuit Dome. The Clippers used the open roster spots to promote emerging young players Jordan Miller and second-round rookie Kobe Sanders.
The youth movement put the microscope back on Leonard and a front office that had to answer for whether the moves were made with the league’s investigation in mind, a premise that Frank denied.
“We haven’t learned anything more than we have back in September,” Frank, who agreed to a multiyear extension with the franchise in January, said of the ongoing investigation after the trade deadline. “And to be honest with you, it doesn’t impact anything we do.”
For a while, it worked.
From Dec. 20 on, the Clippers went 36-19 — the sixth-best record in the league and the third-best in the Western Conference. Leonard seemed rejuvenated by the new group around him, tying Bob McAdoo for the franchise record for consecutive 20-point games at 57. Garland settled in after the Clippers allowed him a month to recover from his toe maladies. Mathurin provided a scoring punch off the bench with eight 20-point games in March, despite missing nine days with his own toe issue.
The Clippers got over .500, something a team 15 games under .500 had never done within the same season. But the progress did not come without costs.
Konan Niederhäuser suffered a devastating Lisfranc injury to his right foot, requiring season-ending surgery. Jackson went down with a right ankle injury. Mathurin fell out of rhythm. Batum fell out of the rotation.
The “new” version of the Clippers appeared to be on fumes after playing the most games of any team in the NBA in March. And now an offseason of hard decisions commences.
Lue is under contract through 2029. Garland is the Clippers’ new point guard of the future. They’re not going anywhere, a league source told The Athletic.
Everything else is less clear.
Leonard has one year left on his deal. According to another league source, the Clippers believe the NBA’s investigation won’t result in significant punishment, and there is no expectation that Leonard’s contract will be voided. But with Leonard’s value re-established, the franchise must decide whether to extend him or explore a trade.
“I think we’re going to be in the clear,” Kawhi Leonard said of the Aspiration investigation after Wednesday’s loss. “I’m not stressing.”
May 10, the day of the NBA draft lottery, looms as a massive day for the Clippers’ offseason planning and fortunes. If the Pacers don’t get a top-four pick, then the Clippers will be selecting fifth or sixth. It could also convince Leonard and the Clippers to take one more run together.
After that, the decisions begin to pile up.
Collins was a great locker-room fit, but the Clippers will have competition for his services if he doesn’t reach an extension before unrestricted free agency. The many adjustments in his role, from position to whether he started, will be something that needs to be considered. Mathurin wants to start, but the Clippers have all the leverage and won’t need to promise anything to a player the Pacers chose not to extend before this season despite being the sixth pick in the 2022 draft. Beal is expected back next season after hip surgery, which will likely require picking up a player option he would have ideally declined if he were healthy. Lopez, Batum and Bogdanović are all great veteran role players, but they all have team options that the Clippers could decline for maximum flexibility. Jones and Dunn are extension eligible. Young rotation players like Miller and Sanders are also on team options, which the Clippers could pick up as part of team-friendly deals.
But until the league’s investigation and the lottery conclude, the Clippers have only this past season to look back on. They’ll enter this offseason much like the ones before it.
Once again, they are a team in transition.