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DeAndre Jordan
DALLAS — Reggie Jackson wasn’t trying to do a victory lap.
But the floor plan in the back hallways of Crypto.com Arena has a way of forcing interactions among opposing sides. It was there Denver’s reserve point guard ran into his old LA Clippers boss, president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank, after the Nuggets’ 113-104 win on Nov. 27. Jackson had caused a great deal of stress that night, with his 35-point, 13-assist outburst not only carrying Denver to victory without Nikola Jokić, Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon, but also sparking an existential crisis of sorts for his former team.
The Clippers were less than a month into the James Harden experience, having made that blockbuster move to land him from the Philadelphia 76ers in late October. Yet with their big three of Harden, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George all available, and with a fourth future Hall of Famer in Russell Westbrook coming off the bench, they’d somehow managed to get outplayed by Denver’s B-Team while falling for the seventh time in 11 tries since Harden debuted.
Jackson, who was a beloved member of the Clippers from 2019 to 2023, enjoyed this reunion far more than Frank.
“I love you Reggie, but f— you,” Jackson, who is close with Frank, said with a laugh while remembering the playful greeting he received from the Clippers’ executive.
But Jackson hadn’t been the only former Clipper who made this new super team look so silly. DeAndre Jordan, the little-used 35-year-old whose best basketball came a decade ago, finished with a 21-point, 13-rebound, five-assist line that he’d only reached one other time in his 16-year career. And when he took a read of that familiar Clippers’ room, glancing toward the hallway area where coaches, executives, players and owner Steve Ballmer make a habit of discussing that night’s affair afterward, the level of discontent was evident. According to several team sources, the mood among management that night was the worst it would be for the entire regular season.
“Yeah, it was dark over there,” Jordan remembered.
The darkness returned on Friday night, when the Leonard-less Clippers were eliminated by Dallas in Game 6 of their first-round series, 114-101. The same question that loomed so large back in November returned from the shadows and will be at the center of the Clippers’ decision-making process this summer: Does Ballmer, the uber-competitive former Microsoft CEO who is far and away the wealthiest owner in all the NBA, still see enough light at the end of the tunnel with this group that he’s willing to re-invest enough to keep it all together? The answer, team sources tell The Athletic, is a resounding yes.
Even with the Clippers’ latest disappointing finish — a second consecutive first-round flop that followed their playoff absence back in 2022 — they are expected to make strong efforts to re-sign both Paul George and James Harden. The thinking, team sources say, is that a team built around the oft-injured Leonard simply must have as much elite talent as possible as a way of mitigating the seemingly inevitable injuries that have come to define this Clippers era.
The optimism that is driving this strategy, it seems, was born out of the midseason stretch in which the Clippers looked like the best team in the NBA. They won 26 of 31 games from Dec. 2 to Feb. 5, all while boasting the league’s third-best net rating and top offense.
After all these years in which a lack of health had hampered them, with Leonard and George widely seen as the unofficial faces of the league’s load management era, it was a two-month long showcase of how special they could be as a group. The X-factor in it all? Leonard, George, Harden and Westbrook all played at least 27 games in that span.
Come playoff time, though, things changed for the worse on the health front. Again.
Leonard, who signed a three-year, $152.4 million extension in January and played more regular-season games than he had since his 2016-17 campaign (68), fell victim to inflammation in the right knee that he had surgically repaired after tearing his ACL in the 2021 playoffs (and missing the entire 2021-22 campaign). He missed the last eight games of the regular season, four of six playoff games, and re-sparked all the familiar doubts about his viability as a franchise centerpiece player.
But with the Clippers set to start a new era inside the $2 billion Intuit Dome next season, and Leonard’s latest postseason absence offering a sober reminder that they still need all the elite help they can get around him for these years to come, these next few months will set the course on a pricey path that is full of both potential and peril.
It starts with George, the 34-year-old, nine-time All-Star whose forthcoming free agency was never part of this plan. But the complications won’t end there, with Harden, coach Ty Lue and Westbrook all facing nuanced negotiations of their own as they all decide whether the desire to recommit to the Clippers is mutual. This is a deeper look at all four of the Clipp
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