The Los Angeles Clippers Just Can’t Keep Up

Pop quiz: What two traits do the Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns, and Los Angeles Lakers have in common?

The first commonality is obvious: All five teams have either already been eliminated from the 2023-24 NBA playoffs or are one loss away from elimination. The Suns and Lakers are already gone, the Bucks and 76ers trailed 3-1 before staying alive with Game 5 wins on Tuesday, and the Clippers now trail 3-2 after a 123-93 blowout loss to the Mavericks on Wednesday—the worst in the franchise’s postseason history, in perhaps its last ever home game at Crypto.com Arena.

The second shared trait might be related to the first: These are the five oldest teams in the playoffs, according to Basketball Reference, which weights each team’s age by minutes played.

A couple of weeks in, the defining theme of this postseason is generational turnover. LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Steph Curry are all out of the playoffs early for the first time in decades, and four more of the defining stars of the 2010s—Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, James Harden, and Russell Westbrook—will join them in Cancun with one more Clippers loss.

As The Athletic’s John Hollinger noted, out of the 20 Finals teams from 2011 through 2020, 17 were led by Leonard, James, Durant, Curry, or Durant and Curry together. (And that count of 17 doesn’t even include the 2012-13 Spurs, with a pre-prime Leonard.) “We’re witnessing a full-on rout of the generation that carried the NBA through the last decade-plus,” Hollinger wrote.

That changing of the guard is one reason for the lack of a defining team of this era of the NBA, with five different champions in the past five seasons—and a record-tying sixth this year, if the Nuggets or Bucks don’t win the 2023-24 title.

In a vacuum, a roster populated by experienced veterans isn’t a bad thing; in fact, older teams tend to win more regular-season games than any other age group. But in the playoffs, it’s clear that the aging teams can’t keep up with the younger ones.

That was true of the Suns against the Timberwolves. It might be true of the injured Bucks against the Pacers. And it seems true of the Clippers against the Mavericks, too. The athletic disparity between those latter playoff rivals was evident in Wednesday’s pivotal Game 5. Luka Doncic led all scorers with a methodical 35 points, but he was aided by four teammates that Dallas has added since last offseason, all age-26 or younger: Derrick Jones Jr., P.J. Washington, Daniel Gafford, and Dereck Lively II. (All ages in this piece refer to a player’s season age on Basketball Reference.)

“Luka plays slow, but everyone else plays fast,” Lively told me after the Mavericks remade their roster at the trade deadline. And that added speed looks even more exaggerated against the Clippers, as the Mavericks’ play is full of ambitious lobs and ferocious dunks, in-your-face defense and quick hands in passing lanes.

Dallas leads all teams in playoff dunks, with 33 slams in five games. Lively is the individual leader with 14 of those dunks, even though the bouncy rookie center has played less than half as many minutes as the other players at the top of the leaderboard.

On the other end, one game after George and Harden helped the Kawhi-less Clippers stave off a historic comeback and even the series, the Clippers’ two remaining stars looked lost. In Game 4, George and Harden scored a combined 66 points on 23-for-36 shooting; in Game 5, they scored just 22 points on 6-for-25 shooting. (Harden finished 2-for-12, narrowly missing out on what would’ve been the fifth 2-for-11 showing of his playoff career.)

With Leonard out due to injury, the Clippers were able to win two games in this series thanks to elevated play from their other stars, as well as unsustainably hot shooting from beyond the arc: The team has made 55 percent of its 3-point attempts in two wins, versus 29 percent in three losses. But the Clippers without Kawhi are neither consistent, nor athletic, nor purely talented enough to match a scorching-hot Mavericks squad led by two dynamic creators of its own.

That dynamic is a problem for the Clippers not just in the present playoffs, but for the future, as well, especially with both George and Harden poised to reach free agency this summer. George turns 34 years old today (happy birthday, Paul!), and Harden will celebrate his 35th birthday this summer.

It still makes the most sense for the Clippers to attempt to retain both players—it’s almost always better to do so, rather than lose such talent for nothing in return—but that wouldn’t be a risk-free investment following a first-round exit. It was one thing to devote tremendous resources to the Leonard-George pairing when both All-Star wings were in their late 20s; it’s quite another when they’re on the verge of their mid-30s.

The Clippers’ foundation looks ancient and unsteady, compared to those the team will need to beat to advance to the first Finals in franchise history. Every Thunder starter is 25 or younger. Every Nuggets starter is 30 or younger. The Timberwolves skew a bit older because of 36-year-old Mike Conley, but are led by Anthony Edwards, a 22-year-old star.

And that’s just the top three teams in the West this year. There are also the Mavericks, with Doncic in his mid-20s; the Rockets, with a plethora of under-25 building blocks next to Dillon Brooks and Fred VanVleet (who are old men compared to their teammates, but also younger than all of the Clippers’ stars); the Grizzlies, with three young cornerstones; and the Spurs, with 20-year-old Victor Wembanyama ready to reach out and seize the world.

In contrast, the Clippers have no conceivable path to get meaningfully younger; they have no cap flexibility and no draft selections to replenish their barren youth corps. The Clippers don’t control any of their own first- or second-round picks until 2030, thanks to various trades and swaps. (They will receive Indiana’s second-round pick this summer, at no. 46 overall.)

To be fair, not all of the Clippers are so old. A few members of the supporting cast are still in their prime age range: Terance Mann is 27 years old, and Ivica Zubac and Amir Coffey are in their age-26 seasons. (No, I can’t believe that Zubac is only in his age-26 season, either. As a rookie, he was teammates with Luol Deng, José Calderón, and Metta World Peace!)

But none of those role players can realistically evolve into the leaders of a legitimate championship contender. Nor will any of the younger Clippers biding their time on the bench this season: Clippers younger than 26 (Brandon Boston Jr., Bones Hyland, and Kobe Brown) have combined for just 27 minutes in the playoffs, all in garbage time.

The Clippers, in conclusion, seem stuck, barring a miracle run of health—and it’s not as if the team’s core is likely to get healthier as its members venture even deeper into their 30s. Leonard hasn’t completed a healthy playoff run since 2020, his first season as a Clipper, when the team blew a 3-1 lead in the second round in the Orlando bubble.

Even though that was the first season for the Leonard-George duo, it might have been the team’s best—and only realistic—chance to reach the Finals. The 2019-20 Clippers had the best point differential in the West and matched up well with the top-seeded Lakers, but they squandered the opportunity with an embarrassing collapse.

A year later, they reached the conference finals, but had to play there without Leonard, who’d torn his ACL in the second round. And then, kaput—the Clippers haven’t won a playoff series in three seasons since and are now one loss away, without their best player, from another early elimination.

It’s hard to identify a factor that will improve their chances in future seasons, as they keep getting older while the rest of the West improves. Like the other veteran-laden teams this season, the Clippers have been surpassed by the up-and-comers and superstars still in their primes.