by Paul Teetor
Steve Ballmer deserves a refund.
The Clippers multi-billionaire owner doesn’t need a refund, and he probably doesn’t want one either. He’s the seventh richest man in the world, with an estimated fortune of $147 billion.
But by any normal business standard, he deserves a refund. He has invested more than $700 million in three-star players – Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and James Harden — who were supposed to bring the franchise its first ever NBA title, or at least a trip to the NBA Finals.
But all he got for his money was one trip to the Western Conference Finals three years ago and a T-shirt that says “Wait till next year – that’s the year we’ll finally be healthy.”
It’s all because Ballmer reluctantly approved one of the worst trades in NBA history.
The biggest refund is owed by Kawhi Leonard, the guy who was a genuine superstar as recently as 2019, the year he led the Toronto Raptors to their one and only NBA title. That summer he became a free agent and after weeks of backstage maneuvering signed a $103 million contract with the Clippers. That contract has since been extended twice for a total of more than $400 million.
Since then Leonard has been mostly a no-show due to injuries for most of his Clippers career. Once again he was out of action as once again the Clippers flamed out in the first round of the playoffs last month.
It was their last season at the Crypt, they will open next season at the $2 billion Intuit Dome in Inglewood. The move will mark a turning point in Clippers history – good or bad.
It will also mark the 10th anniversary of Ballmer buying the Clippers from penny-pinching racist Donald Sterling, who was forced to sell by the league after being caught on tape making blatantly racist remarks.
Ballmer now has some big decisions to make: should he bring back Paul George and James Harden, the other two alleged “superstars” who couldn’t even get the Clippers out of the first round of the playoffs? That move would cost him hundreds of millions, in addition to the $165 million he’s already committed to bring back Leonard for three more years.
Should he bring back the front office, most notably President of Basketball Operations Lawrence Frank, who engineered the awful trade for Paul George? And how about Coach Ty Lue?
Or should he admit that the whole Kawhi-PG-Harden era is over, a colossal failure that has done enough damage to the franchise already without going any deeper into the abyss?
After all, Kawhi will be 33 next month, PG is already 34, and Harden will be an ancient 35 this summer. By basketball standards they are an over-the-hill gang, and the injuries have already started to mount every year.
Should Ballmer engineer a teardown and a rebuild of the entire franchise and its player roster?
All these questions and more were given added emphasis this week when the results of the voting for the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award were announced.
Denver’s Nikola Jokic was the winner, which was expected, it was his third MVP award. Of far more interest to Clippers fans was the player who came in second: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, better known simply as SGA.
The 6-foot-6 SGA is so smooth and so efficient that he kind of snuck up on the league as he got better and better each year while reaching superstar status last season.
But he didn’t sneak up on Clippers fans who had the opportunity to watch him in a Clippers uniform during his rookie season of 2018-19 with the Clippers. The Clippers drafted him 11th overall after one year at Kentucky, but we now can see he should have been drafted first overall.
So the Clippers made a brilliant pick at number 11.
They could see right away that he was a superstar in the making, a rare talent who has a unique style based on his shiftiness, his understanding of angles and the ability to stop and start on a dime. In the summer league held after the draft, he averaged 20 points, five rebounds and five assists. The kid was special from the start.
Ballmer and Frank and Lue have never said whether they saw SGA’s superstar status coming, but it doesn’t matter because they traded him to Oklahoma City after his rookie year.
Why would they do something so crazy, so reckless as to trade a future league MVP. I mean, Stevie Wonder could have seen that this guy was going to be a star player in a couple of years. He’s still only 25 years old and already the second-best player in the entire NBA – better than Giannis, Luka or Anthony Edwards.
Here’s where the story gets really weird. They traded him not because they wanted to get rid of him but because OKC had all the leverage when the Clippers came calling in an effort to trade for Paul George in the summer of 2019.
That was the summer when Kawhi Leonard was an unrestricted free agent, free to sign with any team in the league. For Kawhi, a SoCal kid who grew up in Riverside and went to college in San Diego, it came down to the Lakers or the Clippers.
LeBron was recruiting him to the Lakers, and he told LeBron he would sign with the Lakers if he didn’t sign with the Clippers.
Then he went and told the Clippers that he would sign with them – but only if they recruited and signed another star to play alongside him. And he had a strong suggestion for who that star should be: Paul George.
In the insular world of pro basketball with dozens of podcasts and blogs and a website called HoopsHype that print a daily roundup of all the crazy rumors and in-your-face quotes floating around, all this backstage maneuvering was known to one and all.
Thus, when the Clippers called OKC to ask about trading for PG, OKC general manager Sam Presti had the Clippers over a barrel. He knew that they had to get PG or they wouldn’t get Kawhi.
And Ballmer, who made his fortune at Microsoft as the top guy under Bill Gates, was savvy enough to know that you don’t make a deal when the other guy has all the leverage.
But Frank, and the rest of the front office execs, convinced Ballmer that they wouldn’t just be trading for Paul George. They would be trading for PG AND Kawhi – because that was the only way that Kawhi would sign with the Clippers.
And so they made the deal.
And what a truly awful deal it was.
The Clippers gave the Thunder SGA plus five unprotected first round picks – meaning whether the draft pick was first overall, second overall or 30th overall, the Thunder got the pick. And the Thunder also demanded two pick swaps – meaning if the Clippers had a better draft pick in a certain year, the Thunder would give them their pick and use the Clippers pick instead.
In the years since then, the Thunder have used their bounty of draft picks to build a new team from scratch, with SGA as the foundation and better and better draft picks filling in around him each year.
This year they surprised everybody by winning the Western Conference and having SGA finish second in the MVP balloting.
The Clippers? They did their usual first-round face plant and for good measure signed Kawhi through his age 36 season, when he is likely to lead the league in games missed due to age and injury.
It’s time for Steve Ballmer to start over with a new squad in his new arena.
Money can fix a lot of problems, but it can’t fix bad management.
Only Ballmer can do that.
Happy trails to Bill Walton
The shocking news of Bill Walton’s passing at age 71 broke Monday morning. I never met the man but considered him a friend anyway – as did millions of others. A great basketball player at UCLA and in the NBA, an insightful color analyst and a joyful human being, his loss is the world’s loss.
In the aftermath of the stunning news – there had been no hint that he was near death – All Ball took comfort in the words of his beloved Grateful Dead, from Ripple:
There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
RIP Bill Walton.
You were a true original.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com
