About that 2028 L.A. Clippers pick

In case you missed it (or were sitting under a rock for the last couple of days) the Clippers got hammered by the league with penalties stemming from their circumvention dance with Kawhi Leonard and his uncle.

I’m sure that most of you also realized that the Celtics have a Clippers pick in 2028. But there are complicated provisions related to where the pick lands, swaps with other teams, and it just makes my head hurt to think through the different variations.

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With all that said, the clearest explanation I saw on this comes from BRobb at MassLive.

Celtics get a 2028 first-round lottery pick via swap from PHI/LAC if:

The Clippers’ pick lands between 1 and 16 and/or Sixers’ pick lands between 1 and 8. Celtics would get the higher of these picks in this scenario via a swap with their own pick.

Celtics get a 2028 first-round pick outright from Clippers if:

The Clippers pick falls between 17 and 30 and Sixers pick falls between 9 and 30. In that scenario, Celtics get the Clippers pick outright without having to swap their own.

There are flow charts and percentage tables out there if you are interested. But I’ll find it hard to follow all the math until we at least get into next offseason and see what the Clippers end up doing.

So the bottom line is that we should be doing something that we would do normally: Rooting against the Sixers and Clippers. I guess I don’t have any specific dislike of the Clippers, more of a sad pity for their fans. But in this case the team dug the hole with their own aspirational shovels.

It will be interesting to see how the Clippers navigate the next couple of years. I’ve seen some suggest that they should lean into taking on bad contracts (for the cost of other people’s draft picks). Balmer is banned from the team for a year, but his money is still limitless, so they could just pay their way through this. But it will still be very hard without all those draft picks.

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Anyway, the Celtics have an asset in that 2028 pick and it seems to have gotten a bit better because of all this. Now we wait and see what Brad Stevens intends to do with that asset.


Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/2028-l-clippers-pick-123651898.html

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Publish date : 2026-09-04 12:36:00

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