The Clippers' Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Year
Wherever you looked, 2025 was a brutal year for a striving, impatient basketball franchise made in its owner's image.
It’s hard to remember now, but this time a year ago, one might have looked at 2025 as the dawn of a Clippers decade in LA. Certainly Steve Ballmer had reason to believe his reign was near.
The richest owner in American sports had been close before. He thought he had it in 2019, when a single evening’s business transformed his aspirational eight-seed into an apparent juggernaut by pairing together Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. Instead, a pandemic hit, and it was LeBron James and the Lakers who lifted that season’s trophy. The ensuing years accrued only disappointment and load management discourse.
But one year ago yesterday LeBron turned 40, and the Lakers had not readied a successor. Anthony Davis, though eight years younger, was perennially hobbled and on virtually the same career timeline. As if to underscore how vague their notions were of their future post-James, the Lakers had spent a second-round draft pick on his son. And there was another open secret about LA’s fairer franchise: For all its cultural cache and franchise valuation, the owners did not have a lot of hard cash. The Buss family had neither the gut nor the appetite for the NBA’s severe luxury tax penalties; Ballmer, of course, possessed both. The Lakers were tenants in their arena. Ballmer had spared no expense creating his own.
Honestly, I can see the vision. Lakers: poorly managed, falling apart, no plan. Clippers: savvy, resourceful, ready to pounce. Time was on their side.
But as the year 2025 revealed to Ballmer with breathtaking clarity, this was always a misjudgment. This began in February, of course, when the Lakers pulled Luka Dončić out of a hat. In exchange for Davis and a single draft pick, they received James’ heir—a charismatic, preternaturally gifted gamer just entering his prime, a crown jewel to sell out arenas for years to come. Amid league-wide recriminations around the trade, Ballmer’s Clippers were less than an afterthought, but more than anyone — even the Mavericks got a couple pathetic assets back in the trade — they were its biggest loser. As for the Buss family’s cash/competency problem, it was solved a few months later, when one of the owners of the Dodgers — the winning, money-printing sports franchise nonpareil — added the Lakers to his portfolio.
Is that all? That is not all, because Luka did not win Most Valuable Player last season, and the Lakers did not win the 2025 NBA Finals. Those prizes belonged to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the cool-headed prodigy Ballmer’s Clippers cast off on that fateful 2019 day. The title-hungry Oklahoma City Thunder were assembled through that trade; their second-best performer in the Finals, Jalen Williams, was one of the five first-round picks (plus two swaps) the Clippers conveyed in the Paul George trade. The only reason the outcome of that trade hasn’t been settled yet is because one side is still running up the score: The Clippers (11-21 as of this writing) owe the Thunder (29-5) their 2026 pick, too.
(On that note: The Lakers, whose second-year head coach is a Clipper legend, are 20-11. The Clippers have had an ex-Laker at the helm for six years, in which they have a 16-21 playoff record and have made one conference finals.)
The awful stench emanating from the Clippers’ transactions page might be addressed through changes to the front office. Unfortunately for Ballmer, circumstances that developed this summer seem to have ruled out the possibility of replacing Lawrence Frank, the team’s president of basketball ops since 2017 and the guy who made the doomed Gilgeous-Alexander trade. An investigative journalist found that a company with deep financial ties to Ballmer had paid Leonard — the franchise linchpin — tens of millions in cash and stock for a no-show endorsement deal; several of the now-defunct company’s employees said it was understood internally to be a salary cap circumvention ploy. Yet as the team he assembled sank to the bottom of the Western Conference, Frank signed a contract extension a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the only person to lose his job in this dismal stretch of basketball has been Chris Paul, the best player to ever wear a Clipper uniform.
Deepening the irony of Ballmer’s flailing basketball endeavor is the basically unparalleled financial success he has had in the past year. Much of his wealth is pegged to Microsoft stock, which has had quite a run thanks to the company’s 27% stake in OpenAI. In 2024 Ballmer’s net worth surged past $100 billion according to Forbes; today some sources put it closer to twice that much. And yet all that dough has purchased Ballmer in an NBA context is a yearlong humbling and — if he’s paying close enough attention — a lesson in franchise building.
Because while the failure of his strategy was laid bare in 2025, it was set in motion the day they traded away the rookie point guard who nicked a couple playoff games from the Kevin Durant-led Golden State Warriors. What Angelenos have missed without Gilgeous-Alexander in town was the lifeblood of lasting fandom — not the championship run or the MVP but the joy and, yes, the seasons of losing, that comes with watching a precocious youngster (or a few) try to figure it out. What Ballmer has instead are empty rows in his gleaming arena’s lower bowl, losing for another man’s draft pick, and a courtside seat to his biggest rival’s rejuvenation. There’s always next year.
