Kawhi Leonard, Clippers punishment Might Be Bad News For Boston Celtics Draft Pick

The NBA dropped the hammer on the LA Clippers for circumventing the cap and arranging inappropriate payments to Kawhi Leonard. In a press release, the NBA announced the following punishments:

The Clippers forfeit five first-round draft picks, one in each of the 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032, and 2033 NBA Drafts.
The Clippers are fined $30 million.
Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is suspended from all league and team activities for one year.
Clippers President of Business Operations Gillian Zucker is suspended without pay for one year.
Clippers President of Basketball Operations Lawrence Frank is suspended without pay for six months.
The Clippers organization and personnel are subject to a compliance and monitoring program overseen by the league office for a period of five years.
Leonard is required to pay the league $700,000.
Dennis Robertson (Leonard’s uncle and then business manager) is banned from conducting business or otherwise engaging with NBA teams and their affiliates on behalf of or with respect to any player, employee, or other league or team personnel for five years.

Docking a team first round pick for five consecutive years is effectively a death sentence from the NBA. They have the Stepien Rule in place to prevent teams from trading their picks away in consecutive years specifically because of how damaging that would be to a team. So the league’s punishment, though subject to an appeal, is about as harsh as it gets.

On the surface, all of this might seem to make the 2028 pick the Boston Celtics could potentially get from the Clippers even more valuable. The Celtics own a draft asset of theirs, the team is in a bad way, ergo ipso facto the draft asset is more valuable.

However …

The penalties start in 2029 and continue for five-straight seasons, so there isn’t time for the penalties to impact the pick heading to Boston. The pick is top 16 protected, so it becomes Boston’s outright if it falls outside of the lottery. To vastly oversimplify the conditions, which also involve Philadelphia and San Antonio, if the Clippers pick becomes a lottery pick, the Celtics can swap picks.

The odds of it falling outside the lottery are low, so it will probably end up as a swap. And because the Celtics will probably still be good in 2028, they’ll want to swap picks. But because of the lottery reform, swapping with a bad team isn’t quite as beneficial as it used to be.

The Clippers 2027 draft pick is caught up in swap rights too, so they’ll likely end up with Toronto’s or Oklahoma City’s first-rounder. Neither of those will be very good. The 2028 pick is probably heading to Boston. And then all of their own draft picks for the next five seasons are being taken away. They have some incoming picks, but they won’t control their own draft pick again until 2034.

Ouch. Now lottery reform becomes an issue for Boston.

In an effort to prevent tanking, the bottom three teams have lower odds, giving teams that land between 4th and 10th-worst the best odds of winning the lottery. There's a chance the worst team in the league gets the 12th overall pick.

Without incentive to avoid the bottom, the Clippers motivation will change. They can be as bad as they want to be and it doesn’t matter if they get screwed in the lottery. In fact, they might enjoy sticking it to the rest of the league after this.

This 2026-27 season might just be a free-for-all of trades trying to reacquire draft assets. Anyone with any value … Max Strus, Rui Hachimura, Darius Garland … anyone that any team would want, will likely be available for whatever salary dumps and draft picks. The Clippers will become the NBA’s dumping ground, taking all the picks they can to park bad contracts for a couple of seasons. Who cares if they win 10 games in 2028?

The Clippers have no choice but to play the cap space game and try to rebuild through free agents and other teams’ picks. They’ll live in the bottom three for a few years if they have to in order to climb out of this hole.

They might try to reacquire the pick from the Celtics, but none of who they have to offer is worth much to Boston.

It’s entirely possible the Clippers could bottom out and still land the number one overall pick. As long as they don’t do that in 2027 (teams are no longer allowed to win the lottery two years in a row), the Celtics will gladly celebrate their win. So we can’t rule out this pick becoming massively valuable to Boston.

At the same time, the odds aren’t in their favor. The 2028 pick could very easily slide all the way down to 10, 11, or 12, which is still good, but not what the Celtics were hoping for.

It’s still way too early to say for sure how this impacts that pick, but the way things look initially, it seems like its value could go down before it goes up.

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