The NBA's ruling wiped out five first-round picks, and the front office now has to build its draft plans around swaps and picks that belong to other teams.
Draft night just became the emptiest night of the year for the Los Angeles Clippers front office.
The league ended its investigation into the team's dealings with Kawhi Leonard on Wednesday, and the ruling took five first-round picks, one in every draft from 2029 through 2033, along with a $30 million fine and suspensions for owner Steve Ballmer, president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank and team president Gillian Zucker.
Commissioner Adam Silver said "The severity of the penalties reflects the seriousness of the violations."
The league found the team helped arrange endorsement deals for Leonard with four companies, including Aspiration Partners, and paid personal expenses, a case it walked through when announcing the full list of penalties on Wednesday.
The Pick-by-Pick Situation
Almost every pick still on the ledger comes with a catch.
The 2027 first is tangled in swap rights, with Oklahoma City holding a swap from the Paul George trade and Toronto adding another in the pending Leonard deal.
The 2028 first goes to Philadelphia outright from the James Harden trade.
In 2029 the Clippers held two firsts, their own tied to a top-three protected swap with the 76ers and an unprotected pick from Indiana, and the penalty erases the Indiana pick, not the swap.
The 2030 and 2032 drafts bring nothing at all.
Their own firsts in 2031 and 2033 are gone too, replaced by Toronto's unprotected picks in those years once the Leonard trade closes, and the first draft where the team fully controls its own first-round pick is 2034.
The second round is thin as well, with just two picks over the next four drafts, one from Dallas in 2028 and one from Toronto in 2030.
Cap analyst Yossi Gozlan counted nine first-round picks shrinking to four over the next seven drafts, and he noted the team may have none it can legally trade, depending on how the league treats forfeited picks.
What Draft Night Looks Like Now
The one piece still moving is the Leonard trade, which would send him to Toronto for Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, the two firsts, two second-round picks and the 2027 swap.
It was agreed to on June 30 and frozen in July, and Shams Charania reported the expectation is that it gets finalized within days.
Leonard, who was fined $700,000 himself and averaged 27.9 points in 65 games last season, put out a statement this week accepting responsibility for lapses in judgment by people in his circle.
The front office is fighting back, at least on paper, and it answered the league with a statement calling the investigation biased and promising to challenge the outcome.
None of that helps on the court, because this group went 42-40 and finished ninth in the Western Conference last season, and a team in that spot usually leans on the draft to climb.
With almost nothing left to deal, every hole gets patched in free agency or with the players already in the building.
The fine gets paid and the suspensions run out, but the picks are the part that stings, because a front office that spent years trading its future for stars has to ride this roster as it is until 2034.
