Almost every projection has Los Angeles near the bottom of the West, and almost every projection is built on a trade that has not actually happened yet.
Nobody is picking the Clippers for anything this year.
Bleacher Report has them finishing 24-58, while ClutchPoints went the other way and predicted they clear 45 wins and grab a play-in spot.
That is a gap of about 15 wins between the market and the most optimistic forecast, which is a strange amount of disagreement for a team in the middle of August.
The reason is simple enough, because every one of those forecasts had to guess at a roster that does not exist yet.
The Roster
Kawhi Leonard is still a Clipper.
The agreed trade that would send him to Toronto for Brandon Ingram and Gradey Dick has been on hold since July 9 while the NBA finishes its investigation, and Leonard is still counted on the Los Angeles roster because of it.
He averaged 27.9 points in 65 games last season, the best scoring year of his career, so every projection that treats this club as a lottery team is assuming he is gone.
If the deal collapses or drags past camp, the entire premise of those numbers goes with it, and what the trade looks like from here is still nobody's guess.
The Supporting Cast
This team went 42-40 last season and reached the play-in after starting 6-21, which gets skipped over in every preview.
Darius Garland came over at the deadline and averaged 18.8 points and 6.7 assists across 45 games between his two teams last season, and he now gets a full year running this offense.
"Coming to a system where I can actually be me. Have the ball in my hand for the majority of the game and actually have control of the pace of the game," Garland said on the Ball in the Family Podcast in June.
Bradley Beal is back on a two-year deal worth 13.2 million dollars after playing six games last season while rehabbing a hip injury.
Rui Hachimura signed a two-year contract in July, Derrick Jones Jr. and Kris Dunn are still here for defense, and on Wednesday the Clippers added Max Strus in a multi-team trade.
Strus is a career 37 percent shooter from three across 321 games and reunites with Garland, who was his point guard in Cleveland, though he played only 12 games last season while coming back from a foot injury.
Where the Real Upside Sits
Shooting was the hole and the front office kept filling it, which is not what a team does when it plans to lose 58 games.
Tyronn Lue has never coached a bad defensive team when he had the pieces, and Jones, Dunn and Hachimura give him size and effort on the wing.
The last open question is Bennedict Mathurin, who is still a restricted free agent and could still come back with room under the first apron to pay him.
Add Mathurin to Garland, Beal, Hachimura and Strus, and this becomes a deep, experienced, shooting-heavy group.
Thirty is too low.
The healthy version of this roster is deeper than the one that won 42 games and reached the play-in last season, and nobody is accounting for that yet.
