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The Clippers’ Place in the Western Conference Near the Midpoint of the 2025 Season
We are not quite halfway through the 2025 NBA season, but we
sure are close, with most teams having played around 37-38 games (the Magic are
somehow at 40) out of the usual 82 total. With the Clippers’ game today being
postponed due to the fires in Los Angeles (hope all of you LA-based readers are
making it through ok and staying safe), it felt like a good time to check in on
the Western Conference and where the Clippers fit in.
Readers of my annual NBA Division previews will remember I had the Clippers tied for 10th in the West (with the Rockets) in my preseason predictions. I did other predictions on Twitter and had the Clippers anywhere from 10th to 12th varying on the Kawhi injury news. In short, I thought the Clippers would be towards the tail end of the play-in, or just out of the play-in entirely – but a competitive team that would not be towards the very bottom of the conference.
Up until a couple of weeks ago, the Clippers were on the path to proving me very wrong indeed. At some points they were as high as the 4th seed in the West, and were in the 5th-6th range for much of the first two months of the season without any games played from Kawhi Leonard. The Warriors fizzled after a hot start, the Timberwolves were disappointing, and the Kings were so dysfunctional that they fired head coach Mike Brown, who they just signed to an extension this past summer. Meanwhile, the Suns benched $50M man Bradley Beal along with starting center Jusuf Nurkic and have been embroiled in trade rumors for weeks. The Grizzlies and Mavericks have been good but decimated by injuries. It seemed like the perfect Western Conference for the steady, competent, defense-first Clippers to thrive in.
Unfortunately, the Clippers have stumbled in recent weeks (1-4 in their last five games) while the Wolves and Kings have surged, and the Suns and Warriors have stabilized a bit. Despite all their injuries, the Mavs and Grizzlies are also hanging in as top seeds. The West thus remains highly competitive and tightly contested as we near the half-way point of the season. The Grizzlies, the 3rd seed at 24-14, are just six games ahead of the 17-19 Suns all the way down in 12th. If you trim off the Grizzlies and go to the 4th place Nuggets at 22-15, it’s even closer, with just 4.5 games separating nine teams. The Clippers sit squarely in the middle of the pack, tied for 7th with a 20-17 record.
Qualitatively, the Clippers to this point are relatively in line with where they should be. That is, their Net Rating of 0.9 is good for 14th in the NBA and 8th in the West, or about accurate for their standings and win totals. Thus, it’s reasonable to assume they’ll remain at around a slightly above .500 pace the rest of the season – though a healthy Kawhi Leonard could change that. And, ultimately, Kawhi is maybe the hardest player in the NBA to give a prediction on right now. He’s only played twice so far, and looked nowhere close to “2024 regular season Kawhi” in those games. How long will it take Kawhi to get off a minutes restriction, if he can even stay healthy the rest of the year? Is he ever able to get back to that level he was at last season? Both are unanswerable questions. A good median outcome, that he’s a very good player at around 28-32 minutes per game for the last 30 games of the season, would help the Clippers immensely – but they’ve also had good injury luck outside of Kawhi, and that’s not guaranteed to stick the rest of the year.
Leaving injuries and Kawhi aside, there are a few final wrinkles. The first is that the Clippers have had one of the hardest schedules in the NBA to this point. Their home and road splits are relatively even, but they have already played the Thunder, Rockets, and Nuggets several times and not gone up against a number of the NBA’s bottom feeders. Because of that, power rankings such as ESPN’s BPI that factor in strength of schedule have the Clippers as being better than their record of raw net rating. Similarly, Tankathon’s strength of schedule remaining (based purely on opponent win percentage) has the Clippers at 21st. Therefore, optimists can say that the Clippers should outperform what they’ve done in the first part of the season based on an easier second-half schedule. Finally, multiple teams either behind or close to them in the standings (the Lakers and to a lesser extent the Spurs) have far outperformed their Net Rating, indicating they will slow down as the season goes along.
Let’s start at the top and bottom of the West and then work our way into the middle. The Pelicans and Jazz are certainly finishing below the Clippers. The Blazers are technically only seven games back, but it’s hard to imagine the Clippers sliding below Portland. That gives the Clippers a floor of the 12th seed. The Thunder are secure at the first seed, and while the Clippers are only five games behind the Rockets and 3.5 behind the Grizzlies, it’s difficult to see them climbing above those squads (or all of the other four teams in their way) to get to a top three seed. That gives the Clippers a fair ceiling of the 4th seed.
There are four other teams below the Clippers right now: the Warriors, Kings, Spurs, and Suns. The Suns have the highest pedigree of those teams but are lowest in Net Rating and have few avenues to improve their roster barring a Jimmy Butler miracle trade. The Spurs are only a couple games back of the Clippers but also possess a negative Net Rating and do not have a strong incentive to be good this year, at least compared to more veteran teams with higher expectations. The Warriors are fine but seem just as mediocre as last year – and shockingly committed to such mediocrity. The Kings, somewhat surprisingly, are the most dangerous of these teams, with a 3.0 Net Rating far better than their .500 record and a recent surge that has won them six games in a row. If I were betting on any of these teams passing the Clippers, it would be the Kings. Ultimately, I’d guess the Spurs slide to 12th and the Suns or Warriors end in 11th.
There are four other teams above the Clippers: the Nuggets, Mavericks, Lakers, and Wolves. The Nuggets have roster issues, but as long as they have Nikola Jokic in his prime, they will be a very good regular season team. I’d pencil them above the Clippers. The Mavericks are dealing with injuries to Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving, and where they fall really depends on when those guys get back. When they are healthy, they have been on a different level than the Clips, so I’ll keep them above for now. The Wolves’ Net Rating is slightly better than the Clippers, and they’re a team that has more avenues for win-now trades if they choose. However, the Wolves have had truly insane injury luck: all seven of their top players have appeared in all 37 of their games, and Mike Conley has missed just four. If their injury luck runs out, they are a prime candidate to drop in the standings. Finally, the Lakers have a lackluster -2.4 Net Rating but somehow possess a 20-16 record. Considering the Lakers’ own injury luck (LeBron has missed three games, Anthony Davis two, and Austin Reaves five), they are another candidate to slip.
At the end of the day, if you want to cast a really wide net, the Clippers could reasonably finish anywhere from 4th to 12th. After doing more of a thorough review, I’d say their likely outcomes are more in the 6th to 10th range – play-in territory. Considering how much of the season Kawhi Leonard has missed, that’s not bad! Above all else, Clippers’ fans wanted a competitive, fun team that would be at least somewhat in the mix, and I think that’s what they will end up with. If Kawhi can get healthy, stay healthy, and raise his play to somewhere even close to where it was last year, those expectations could shift up. But I can’t get there quite yet.
The Clippers’ Place in the Western Conference Near the Midpoint of the 2025 Season
Robert Flom