The Los Angeles Clippers have built a team of stars past their primes, although their roster is expected to find more success than the aging Golden State Warriors for one key reason.
This offseason, the Los Angeles Clippers re-tooled the roster, adding aging stars Bradley Beal, Brook Lopez, and Chris Paul to an already-experienced roster.
After taking the Denver Nuggets to seven games in the first round of the playoffs, LA showed that the core of James Harden and Kawhi Leonard can compete, and the addition of win-now players to the roster has boosted their title odds.
While the Clippers have come under fire for being a “nursing home” team, their in-state rivals, the Golden State Warriors, are in a similar position, although they are not being taken as seriously.
Next season, the Clippers will be led by Beal, Leonard, Harden, Lopez, Paul, Ivica Zubac, John Collins, and Bogdan Bogdanovic. The youngest player in that group is Collins, who is 27.
The Warriors, on the other hand, will rely heavily on Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler, and Draymond Green, all of whom are 35 or older. Simply put, the Clippers have depth, the Warriors do not.
“Jimmy Butler regularly misses a bunch of games, and Steph is now 38 and has fairly regularly missed games,” outlined ESPN’s Tim Bontemps. “If those two guys are healthy, they’ve got a pretty high ceiling. The Clippers are just way deeper. The Clippers go 10 deep. The Warriors are extraordinarily top-heavy, and their top-heavy team is very old and injury-prone.”
On top of the depth, the Clippers have one of the best medical staffs in the league and should be able to withstand more injuries than most teams, which the Warriors simply can’t afford to do.
The Warriors currently have only nine players on payroll, and their only true center is Quinten Post. Their wing rotation of Butler, Buddy Hield, and Moses Moody is not very deep, either.
Meanwhile, the Clippers have two true centers in Zubac and Lopez, two true point guards in Paul and Harden, and wings to spare with Leonard, Beal, Collins, Bogdanovic, Kris Dunn, Nicolas Batum, and Derrick Jones Jr. Even if one of their best players goes down, they have more than one serviceable backup to keep the team afloat.
While Curry and Butler are arguably better than any single Clippers’ player, Los Angeles is built to withstand the bruises and bumps of the regular season.
If either Curry or Butler, or even Green misses significant time, the Warriors are in danger of missing the playoffs entirely in a loaded Western Conference.
