With a considerable shot to land one or two max-level players this summer, the LA Clippers have increasingly good odds to win the 2020 NBA Finals.
The 2019-2020 NBA season still seems a long way off, especially since the current one still hasn’t come to a close. But with the LA Clippers out of the playoffs and free agency roughly one month away (and the NBA Draft even sooner than that), it’s hard to keep from looking ahead.
All signs are pointing to the Clippers having a huge summer. Depending on how they play their cards, the team could have over $50 million in cap to work with, giving them the capacity to sign two max-level players. To go along with that, they’ve painted themselves as one of the go-to free agent destinations in the league, vaulting themselves ahead of teams like the Los Angeles Lakers in the process.
That kind of thing doesn’t just happen overnight, and the Clippers have been working for years to get to there by constructing a star-studded front office. Fronted by Lawrence Frank, Michael Winger and Jerry West, LA appears fully prepared to make a franchise-changing run at the likes of Kevin Durant and Kawhi Leonard this summer. If all goes according to plan, the Clippers will be closer to winning a title than ever before.
The league has already taken notice of what’s brewing in Los Angeles, and that optimism seems to have stretched to bettors as well — per The Action Network, the Clippers’ 2020 title odds have recently jumped from 16-1 to 7-1, giving them the third-best odds to win next season. Only the Golden State Warriors (2-1) and Milwaukee Bucks (6-1) have better odds.
A lot of this has to do with rumors about Leonard coming to Los Angeles in the summer, and the Clippers’ potential to pair him with the star of his choosing. And while that still seems like an unlikely event, it hasn’t kept people from siding with LA for next season.
So what does this mean? Honestly, not so much.
Those odds are based almost entirely on the Clippers’ chances to sign a superstar free agent or two this summer. If they fail to do that, their 7-1 odds will, expectedly, plummet.
More importantly, just because the Clippers’ title odds are rising does not necessarily mean their chances to sign Leonard or Durant are doing the same. There’s nothing definitive about either one of their futures at the moment, and any sort of information about where one of them will sign this summer is purely speculation.
Still, though, it’s a nice change of pace to see the LA Clippers near the top of one of these lists, and to know that it isn’t just us fans that are optimistic about this summer.