The LA Clippers had a very unorthodox draft night from the start.
NBA 2020 (Virtual) Draft Night has now come and gone, and the LA Clippers did not make it easy for any media outlets. From multiple trades to a complete flip of their draftee, it was a wild night for anyone involved.
The easiest way to look at this crazy draft is to look at the events before doing any kind of analysis. LA Clippers weren’t supposed to have any draft activity up until the 57th pick of the night, but the front office usually likes to throw everyone for a loop despite what is supposed to happen.
Many very different new faces were heading to LA throughout the night.
The Clippers started the night with a three-team deal including Brooklyn and Detroit that netted them the 19th overall pick in exchange for Landry Shamet and Rodney McGruder. They ended up trading away the pick for Pistons shooting guard Luke Kennard.
After that, the Clippers swung another deal to pick up the 33rd overall pick in Daniel Oturu from the New York Knicks in exchange for a 2023 2nd rounder, as reported by the New York Post. Once it came to the initial pick they had, LA made their last move by swapping the 57th pick to Brooklyn to get their 55th pick, Jay Scrubb.
With that, the biggest moves of the 2020 NBA Draft for LA were finally complete. There were a lot of conflicting reports throughout the draft, and even the official NBA website still has Reggie Perry marked down as the Clippers’ pick. Still, we now know for sure that the biggest additions for LA were Kennard, Oturu, and Scrubb, while the biggest losses were Shamet and McGruder. A big thanks to Tomer Azarly and Adrian Wojnarowski on Twitter for all of this final information, they hung in there and got all the right info out.
There is a lot to talk about with these three new Clippers players, and since we have to start somewhere, let’s discuss the interesting addition of Kennard from Detroit.