It was brilliant of the LA Clippers to extend Terance Mann, especially at the price they did it.
The Clippers have nailed some of these extensions lately. They locked in Paul George up through the 2024-2025, and re-signed Kawhi Leonard this offseason through 2023-2024 with a player option for the 2024-2025 season. Now we have Mann through 2024-2025, and are going to keep building this roster to contend by the time all three will be stars and on the court together.
This Clipper roster is a great group to keep together, and the front office needs to make sure that happens. A few future extensions should hopefully be on the way for this squad.
Reggie Jackson, Marcus Morris Sr., and Ivica Zubac might be due for extensions with the LA Clippers in the near future.
After the Terance Mann extension, it’s clear that the LA Clippers are buying into the bright future of this core. They wanted these three major pieces with this team through the 2024-2025 season, and have them under contract until then (pending Kawhi’s player option in the 2024 offseason). The front office should continue to lock the other massive parts of this roster in through that time.
Reggie Jackson should be one of those players that should be looked at an extension due to how influential he was to the team this past year in the postseason. We saw how clutch and influential he can be for this squad, and should be here for the long haul.
He can play multiple positions, and has a lot of great veteran experience in this league. Always productive in the postseason, Jackson has shot 46.9% from the field, 39.2% from deep, and 88.8% from the line in the playoffs. He’s the type of player a team can count on when it matters most, and an extension through that golden 2024-2025 season should be in discussion.
The same can be said for Marcus Morris Sr., who has progressed into an important role player on whatever team he’s on. Morris is a player that every championship contender can use.
Since the 2015-2016 season, he’s averaged 14.3 points per game and 5.1 rebounds per game. He’s shot 43.8% from the field and 38.5% from deep since that time, and this year ended up finishing with the second-highest three-point percentage in basketball (47.3%).
Every team can use numbers from a player like that who has also become one of the better defensive players in the league and can take on No. 1 options on opposing teams. He did that this year, and has been a guy who has not shied away from those matchups for a long time now.
In addition to playing on the wing, he also can play the four. He’s a role player who can fit on the court in three different spots, can guard anyone, and has a wide skillset. If we can lock him in with the other three extended players, we should look into it.
Lastly is Ivica Zubac, who should be in the running for an extension because he does what the rest of the Clippers don’t do. He rebounds the basketball. The Clippers were in the bottom half of the league in rebounds per game last year, and they need to put an emphasis on rebounding moving forward.
Zubac is the one capable of holding it down. Even when he had to battle Deandre Ayton by himself in the WCF last year with Serge Ibaka out, he crashed the boards. He collected 41 rebounds in Games 2 through 4 of that round, which hopefully caught management’s eye.
He led the team in rebounds per game last season (7.2), and played in every single game for the Clips. He is one of the few Clippers who can be trusted to rebound, and he’s still very young at 24 years old. We have a club option to keep Zubac around next year, but we also need to keep him around for longer.
I’m not saying that the Clippers have to extend these guys through 2024-2025 today. However, these are extensions we need to think about with our team already building to contend through that season.