‘Tis the season: ‘Lob City’ Edition

What a magical time of year it is!

FREE AGENCY.

Instead of traditional presents and snowflakes (depending on where you live), the greatest gifts one can receive are hearing things like ‘opt-out’, ‘trade’ or how ludicrous the New York Knicks are.

This past week, we received all three – what a free agency miracle!

In this article we will be focusing on the opt-outs of Blake Griffin and Chris Paul and how it will affect the Clippers and the league.

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On Friday, June 23, both Chris Paul and Blake Griffin opted-out of there contract making them free agents. The result leaves the Clippers in daze, while adding to the free agency buzz.

This puts the organization in a unique position as with duo, the Clippers have play-off potential, but are not contenders. Keeping the core intact allows the team to look for valuable role-players that can make an impact such as Otto Porter, Caldwell-Pope or Rudy Gay. Both Paul and Griffin were also sidelined for 21 games this past season leaving room for improvement. Additionally, you can’t forget about the seven-foot giant in DeAndre Jordan that continues to improve, averaging a career high in points and field goal efficiency while remaining healthy.

Let’s say both Griffin and Paul leave this off-season, this would put the Clippers in a position of potentially missing the playoffs, especially with Minnesota becoming a powerhouse. The team would then be forced to rebuild and trade other key assets to acquire young talent and draft picks to begin the process. However, this may not be necessary. With Griffin and Paul entering free agency, this gives the Clippers an additional 45 million in cap space. This extra cap space paired with a high caliber pool of free agents and Jerry West now in the front office, may allow the Clippers to remain in contention.

With these two new free agents, we may see some new ‘superteams’ emerge (a continued imbalance in competition), a topic that I refuse to indulge in.

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Griffin and Paul may take their time on making a decision until Jerry West can present a plan that proves contention but I don’t have time to wait…

I wonder what the coming week will bring.