Why the Celtics succeed, and the Clippers failed, with similar team builds

The team is led by two wings. One was just named to the All-NBA First Team, and the other just won Finals MVP. Both are talents the likes of which define the NBA — shooters, defenders, initiators, cutters. They do it all. The team is a championship favorite, of course, coming into the season. The team is … the 2019-20 Los Angeles Clippers? The 2024-25 Boston Celtics? Yes, yes. Both.

The Celtics just blew out the field in 2024. They are coming off of one of the 20 most dominant seasons in NBA history. After retaining most of their team this offseason, they are huge favorites to repeat as champs this upcoming season. And the Clippers were favorites coming into the 2019-20 season. Then they spent the past five seasons doing very well, as the sixth-winningest regular season team, but not so well they came close to a championship. And the clock has struck midnight for their star duo, with Paul George now a Philadelphia 76er.

Ultimately, the Clippers’ last half decade is likely defined more by what they didn’t accomplish than what they did. They started in somewhat similar circumstances as the Celtics, with similar building blocks in a superstar wing duo. Arguably, Los Angeles’ Kawhi Leonard and George, when healthy, had higher peaks during the last five years than Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Yet the Celtics turned their duo into a championship, doing what the Clippers could not.

Why? What lessons can the rest of the league take from the two teams’ different paths from those comparable starting squares?

Purely by the numbers, the Clippers actually found more success, with their two stars on the court, than the Celtics did. At least in the regular season. The playoffs tell a different story.

The Celtics were flat-out dominant in the regular season, and they saw little dropoff in their play come the postseason. That was less true before 2024. In the four seasons leading up to their championship, Tatum and Brown together had an on-court net rating of 4.43 in the playoffs. They figured out something coming into 2024. Something the Clippers never put together.

Okay, caveat time: Health is a factor. The Clippers lost Leonard midway through the 2021 playoffs, both Leonard and George in the 2023 playoffs, and Leonard midway through the 2024 playoffs. They did play all the way through their 2020 campaign, when the Denver Nuggets stormed back from a 1-3 deficit to take the second-round series. And they have played sections of other series together. As a result, despite poor health, they have played almost 800 playoff minutes together — more than, say, LeBron James and Anthony Davis have played together. It’s a fair-sized sample. And perhaps the Clippers would have broken through and won the title if both had been healthy for more series. But there are few reasons to think so, not with a near-neutral on-court net in those almost 800 minutes, and a team-building philosophy that never cracked the code.

After years of tinkering, the 2024 Celtics put together a championship team that ameliorated the stars’ aversions and strengthened their preferences. Particularly when it comes to mid-range pull-ups — one of the favorite shots of all four wing stars.

All four are phenomenal players who bring enormous amounts to the offensive table. But with none of the four stars putting too much pressure on the rim, their respective teams needed to find players who did create layups. Who did space the floor. And who did it all without holding too much of the ball — another trait that all four share, with all four ranking in the top 20 among forwards in seconds per touch last season. (Holding the ball for long periods is a quality shared by virtually every other star around the league, to be fair.)

Those preferences have been just as pronounced in past seasons for the Clippers; Leonard hasn’t cracked average-for-his position rim frequency since 2014-15 as a Spur, and George since the year prior as a Pacer. Yet the Clippers never added a supporting cast that filled in the gaps. In fact, some of their other players who played the largest roles over the half decade mimicked the same strengths and weaknesses. Reggie Jackson, Marcus Morris, and Lou Williams ranked fifth, sixth, and 11th respectively in total minutes played since 2019-20 for Los Angeles, and all three have long been well above average in mid-range frequency, according to Cleaning the Glass. Morris and Williams ranked near the 100th percentile for their positions in many of their seasons as Clippers.

As a result the Clippers ranked 22nd in assists over the last five seasons. Until the addition of James Harden last season, Los Angeles never rostered a point guard who could imprint his own preferences onto the team’s style of play and actually create layups for others. When he played, the Clippers assisted 56.4 percent of 2-pointers, versus 51.2 percent from 2019-2024 without him. (As a point of comparison, this past season an assist rate of 56.4 percent on 2-pointers would have ranked ninth among teams, while 51.2 percent would have tied for 22nd.) And Harden had the best offensive on/offs on the Clippers last year, at plus-7.2 per 100 possessions. Among 1000-minute seasons, that would have ranked third within the Leonard-George era, behind only two Leonard seasons.

In many ways, Harden was the perfect addition for Los Angeles. But they acquired him at huge cost via trade, virtually emptying the Clippers’ already bare cupboard of picks, which was the cost of trading for George. Seriously: They don’t fully control a first-round draft pick, with theirs all traded or swapped, until 2030. Even had they opted to retain George, there were few ways to build the team around the stars. Meanwhile, and because the Celtics drafted their two leaders, Boston was able to add a variety of players with impacts comparable to Harden — shifting the team identity to ameliorate the aversions of the stars — for a fraction of the cost on the trade market.

They traded a first-round pick and Kemba Walker for Al Horford in 2021, acquiring a floor-spacing and shot-blocking big who had given them so much in a three-year stint prior. The deal also gave them cap space for the upcoming offseason, which they used in part to sign Josh Richardson — who they then flipped, along with a first-round pick and a pick swap, for Derrick White. Another floor-spacing shot blocker, this time at the guard spot.

When Jrue Holiday found himself adrift on the rebuilding Portland Trail Blazers, Boston snapped him up in exchange for two rotation players and two first-round picks. Boston also sold another role player, this time acquiring two first-rounders, in addition to … floor-spacing and shot-blocking big Kristaps Porzingis.

Sure, perhaps one of the obvious lessons here is to pay less for stars when trading for them. Or, perhaps said in a more interesting way: pay less for players who impact your team like stars. James Harden is indisputably a more talented basketball player than Derrick White. Yet White arguably changed the profile of the Celtics to a comparable extent as Harden did the Clippers.

And all four of Boston’s additions fit perfectly around the stars. Of the four, only Porzingis took an above-average proportion of his shots from the mid-range last season, according to Cleaning the Glass. All four had incredibly low isolation rates and above-average-for-their-positions 3-point rates. As a result, despite the love of the stars for mid-range pull-ups, Boston finished bottom-five last year in such shots per game. The Clippers, on the other hand, finished top-five. There’s nothing wrong with stars taking long 2-pointers. But when the entire offense is based on such shots, defenses have easier choices, shorter rotations, and more room for error. Put another way: Boston took the second-most catch-and-shoot triples in the league last year. Los Angeles was dead last.

The Celtics prioritized rotation players who are quick decision-makers. Players who only take layups and threes. Passers and drivers. Defenders. The Clippers have had a few of those players on their roster during the Leonard-George era. And in fact, they have largely been the best non-stars on the Clippers during the last five years.

A quick note: Being an enormous center, it makes sense that Ivica Zubac takes few mid-rangers and has a low usage rate. But even compared to other centers he took few mid-rangers and had a low usage rate. Furthermore, his average time of possession of 1.36 seconds per touch was the fifth-lowest among all centers last year. He has long been an excellent role player on the Clippers.

Since 2019-20, role players’ usage rate and long mid-range frequency had negative trend lines — albeit with relatively low correlation factors — when compared to win shares per 48, indicating that players who see less of the ball, and shoot less frequently from Leonard and George’s preferred area, have helped the Clippers more than the inverse. It is an ironic twist of the knife that Batum, one of the prizes of the Clippers’ team-building process, was dealt to Philadelphia in the process of adding Harden. Batum sported the lowest usage rate among those high-minute role players as well as one of the lowest mid-range frequencies. And isolations? He went it alone so infrequently that he doesn’t even reach nba dot com’s filter of minimum 10 such plays in any of his seasons as a Clipper.

The team-building approach the Clippers have taken, as opposed to that of the Celtics, has largely defined Los Angeles’ offense. Or, at least, failed to redefine it in any meaningful way beyond the preferences of the two stars. The Clippers have long been characterized by mid-range pull-up jumpers. Such shots have largely flowed out of static isolations — they led the league in isolation frequency this past season. And because so many role players exacerbated that shot profile, Los Angeles finished dead last in passes per game last year. Their anti-modern offense has been very good — any offense led by Leonard and George will be — but always facing a deficit that turned into a real barrier in the playoffs. The minutes when Leonard and George played together saw the team’s offensive rating drop from 122.6 in the regular seasons from 2019-2024 to 116.7 in those playoffs. Last year, Boston’s offensive rating in the playoffs dropped by much less, from 121.6 to 119.0.

Even if the league was once defined by the superstar wing, that stopped being true years ago. In building their championship roster, the Celtics got that memo. The Clippers did not. As a result, after having retained their entire core the Celtics are now set up to potentially defend their championship. The Clippers are set up to remember what could have been, to dream of health, and to hopefully use these lessons going forward into their next era. Whenever that does begin.