LA Clippers: Ranking the last 10 first-round picks

Blake Griffin

Who else could it have been? There is no one in the last 10 years that could come close to what Blake Griffin has done(aside from Paul, but he was traded here). The LA Clippers franchise changed when they drafted him first overall in 2009.

After waiting one whole season for him to recover from an injury, Griffin did not play around. Just his rookie season is better than any of the previous players have had. I think everyone knows what type of rookie season he had, one that Sports Illustrated, call him one of the 15 greatest rookies of all time.

Griffin had a long career as a Clipper. He played a total of 8 seasons and appeared in 504 games. In those games, he averaged 21.6 points, 9.3 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 1.0 steals on 56.1 true shooting percentage. As a result, he is very high up in leaderboards across many statistics for the Clippers’ franchise, which includes:

• Second in points
• Third in rebounds
• fifth in assists
• Sixth in steals
• Third in minutes
• Fourth in win shares

You can probably combine everything the past nine players on this list have done and I am sure it will not match this. But his individual stats are not the only thing Griffin had brought to the table.

He has been hugely responsible for the amount of team success the Clippers had. All those playoff appearances and playoff wins were possible because the Clippers drafted Griffin.

However, as it was with every single player on this list, the Clippers traded Griffin as soon as they signed him to one of the biggest contracts of all time. In 2018, Griffin was sent to the Pistons, as the Clippers decided to blow it all up.

So, here is the ranking of the last 10 first-round picks the Clippers had selected. It is clear from the type of players that made the list that the Clippers have not been good at finding talent, especially at the far end of the round. And when they do select a player that could develop into a star, what do they do? They trade them. The only player on this last that panned out in the long-term is Blake Griffin.