LOS ANGELES — Around 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, as a little more than three hours remained until the NBA’s trade deadline, the Los Angeles Clippers didn’t have any trades close to happening, said Lawrence Frank, the team’s president of basketball operations.
By 7:30 p.m. on Friday, the fruits of those final hours could be seen on the home team’s bench inside Crypto.com Arena as guards Eric Gordon and Bones Hyland and center Mason Plumlee settled into seats next to their new Clippers teammates to watch an eventual 119-106 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks.
Each filled one or more of the team’s deadline objectives, Frank said, the combination of which, he believed, had advanced their ultimate priority — improving the rotation of players and diversifying the options they can use around Kawhi Leonard and Paul George in the postseason as they pursue the franchise’s first championship in a crowded Western Conference race.
