The Clippers Keep Adding Bodies. Nobody Has Answered the Real Question.

Johni Broome arrived this week for cash considerations, a transaction so minor it barely registers as news. Rui Hachimura is here on a two-year deal. The front office is moving, filling slots, checking boxes. And yet the offseason addition that matters most isn't anyone they've signed — it's the extra two or three shot attempts per game that James Harden is about to inherit whether he wants them or not.

I've written about this twice already, and the number keeps demanding another look. In the final ten games of last season, Harden's shot volume climbed from 16.7 attempts per game to 19.4. His field-goal percentage fell from 43.7% to 36.1%. That's not a slump; that's a system telling you something. The offense leaned harder on him, and he bent under the weight. What makes this uncomfortable heading into 2026–27 is that the Leonard trade doesn't add volume to Harden's plate gradually — it dumps the whole thing on at once.

Kawhi Leonard was averaging 27.3 points per game on 50.4% shooting. That's not just production; that's the kind of half-court gravity that creates clean looks for everyone else on the floor. When a defense has to account for a scorer that efficient, it opens driving lanes, softens closeouts, and generally makes life easier for a ball-handler like Harden. With Leonard in Toronto — pending however the league's investigation resolves — that gravity disappears, and Harden becomes the primary threat defenses will scheme around every possession.

Brandon Ingram changes some of this calculus, and the optimistic case for the new-look Clippers leans heavily on his ability to draw defensive attention and create offense in the mid-range. But Ingram has never been Leonard. And the rest of the supporting cast, however solid — John Collins shooting efficiently, Ivica Zubac anchoring the interior, Derrick Jones Jr. providing energy off the wing — doesn't include anyone capable of manufacturing their own shot against a locked-in defense the way Leonard could. The Clippers finished last season at 42–41 with a positive scoring differential. That margin was built with Leonard on the floor for nearly 32 minutes a night. The math of replacing him with depth signings and a frozen trade doesn't close cleanly.

My read is that the Clippers' front office understands this, and the Broome acquisition and Hachimura signing are genuine attempts to surround Harden with enough secondary scoring that his usage doesn't spike into unsustainable territory. That's the right instinct. The problem is that instinct and a late-season efficiency collapse are now on a collision course, and the roster additions so far don't feel proportionate to the size of the problem. Adding role players to a team that just lost its best player isn't a solution — it's a way of hoping the problem doesn't show up until November. Based on what the final ten games of last season already told us, it will.