The Clippers basically did a sign and trade, just took a little time to get the trade part down.
I guess that is better than just losing him in free agency. Owner Steve Ballmer explains why they made the trade.
“[Griffin] is obviously a superstar player,” said Ballmer. “But if you look at what happened injury-wise, if you look at the kind of chemistry we were getting on our team, the thing you can see at the high level with the numbers when I started — one guy got all the assists, one guy got all the points and one guy got all the rebounds. It’s not all quite that way, but I think in the modern NBA, we were seeing it more and more — there’s a greater distribution of responsibility.”
It wasn’t that long ago the Clippers were telling Blake he was MLK and they were going to hang his numbers in rafters.