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Question for all the rookies: what players do you model your game after, and what players do you think you are similar to in terms of play styles on both ends? Dylan Harper: All the big guards that resemble the same size as me. I'd say Shai, Cade Cunningham, James Harden, Luka Dončić. We are all around the same height. Just how they control the game, the pace. How they can score and a little bit of everything. On advice I have for a lefty is to work on your right hand too, because a lot of teams are going to force you to go right, even though you're a lefty.
Bradley Beal's goal is re-sign with Clippers on long-term deal next summer
Bradley Beal just joined the Clippers, but he’d already like to stay beyond this upcoming season. Beal recently agreed to a buyout with the Suns and agreed to a two-year deal worth $11 million with the Clippers that includes a player option after the first year. Beal’s agent Mark Bartelstein told Front Office Sports Today that the goal is to opt out and then agree to a longer deal with the Clippers. “Brad did not want to go anywhere where he would be a one-year rental or he would go somewhere where they’re getting a massive talent grab for a year, try to help them win a championship and then move on to somewhere else,” Bartelstein said on FOST. “Brad doesn’t like change. It’s one of the reasons why he stayed in Washington so long. So the goal of this is to go to LA, have an awesome season and then re-sign a long-term deal with the Clippers [next] summer.”
The Clippers recently re-signed James Harden and added Brook Lopez and John Collins to go with Kawhi Leonard. The team won 50 games this past season despite having Leonard play in just 37 of them and lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Nuggets in seven games. “We just thought the Clippers presented an opportunity for Brad to really be the best version of himself, to get back to being exactly who he is, which is a multiple time All-Star and All-NBA player,” Bartelstein said. Beal made three All-Star teams and an All-NBA team in his 11 years in Washington.
Law Murray: Bradley Beal has already updated his profile #onhere to show he is a Clipper pic.x.com/Ix9EKZIlbS
Bradley Beal has already updated his profile #onhere to show he is a Clipper pic.twitter.com/Ix9EKZIlbS
— Law Murray 🎡 (@LawMurrayTheNU) July 17, 2025
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Brad is one of the most selfless players that I’ve ever been around,” Bartelstein told Sportskeeda. “Brad is going to do whatever it takes to win. But the point of the matter is this guy is a very, very special player. He’s a very special talent. You can’t average 30 points in this league twice at the efficiency level that he did it at without being one of the very, very best there is. He is always going to play the right way. He’s always going to be selfless. But if you have Brad Beal on your team, you have to let him be Brad Beal. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense and you’re not getting the best version of him.”
Last one for you here — you mentioned ball handling. Is CP3 on the way? Does this move set up the next one with him coming? I really can’t corroborate that right now. It just doesn’t make sense. Law Murray: I was told that Bogdan Bogdanović is expected to be with this team. And also, this team would be comfortable with Kris Dunn being your nominal backup point guard — if you want to call it that. Chris didn’t play that role often last year. He started a ton of games. He was basically in the starting five, but he wasn’t playing a lot of point guard. He was the secondary guy to James. I refer to Kris Dunn as a small forward often because of his defensive role and his relative off-ball role. He was a secondary playmaker.
Clippers not that into Chris Paul?
Lay Murray: “We’ll see what happens with Jordan Miller. And so, if you sign Chris [Paul], that would make 14 with an open roster spot — not including Miller. And yeah, like, Chris Paul — the obvious is that he’s a franchise legend. He takes care of the basketball, he shoots, he can make plays defensively — all that. That’s the obvious. The other side is, the Clippers… it’s not like they’re saying, ‘Oh, we’re totally not doing this.’ It’s just — they point out that Chris is… Chris is small, man. Like, he’s small. He’s old. That doesn’t go with who else is here. Like, where are the minutes going to come from? We gotta see. But that’s not something that — let’s just put it this way — I’m probably going to update the graphic in the next 48 hours… I’m not going to have any spots for Chris Paul on it. So yeah, I’d put that on the doubtful side of 50/50.”
More than 20 teams expressed interest in Bradley Beal
Soon after, the Suns gave Beal and Bartelstein permission to speak to other teams about joining them via buyout, the best signal yet that the Beal era in Phoenix was ending. More than 20 teams showed interest, sources said. Eventually Beal met, via Zoom, with half a dozen teams about how he might fit with them.
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The Clippers were one of the teams that had already shown interest in Beal and were on his short list. When the Powell deal happened, talks accelerated, sources said. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and head coach Ty Lue, who as a native of Mexico, Missouri, has a long relationship with St. Louis native Beal, spoke to Beal about what the Clippers could offer. But the key voice came from James Harden, who lobbied the Clippers' front office to chase Beal and then reached out to him directly to make the sale, sources said.
Oh No He Didn't: Shams: "The one need for the Clippers right now is the point guard position, a reverse guard coming off the bench. I'm told they have Chris Paul on their radar among some other free agent guards as well. I don't expect them to make any immediate decisions yet"
Joel Embiiid: James Harden is not talking to me
It's a principled stance, but it's also a desire to have something his talent and status will not allow him: innocence. When Embiid plays his latest sports video game obsession, "MLB The Show," he trades and trades until his team is invulnerable, only then does he play, securing in make believe what he cannot in life -- a guarantee against his doubts, his silence, his bad luck, his frailty, his complicity. "No one knows this, but even James [Harden] is not talking to me," Embiid tells me. "That's the part I don't like about being 'that guy,' because it puts you in the middle of those situations. Because if you ask James, he probably believes I had something to do with him not being here. And I'm just like, 'I won the scoring title. You won the assists title. We had a pick-and-roll that was unstoppable.'" "It hurts when you feel like you haven't done anything wrong," he continues. "When you think you have a relationship like that with somebody ... you lose a lot."
The Los Angeles Clippers traded Powell to the Heat just two and a half weeks after their chance encounter. “I know how much of an inspiration that he took from the player that I was,” Wade said. “Being a guy who’s in that 6-foot-3, 6-foot-4 compact, quick, explosive. He’s taken pieces of different people’s game, of course, and he’s given me some love for what he saw that I did that he has utilized in his own game. So it’s cool to have that connection. “It’s a dream for him to put that jersey on because he grew up watching one of his favorite players play in that jersey. So it’s going to be an emotional night for him, I’m sure, when he actually gets out there and actually puts that jersey on. It’s cool.”
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