Paul George opts out of contract, set for free agency
The 34-year-old now will enter the open market.
Paul George has opted to hit unrestricted free agency following his decision to decline his player option for 2024-25, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. George is “planning to set meetings with cap space teams and the Clippers beginning Sunday night,” per Wojnarowski, and the “opt-in-and-trade scenario is now gone.”
George’s player option was the final year of a four-year, $176 million contract that the forward signed in Dec. 2020 with the Clippers. George has played 301 games back home in Los Angeles since being acquired by the team in the summer of 2019.
The Clippers and George have been in a longstanding staring contest over what George’s next contract should be—the Clippers preferring to keep George only if he opted for a three-year deal and less than the $150 million they dished out to Kawhi Leonard in January, while George wanted a full four-year, $221 million maximum contract.
With George now set for free agency, the market will dictate what George is set to receive. A return to the Clippers has not been ruled out, according to one league source not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The Philadelphia 76ers and Orlando Magic are among the teams rumored to potentially be interested in the star.
George and the Clippers had agreed to table contract extension negotiations around the time of the All-Star break in February and pick things back up in the offseason, according to Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank.
“Basically, once we got, call it past the All-Star break, it was, ‘You know what, I just want to focus on the rest of the season, try to help the Clippers win a championship, and then we can resume conversations when the season’s over,’” Frank told reporters in early May.
So far, the two sides have been unable to agree on a new deal that would keep George with the organization as the franchise enters their new arena in Inglewood.
“We love Paul,” Frank told reporters following the second round of the NBA Draft. “We very much want to retain Paul. But we also very much understand and respect the fact this is a business and players have a finite amount of time to be able to not just make the most amount of money but to be able to pursue whatever they want. We hope Paul’s decision is to be here. He’s been awesome. He’s been an All-Star three of the five years. He’s one of the best two-way players in the league. He’s a terrific person. He’s got a great family, so we hope he’s here. But [we] also respect the fact that if he chooses to opt out, that’s his choice. He’s earned it, and we’ll see how things play out.”
George’s tenure with the Clippers has been rife with unique successes and riddled at times with catastrophic and unfortunate events.
In 2021, George helped guide the Clippers to the franchise’s first-ever Conference Finals appearance despite superstar Kawhi Leonard having to miss the final two games of the team’s second-round series against the Utah Jazz and the entirety of the Conference Finals against the Phoenix Suns. George averaged 26.9 points, 9.6 rebounds, and 5.4 rebounds across 19 postseason games during that run, including scoring at least 20 points in every single contest.
However, the thrill of 2021 was quickly washed away several months later as Leonard missed the entire 2021-22 season after undergoing surgery to repair a damaged right anterior cruciate ligament, and George was limited to just 31 games due to a myriad of ailments, including a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. George played 56 games in 2022-23 and not only missed the team’s final nine regular season games but also all five of their postseason contests.
George came back to play 74 games in 2023-24, making the All-Star team for his third time with the franchise after enjoying career-high marks in field goal percentage (.471), 3-point percentage (.413), and free throw percentage (.907), which led to career bests in both Effective Field Goal Percentage (.569) and True Shooting Percentage (.613).
If this is the end of George’s tenure in Los Angeles, the forward ends it as the Clippers’ all-time franchise leader in made 3s, sinking 820. George averaged 23.0 points, 6.0 rebounds, and 4.5 assists on 45.5% shooting across his five seasons in Los Angeles, making three All-Star teams and an All-NBA Third Team in 2021.
A key factor in the ongoing negotiations has been the dreaded second apron instituted by the NBA in the league’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement, especially as it pertains to the Clippers retaining their own free agents while maintaining significant flexibility moving forward.
“When your better players are in their 30s and you’re trying to build a sustainable roster, it impacts it,” Frank told reporters on Thursday when asked about the second apron and how mindful of it the Clippers are when attempting to build out their roster.
“Like, if there was no CBA, with Steve Ballmer, look, it would be carte blanche. I mean, all you guys would be getting whatever you wanted. But this is the reality that, as we talked about before with the new CBA, it’s not even about the money as it is, how are you going to build a sustainable roster [and] maintain your tools to have transactional flexibility? And with that comes really, really hard decisions.”
Frank continued: “We totally respect the fact that look, deals get made when they make sense for both sides. We’re hopeful that we can find a deal with any player we negotiate with that we want both sides to feel good about, and [we] respect the fact that for each of our players, they’re going to have choices. They’ve earned it and they have to make the decisions that make the most sense for them.”
It appears the decision that makes the most sense for Paul George was to opt out and test the free agent market. It remains to be seen what happens from here.
This developing story will be updated with more details as they become available.