So, uh … what do you do, after you’ve fired every future draft pick into the sun and have nothing to show for it but six wins and 16 losses?

That’s the uncomfortable question facing the LA Clippers, as they stare in the mirror and see an old team with few assets and no control of its own draft picks for half a decade. Talking to executives around the NBA about their predicament this past week, I was met mostly with shoulder shrugs; well, what can you do? Other than patiently taking your lumps and perhaps exiling a reserve or two, there isn’t a whole lot on the table transactionally. But we’ll get deeper into the Clips’ specific plight in a minute.

The Clippers aren’t alone, however. They’re only a piece of a much broader story about risk management that has left a plethora of teams exposed to worst-case draft scenarios. The bill is coming due soon in several other situations where unprotected picks or swaps traded in heady moments of star acquisition earlier this decade now hang over teams that should otherwise be starting a rebuild.

To wit: The Milwaukee Bucks are 10-13 and are out two unprotected future picks and three swaps from previous trades for Jrue Holiday and Damian Lillard. They have a limited supply of young talent, their best player is 31 and, if you somehow haven’t heard, he might not want to stick around much longer.

At least the Bucks have a banner to show for their efforts. Pity some of their colleagues in unprotected pick jail. Much like the Clippers, their aspirations haven’t led to success taking root, and now they have a no-show draft pick:

• New Orleans recklessly sent an unprotected 2026 pick to the Atlanta Hawks to move up in the 2025 draft; the Pelicans are 3-20 and looking at surrendering a high lottery pick in a loaded draft.

• Rebuilding Brooklyn is 5-17 but had better get better quickly — the Nets owe the Houston Rockets a 2027 pick swap from the James Harden trade.

• The Phoenix Suns, though momentarily resurgent, still face the same core issues: limited young talent, no control of a draft pick until 2032 (a pick that is currently frozen after they went over the second apron last season), and the third highest-paid player on their roster for the next three seasons is named “Dead Cap Charge for Bradley Beal and Nassir Little.”

• Dallas owes picks and swaps from 2027 to 2030 that could complicate a pivot to rebuilding around Cooper Flagg, although the Mavericks at least received a raft of first-round picks and swaps one future pick from the Los Angeles Lakers in the Luka Dončić trade.

Wait, though, we’ve got plenty more. Several teams look good on paper right now and are seemingly unlikely to surrender a high lottery pick when unprotected selections come due … but we thought that about the Clippers as recently as six weeks ago. The Minnesota Timberwolves, Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks, Orlando Magic and Hawks are all out multiple unprotected years in picks and swaps; the Boston Celtics, Lakers, Sacramento Kings, San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets owe one.

If you’re keeping score, that’s half the league — 15 different teams — that have at least somewhat realistic exposure to potentially forking over the No. 1 pick in the draft between now and 2032. And beyond the naked picks and swaps, a few other teams owe lightly protected picks that offer quasi-realistic odds of lottery riches — notably, the Miami Heat will owe the Charlotte Hornets an unprotected pick in 2028 if the Heat miss the playoffs in 2027.

This state of affairs is nuts, especially for folks like me who worked in front offices in the mid-to-late 2010s. In the wake of the disastrous 2013 Celtics-Nets trade, which gifted Boston with draft picks that became Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, the pendulum swung so far that nobody was giving up an unprotected pick under almost any circumstances. Sam Presti broke the seal on that emphatically with the Oklahoma City Thunder’s 2019 trade of Paul George to the Clippers for an asset haul that included five future firsts (and, um, the MVP), and the floodgates have been open ever since.

Here’s why those unprotected pick debts are so important: Historically, the most productive part of virtually any rebuild isn’t the draft picks you receive for trading your best players (such as those Clippers might get from dealing James Harden or Ivica Zubac, or the Bucks for Giannis  Antetokounmpo), but the draft picks of your own that end up so high in the lottery that they stock the roster with the stars needed for the team’s next era.

Even the one glaring exception, the Thunder, proves the rule to some extent. Yes, they got a future MVP from the Clippers in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and also received the pick that became Jalen Williams. But even after stockpiling future picks to an almost unprecedented extent during its rebuild, Oklahoma City only selected in the top 10 twice — with its own pick in 2021 (taking Josh Giddey sixth) and with its own pick in 2022 (taking Chet Holmgren second).

Aside from Gilgeous-Alexander, asset-wise, the most valuable commodity the Thunder had in the rebuild was their own Ls. Yes, they’ve had tons of other picks from other teams in that span, including the one from the Clippers that became Williams in 2022, but none of them delivered a pick above 12.

Maybe the Clippers change that history this year (the Thunder have an unprotected pick from LA from the George trade, as well as a swap in 2027). However, the Clips have no tanking incentive given the pick they owe and thus are likely to ride things out and pursue a Play-In spot while other, tankier squads moonwalk past them in the reverse standings.

Alas, it’s hard to go forward in the NBA without going backward first. Yes, the Clips can chase the back end of the West playoff race and count on some combination of better vibes, a softer schedule and improved shooting luck (their opponents have made 39 percent from 3 and 80.2 percent from the line) to keep them in an unexpectedly pathetic Play-In chase in the normally fierce West.

On the other hand, the Clips’ vets have been bad enough that we’re already in the “uh, maybe Kobe Sanders can save our season?” part of the program, and the extent to which the team succeeds at all is on the backs of three 30-somethings (Harden, Zubac, and Kawhi Leonard) whose trade value is dying on the vine. Some version of the Suns’ Kevin Durant trade, in which the Clips at least bring back starting-caliber young players for their aging stars, seems the only way to stop this from getting even worse next year and the year after. Surely they’ll ride this out to the trade deadline first, but after that? The pick is a sunk cost, yes, but the future is not.

The Bucks face future challenges, but at least they have Giannis Antetokounmpo for now. (Michael McLoone / Imagn Images)

Ironically, the Bucks are in a much better position than LA, even though they are in a similar position on paper. That’s partly because Antetokounmpo is playing at an MVP level and still has off-the-charts trade value; surely the Bucks would get multiple unprotected firsts in any Antetokounmpo trade, and at least one of them could be used to buy off the Pelicans and get the Bucks’ own 2027 pick back. Voila, the conditions would be set for tanking into a proper rebuild. (In contrast, there is virtually nothing the Clippers could offer the Thunder that is valuable enough to get back their 2026 first; the 2027 swap might be a different story).

But the more unusual situation that blesses Milwaukee is that it is in position to tank the rest of this 2025-26 season and get a high pick, even though it already traded a 2026 pick swap to get Holiday. Lo and behold, the Pelicans giveth once again. Because New Orleans has been so unrelentingly bad, sporting the league’s worst record, the Bucks can contemplate legitimate scenarios where they trade Giannis and tank their way into the top 5 … even with the Pelicans having swap rights to the pick!

For instance, consider a scenario in which New Orleans and Milwaukee are both among the last four teams on lottery night. Even if the Bucks’ pick ends up No. 1, Milwaukee’s swap would only push it down to the second, third or fourth spots — a sweet position in a draft with at least four players regarded as having true star potential.

Moreover, the scenario is quasi-realistic. There’s a 2.5 percent chance of it happening based on current standings, and those odds greatly increase if the Bucks nosedive past a few other quasi-playoff-contenders (such as the Portland Trail Blazers, Chicago Bulls, Memphis Grizzlies, Dallas, and the aforementioned Clippers) into the bottom eight.

Alas, the other clubs that owe future picks should be so lucky; their dilemmas resemble the Clippers’ much more than that of the Bucks. Let’s just say the Nets likely can’t count on Houston face-planting as a fix to their 2027 pick swap problem, nor can the Mavs expect an Oklahoma City decline to bail them out in 2028.

Instead, all that’s left to do is fight the good fight. The Suns are doing it, with at least some level of success, and several of the teams I mentioned above have enough remaining roster talent to possibly emulate them and stay, shall we say, Play-In-relevant for a while. Execs can also look back on those Nets from the end of the last decade, who faced one of the most hopeless situations in recent league annals and somehow cobbled together a 2019 playoff team, signed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving the following summer and beat those same Celtics whom they gifted Tatum and Brown in the 2021 playoffs. (I know Brown was hurt, but still …)

Even that “success” story involved three unwatchably bad seasons, plus a series of unlikely transactional victories. Big picture, there’s no good way to be bad without having control of your own draft picks. The Clippers and Suns are the first teams venturing down this road, but with half the league in hock on unprotected future draft picks, they certainly won’t be the last.