Is Age Just A Number?

With a minutes-weighted age of 29.7 years old, last season's Los Angeles Clippers were the oldest team in the NBA. It marked the third consecutive year that they were either the league's oldest (2023-24) or second-oldest (2022-23) team, and considering what happened to L.A.'s roster during the season — with Kawhi Leonard (33) missing significant time (45 games), Norm Powell (31) doing the same (22 games), and a good chunk of those available minutes being distributed to guys like Derrick Jones Jr. (27), Amir Coffey (27), Terance Mann (28), Jordan Miller (25), and Kobe Brown (25) — one could easily see how the Clippers' minutes-weighted age could have pushed over 30 like it had the year before.

This offseason, the Clips have only gotten older. They signed Brook Lopez (37) to be their backup center. While they traded Powell for John Collins (28 this season), they added Bradley Beal (32) to take on Powell's role. They'll also have Bogdan Bogdanovic (33) for the full season rather than splitting the year with him and Mann, and they won't be giving any minutes to the departed Kevin Porter Jr. (24 last year). And of course, Kawhi will be 34 this season while James Harden will be 36, Nic Batum will be 37, and Kris Dunn will be 31. After adding in Jones (28 this year) and Ivica Zubac (same), we can reasonably expect that not a single player in the Clippers' rotation will be younger than 28 years old.

Clippers president Lawrence Frank is not worried.

But should he be? Can a team as old as this season's Clippers are expected to be actually win big, in either the regular season or the playoffs? Especially after seeing the Thunder (minutes-weighted age of 24.8) play the Pacers (25.8) in the Finals this past season, it feels like a question worth asking.