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.

As longtime readers know, I've been looking into the correlation between team age and wins for a long time. I've got the Wins Above Age-Derived Expectation (WAADE) leaderboard on the front page of the website, and I've even looked into the distinction between the age of a team's stars and the age of its supporting cast, trying to nail down the distinction of how old a team really is.

Historically, older teams have been more successful in the regular season than younger ones — but only to a certain point. Once they've hit a certain age bench mark, the wins started going away.

This makes intuitive sense. Most young players aren't very good yet. They need time to learn the league, grow into their bodies, and develop their skills. That doesn't preclude the idea that young players can be helpful or even among the best players in the NBA, but if you put too many of those guys on the floor, you're probably not going to be that good. The Thunder are the massive exception to the general rule. There's a reason they were viewed as so novel.

Players also tend to hit their athletic and skill peaks in their mid-to-late 20s, so it makes sense that teams in that age range tend to have the most success. And for most of history, players started tailing off in their early 30s and dropped rather precipitously from there as their bodies began to wear down. (This still happens to most players. We just have some, like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Chris Paul, Harden, and more, who have maintained an elite level of play deeper into their 30s almost any other players in history.) So again, it makes sense that as team age pushed above 30.5 years or so, they have tended to see their record slide a bit.

But I do think it's worth breaking things down further. The WAADE leaderboard is based on data going all the way back to the ABA-NBA merger prior to the 1976-77 season. The league was a lot different back then for a whole lot of reasons, but most pertinent for this discussion is that it was a lot older. Nobody was coming into the league out of high school. One-and-done players were not really a thing. Guys usually spent three or four years (and sometimes more) in college. Comparing this era to that one might not make a ton of sense.

So, what I did was, I broke down WAADE into four different time periods: since the merger (1977-2025), from the merger through expansion (1977-2004), the 30-team era (2005-2025), and the last 10 years (2016-2025). I looked at those charts to see if or how the correlation between wins and minutes-weighted age shifted, and how significantly, if at all, teams dropped off in terms of regular-season wins once they reached a certain minutes-weighted age.

Interestingly, the correlation between wins and minutes-weighted age is about 20% stronger now (in both the 3o-team era and over the last 10 years) than it was in the pre-expansion era. (I should note that it's still not that strong. This is something that I think is more fascinating than especially predictive.) The age-related drop-off in regular-season wins is also not quite as steep now as it was previously. I find that latter fact especially interesting given that players in their early-to-mid-30s now could have a lot more miles on their bodies than did those players in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, because they have likely been in the league for several more years.

But some of this is also because the teams are, as I said earlier, much younger. There hasn't been a single team to exceed a minutes-weighted age of 30.6 during the last decade. There hasn't been a team to hit 31 years old since 2012 and nobody has gone over 32 since 2001. It's hard for the wins to drop off as teams get deeper in their 30s if no teams actually get deeper into their 30s. Still, you can see the tail begin to curve near the top of the chart, especially when looking at the 30-team era, which has a larger sample size.

But of course, regular-season success isn't what the Clippers are after. They had plenty of regular-season success last year, after all. Their 50 wins tied for the sixth-most in the league — and that was while playing without Kawhi for more than half the season. As they usually have in recent years, though, they flamed out quickly in the playoffs. And they especially shit the bed in Game 7 against the Nuggets.

So I wanted to take a look at playoff success as well. Because there aren't too many teams over the last 20 years or so that are as old as we can expect the Clippers to be this coming season, I wanted to instead take a look at the trend of how old the most successful teams have been in recent years. And as expected, those teams are getting younger, quickly, with the age of conference finalists, conference winners, and champions dropping precipitously during the 30-team era. (And the age of champions dropping the most quickly.)

Looking at the individual teams makes things a bit more interesting.

During that 21-year span, there have been, fittingly, 21 teams with a minutes-weighted age of 30 or older. Every single one of those teams has made the playoffs. More than half of them (11, including last year's Clippers) lost in the first round. Another four lost in the second round. One lost in the conference finals. Two lost in the NBA Finals. And incredibly, three won the NBA championship.

That seems pretty good. Except that maybe it's not.

The last over-30 team to win the title was the 2013 Heat. All but one title team since then has had a minutes-weighted age below 29. Notably, the lone exception was the 2020 Lakers, who won the title in the NBA bubble — under far different circumstances than most title teams. (They didn't have to travel during the playoffs, which seems like a particularly big thing.) An over-30 team hasn't been to the Finals at all since 2018, which was the last season that LeBron's Cavaliers teams dominated the Eastern Conference. (There have, though, only even been three over-30 teams since then. They all lost in either the first or second round.)

In the last decade, 10 of the 40 conference-finalists have been had a minutes-weighted age of 26 or younger and just one (those 2018 Cavs) has had a minutes-weighted age over 30. In the last five years, only four teams with a minutes-weighted age over 28 have made it as far as the conference finals. Most conference-finalists and title winners still fall in the general prime age range of 26-29 years old, but things are definitely skewing a lot younger than they used to. And when you're talking about a team with title aspirations, it feels like that matters.

None of this means that the Clippers can't find postseason success. So long as they can stay healthy, they should be one of the better teams in the Western Conference. They should be able to escape the play-in tournament again. But the idea of an older team like this, especially one with serious injury issues and a clear athleticism deficit, making it through the four-round gauntlet of physicality and stamina that is the modern NBA playoffs seems less likely than at any point in recent history.

Of course, we also know that the world (probably) doesn't end after this season. If the Clippers don't win it all next year, they won't have to fold the franchise. They'll have other opportunities in the long run of history. But I think it's especially interesting to consider that concept in the context of this specific team. Mo and I have been talking on our podcast about how the Clips are making sure not to sign (m)any deals that last beyond the 2026-27 season, hoarding cap space to make significant changes after that. They're clearly gearing up for a two-year run at most, then planning to pivot to ... something else. That two-year run, though, looks like it will be dedicated to a team that may be anachronistic in more ways than one.