After not suiting up during the 2023-24 season, Blake Griffin announced his retirement from the NBA on Tuesday at age 35. Not counting his first season as a pro, which he missed because of injury, Griffin played 13 seasons in the league and made six All-Star teams and five All-NBA appearances.
The No. 1 pick of the 2009 draft, Griffin was key in transforming the LA Clippers from a punchline into a draw for superstars such as Chris Paul and, nearly a decade later, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
Griffin evolved from a high-flying slam dunk champion to relying primarily on skill as he aged, after injuries sapped his once-remarkable athleticism. And Griffin finished his career as a role player on contending teams, falling short of winning a championship.
Name an NBA trend, from superteams to buyouts, and odds are Griffin was a part of it during his one-of-a-kind career. Let’s examine Griffin’s NBA legacy and investigate his chances of reaching the Basketball Hall of Fame despite modest career totals limited by his injuries and decision to prioritize winning over making money and accumulating stats late in his career.
Three careers in one
Griffin’s career was really three wildly different ones. First, he was an above-the-rim phenom. After returning from surgery to repair a patella fracture that sidelined him all of 2009-10, Griffin debuted the following season as perhaps the NBA’s most exciting player and the most immediate contributor in recent memory.
Some thirteen years later, Griffin remains the last player chosen to an All-Star team as a rookie, and the only one selected by coaches as a reserve this century. (Yao Ming, the other rookie All-Star since Tim Duncan in 1998, was voted in as a starter in 2003.) Griffin accomplished that largely thanks to his rim-rattling finishes. His 214 dunks as a rookie ranked second behind Dwight Howard according to Stathead.com, and Griffin led the league with 192 in just 61 games the following season after being paired with Paul.
Griffin’s 784 dunks over his first four NBA campaigns were the most in the NBA, with Howard (746) and teammate DeAndre Jordan (723) the two other players with more than 509 in that span.
Then came additional injuries. After playing all but four games over his first four seasons, Griffin played no more than 67 from 2014-15 through 2017-18. His dunk total dropped to 84 in his fifth NBA campaign and would never top 70 again. Yet Griffin remained one of the league’s better players when healthy, transitioning from a lob finisher to a shot creator for himself and others on the perimeter.
Despite the change, Griffin was at his best in this iteration. During the 2015 playoffs, with Paul battling a hamstring injury suffered in the Clippers’ epic Game 7 win over the defending champion San Antonio Spurs in the opening round, Griffin averaged 25.5 PPG, 12.7 RPG and 6.1 APG. His play lifted the Clippers to a 3-1 lead over the Houston Rockets in the conference semifinals, only to see the Rockets come back and win the series in seven games.
The second career for Griffin culminated in 2018-19, when he returned to the All-Star Game four years after his last appearance, averaging a career-high 24.5 PPG and 5.4 APG for the Detroit Pistons and lifting them to their only playoff appearance since 2016.
The toll of playing through knee soreness late in 2018-19 eventually caught up to Griffin, who was limited to 18 games the following season. Griffin returned with his athleticism severely diminished, leading to his next metamorphosis. Griffin accepted a buyout with a year and a half left on his max contract, joining the Brooklyn Nets for far less money in pursuit of a championship.
Although adding Griffin wasn’t the kind of boon for the Nets advertised at the time, he showed he could still contribute while playing alongside stars. Griffin started all 12 playoff games for Brooklyn that season, averaging 9.0 PPG and 5.9 APG as the Nets’ run ended in another Game 7 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks in the conference semifinals with Kyrie Irving sidelined and James Harden playing through a hamstring injury.
During his final season, Griffin started part-time for the Boston Celtics in 2022-23 but saw action in just one playoff game as the Celtics’ run — the deepest of Griffin’s career — ended a game short of the NBA Finals.
Griffin transformed the Clippers — twice
Younger fans might not be capable of imagining just how inept the Clippers had been before Griffin’s arrival. Although the Clippers had reached the 2006 conference semifinals, losing in seven games to the Phoenix Suns, that was their only playoff appearance in the 12 seasons before drafting Griffin No. 1 overall in 2009.
When Griffin immediately suffered a season-ending injury, it seemed like further confirmation the Clippers were cursed. Another Clippers No. 1 pick, Danny Manning, had suffered an ACL tear as a rookie two decades earlier. While Manning was able to enjoy a long NBA career, making two All-Star Games, it wasn’t enough to lift the Clippers out of the lottery for an extended period.
Instead, the promise Griffin showed as a rookie helped convince the Clippers to make a bold trade for Paul ahead of the following season, and their partnership was surely a key factor in Paul re-signing with the Clippers as an unrestricted free agent in 2013.
Remarkably, the Clippers made the playoffs more times with Griffin (6 consecutive trips from 2012 through 2017) than their entire history in Southern California before his arrival (4).
Griffin re-signing on a max deal in the summer of 2017 after Paul’s departure for Houston via sign-and-trade also indirectly paved the way for the current Clippers run. Seven months after convincing Griffin to return with a ceremony that included a mock jersey retirement, the Clippers traded him to Detroit in a move that was as unsentimental as it was prescient.
In exchange, the Clippers got a package headlined by forward Tobias Harris and a 2018 first-round pick. They would swap that pick one spot higher on draft night to land Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who would eventually head to the Oklahoma City Thunder along with some of those other 76ers picks in exchange for George.
Without the Griffin trade, the Clippers would likely never have been able to trade for George and simultaneously sign Kawhi Leonard as a free agent in the summer of 2019, beginning a new period of contention that resulted in their first conference finals appearance ever in 2021.
HOF standards evolving quickly
Under the historical precedent for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Griffin’s candidacy is right on the borderline. His six All-Star and five All-NBA appearances are consistent with making the Hall of Fame, but Griffin’s career totals (including 14,513 points) are modest compared to players with longer careers. Harris, for example, already has more career points. So too does Nikola Vucevic of the Chicago Bulls.
As a result, Basketball-Reference.com’s Hall of Fame model has Griffin at 55% to make it. However, that model was built when the Hall was more exclusive in terms of NBA selections than it has become under chairperson Jerry Colangelo.
Several of the players whose careers scored most similar to Griffin’s in my championships-added model have been selected to the Hall in recent years. Sidney Moncrief, another five-time All-NBA pick who scored fewer than 12,000 points in an injury-shortened career, was elected in 2019. Tim Hardaway, with five All-NBA selections and 15,373 career points, made it in 2022.
This year’s selections of role players Michael Cooper — never an All-Star — and one-time pick Dick Barnett have further muddied the bar for Hall of Fame careers.
Given that recent history, I’d be shocked if Griffin doesn’t eventually make it. His Hall of Fame probability trails just three eligible players who have yet to be voted in: 1950s eight-time All-Star Larry Foust and longtime Suns forwards Shawn Marion and Amar’e Stoudemire.
