Veteran Clippers player plans to retire after season
The Clippers logo shown on the jumbotron at Staples Center November 12, 2018. Photo Credit: Larry Brown/Larry Brown Sports
One current LA Clipper will not be sticking around for the team’s move to their new arena.
Lily Batum, the wife of Clippers forward Nicolas Batum, revealed in a tweet on Tuesday that Nicolas will be retiring after the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, France. As a result, 2023-24 will be his final season in the NBA.
“Nico [has] decided to end his career (NBA and EDF [the French national team]) after the Olympics,” Lily wrote, per a rough translation. “So this is his last season with the Clippers.”
Nicolas will turn 35 in December and already has 15 seasons of NBA experience in his back pocket. While it looked like he was cooked towards the end of his time with the Charlotte Hornets in 2019-20, Nicolas has had a nice career resurgence with the Clippers over the last three years. He has hit 39.8 percent of his threes as a Clipper and continues to play an important role for them in both the defense and secondary playmaking departments, despite some clear decline physically.
It all lines up nicely for Nicolas, who is only under contract for next NBA season. He was one of the better combo forwards in the game at his peak and won a silver medal with France at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Nicolas will get one more shot at it at both the NBA and international levels before officially calling it a career (and perhaps graduating to a full-time job of getting mistaken by fans while traveling).
