Max Strus's value to the Clippers runs through games played, and his debut lasted five minutes
Max Strus's first game for the Clippers lasted about five minutes. In Sunday's preseason opener against the Golden State Warriors in Honolulu, a 104-101 Clippers win, he went down with a non-contact injury to his right foot and was seen limping to the locker room, Heavy reported.
ESPN reported the diagnosis on Monday: a partial tear of the plantar fascia in his right foot, with a re-evaluation in four weeks. The Clippers announced the same day that he will be out at least four weeks, which puts him out for the start of a regular season they open against the Kings on October 21.
Strus arrived in a multiteam deal that, as ESPN's Shams Charania reported, sent Peyton Watson to the Cleveland Cavaliers and gave the Denver Nuggets an unprotected 2031 Cavaliers first-round pick and a 2032 Sacramento Kings second-rounder. That reporting lists what Cleveland and Denver received; what the Clippers sent out is not in it.
The appeal was never a mystery. "Max is one of my favorite teammates I have had in my eight years in the league, so I'm super excited about getting back and reuniting with him," Darius Garland, his teammate in Cleveland and again in Los Angeles, said, as quoted by Sporting News. "Really good floor spacer that can shoot the p**s out of the ball."
A floor spacer's salary is bought in minutes: the shooting only bends a defense when he is on the court to be guarded. That is where last season's money broke down. With Cleveland in 2025-26, Strus appeared in 12 of his team's 82 games, and per WAGE about $13.6M of his $15.9M salary went to games he did not play.
The production rank follows from that games count. Production is a season total, so finishing 321st of the 435 rated players last season mostly records how little he played, not how well. His salary sat 106th in that same group, and by cost per unit of production he was 373rd cheapest of the 399 rated players whose production was above zero.
That left him with a WAGE Score of 12 in 2025-26, in the Sunk Cost tier, against 52 in 2024-25, right around the going rate. The drop has the shape of an availability problem: a salary in a similar place on the sheet, a fraction of the floor time.
There is a real other side. The regular-season figures say nothing about the quality of his shooting, and he played 18 playoff games on Cleveland's run to the conference finals, accounting for 9% of the team's playoff production. Brett Siegel noted that Strus had surgery for a Jones fracture in his left foot last year, though the reporting does not say how much of the missed time that surgery explains.
The new injury is to the other foot, and nothing in last season's figures speaks to how this one will heal. The only timeline on record is the four-week re-evaluation.
What changes on the court is depth at a thin moment. RealGM reported that Brandon Ingram, Bradley Beal and Yanic Konan Niederhauser are also out, and Heavy called Strus the second major injury the Clippers have learned about in the days before the season.
Strus is in the last year of a $62M deal, per Sporting News; his salary for 2026-27 is not in the reporting. I'd argue the question this contract has to answer was never whether he can shoot, which Garland vouches for. It is whether the Clippers get enough games from him in its final season for that shooting to show up in the rotation, and his first game for Los Angeles made that question start again.