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According to a new report by Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports, the Clippers are confident that if DeAndre Jordan re-signs, Paul Pierce will come to the Clippers for the mini-mid-level exception:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Sources: If the Clippers can keep DeAndre Jordan, team officials with growing confidence they'll lure Paul Pierce to $3.4M exception.</p>— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) <a href="https://twitter.com/WojYahooNBA/status/616364860792672256">July 1, 2015</a></blockquote>
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Pierce was offered a one year contract with a second year as a team option, worth $6.6 million annually by Washington when free agency opened. He didn't accept after the offer, which indicated that he was waiting to see how the dominoes fell with the Clippers before signing. Now, it seems clear that that was the case: should Jordan leave, both casting in doubt the money available for a small forward and the contending status of the team, Pierce would happily take the money to return to Washington. Should Jordan stay, the Clippers have a chance of convincing the future Hall of Fame small forward to take a pay cut and return to his home town of Los Angeles.
As I've said before, and Steve said in his article this afternoon, the Clippers are in a waiting game right now. They have to wait for Jordan to decide before knowing what their needs and tools are, and then they have to wait for the market to die down--once all the other teams have used up their cap space handing out eight-figure deals, the Clippers can survey the remaining players (and there will be quality players remaining) and fill out their bench.