If the Los Angeles Clippers were a fantasy team, losing Chauncey Billups to a season-ending ACL injury would be a serious blow. While the 35-year-old guard no longer has much foot-speed, at 6’3, 210, he has the size to play both backcourt positions and is averaging 15 points and four assists per game this season.

However, not only will the Clippers survive Billups’ loss, they will probably end up being a better team for it. It’s a situation similar to the one the Dallas Mavericks faced last year when they lost Caron Butler for the season. Butler was still valuable, but his presence on the floor kept the ball out of the hands of more talented players.

The Clippers have a dominant scorer on the interior (Blake Griffin) and the perimeter (Chris Paul); like the early 2000 Lakers, they need the other players on the floor playing excellent defense and knocking down open shots. The four players in the Clippers' rotation with usage ratings higher than 21 are Griffin, Paul, Billups and Mo Williams. Billups shoots 36.4% from the floor; the other three all shoot at least 48%.

The Clippers have multiple perimeter players better at creating shots off the dribble and spotting up off the 3-point line. Randy Foye isn’t nearly as talented as Billups, but he’s a replacement-level shooting guard who knocks down three-pointers at roughly the same clip. More importantly, he’s not going to keep the ball in his hands as much, which in turn frees up more shots for Griffin, Paul and Williams.

Billups’ loss does hurt their depth, as his presence allowed them to survive Paul’s five-game absence earlier in the season. However, the Clippers aren’t making noise in the playoffs without Paul regardless of who is backing him up. With Paul, Foye and Caron Butler starting, and Williams, Ryan Gomes and Eric Bledsoe, a second-year guard from Kentucky set to return from off-season knee surgery, off the bench, Los Angeles has the depth to survive on the perimeter.

They’re also still in the position to improve, as the new CBA has greatly enhanced the roster flexibility of big-market contenders. With heightened luxury tax penalties lowering the market value of veteran role players, they’re free to make decisions based on location and winning. The Clippers (Kenyon Martin), as well as the New York Knicks (Baron Davis) and Miami Heat (Shane Battier), have already received a significant asset for nearly nothing this year.

The addition of Martin, who just returned to the NBA after spending the first part of the season in China, has filled the biggest hole on the Clippers' roster. Instead of giving minutes to two one-dimensional players in Reggie Evans and Brian Cook, they can plug in Martin, a skilled 6’9 240 big man, behind Griffin and DeAndre Jordan.

Now, the only thing Los Angeles lacks is an athletic 6’4+ perimeter player to match up with bigger guards, a problem they still would have had with Billups in the line-up. If they meet the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference playoffs, they would have no one to defend the 6’3 Russell Westbrook or 6’5 James Harden.

That’s where their ability to sign veteran free agents on the cheap could be huge, as they’ve been widely linked to J.R. Smith, another former member of the Nuggets who has spent the first part of the year in China. Signing a one-year deal with a Clippers team who could plug him in for 25-30 minutes a night would be the best way for Smith to rebuild his market value, and he has already banked $3 million this season playing overseas.

Billups is widely respected around the NBA for his locker room skills, but removing him from the line-up will give the Clippers' top players more shots and the things he did on the court are fairly replaceable, especially for a team like the Clippers.