LOS ANGELES — Tobias Harris boarded a private plane in Detroit last January with Avery Bradley and Boban Marjanovic. The three players had just been traded from the Pistons to the Clippers, and now they were bound for Los Angeles — and an uncertain future.

As they traveled across the country, Harris and his two teammates turned to one another to make sense of the latest change in their lives. Harris, a forward from Long Island who had already been traded three times, including once on the night he was drafted in 2011, was processing the idea of joining a new team — again.

“You can’t prepare for a trade,” Harris, 26, said in an interview this week. “Like, your initial reaction is, ‘Dang, I got traded?’ But then I began to see an opportunity with this organization and in this city, and there was excitement. And I remember how we started talking about L.A.: ‘Wow, we’re really going to L.A.’”

The consensus was that the Clippers were commencing a vast rebuild: After all, they had sent Blake Griffin, the cornerstone of the franchise, to the Pistons in the trade. But all these months later, it has become clear that the rebuild was more of a reinvention, and that a group of very good players — if not quite superstars — can still compete at a high level.