This was supposed to be the dawn of a new day, the start of an era of success. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George were the guests of honor, but the loudest voice in the room was that of team owner Steve Ballmer.
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“You don’t think we can win some ballgames this year, with Paul and Kawhi on our team?” Ballmer bellowed. Then he added this:
“We need to win the last game played during the NBA season. That’s the game we gotta win. Kawhi said something after they won the championship (in Toronto) about the ‘Larry O’B. The only thing that matters is the Larry O’B.’ When I first got here I think I called it the Lawrence O’Brien.
“From now on, it’s all about the Larry O’B.”
That trophy, by any name, remains elusive for this franchise.
The Leonard-George era lasted five seasons before George fled to Philadelphia as a free agent in 2024??, and Kawhi’s tenure is about to end after seven seasons. It all turned out to be just another torturous episode in Clippers history, this one particularly painful because the promised land seemed so close but turned out to be so far away, as usual.
There might be more angst to come, too, depending on what the still-ongoing investigation into alleged salary cap circumvention reveals.
Kawhi is headed back to Toronto, where he remains popular because of his role in the Raptors’ 2019 NBA title and could be their missing piece in another playoff run. Meanwhile, Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank is making moves to reverse the horribly one-sided transaction with Oklahoma City that brought George to L.A., the original idea having been that bringing George back to SoCal would facilitate signing Leonard and bringing him back to his roots.
Now Frank is assembling draft choices: Two first-rounders in the Ivica Zubac deadline deal with Indiana – including a partially protected 2026 pick that turned out to be in play when Indiana slipped to fifth in the lottery, enabling the Clippers to draft Illinois guard Keaton Wagler. L.A. also gets an unprotected 2029 first-rounder and a 2028 second-rounder in that deal.
The Leonard deal with the Raptors will bring, in addition to forward Brandon Ingram and guard Gradey Dick, unprotected first-round picks in 2031 and ’33, a pick swap next year and second-rounders in 2030 and ’33.
Remember, the Clippers obtained George and a 2025 first-round pick swap (which became 6-foot-11 center Yanic Konan Niederhäuser) from OKC for first-round picks in 2021, ’22, ’23, ’24 and ’26, plus two-time reigning league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Danilo Gallinari. That helped turn the Thunder into the force they have become. (That last first-rounder to OKC, by the way, was used on Michigan (and former UCLA) big man Aday Mara last week.)
Yeah, acquiring picks in bunches now is kind of a late makeup call, but no sense putting it off. This isn’t necessarily a full rebuild, but it’s an opportunity to change direction.
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Maybe the highlight of the Leonard-George combination in L.A. was that first season in 2019-20, before COVID-19 scrambled everything. They were 44-20, sitting in second place in the Western Conference behind the Lakers, and had announced sellouts of 19,068 for each of their 32 home games in what was then known as Staples Center when the season was halted on March 11.
Their first game when the season resumed in the Orlando bubble was against the Lakers, an L.A. rivalry transplanted three time zones away. The Clippers lost that game, 103-101, but finished the regular season 5-3 in the bubble and won a playoff round, beating Dallas in six games, before blowing a 3-1 lead against Denver in the second round. (Had they won that one, they’d have faced the Lakers in the Western Conference finals.)
Ultimately, the Clippers won three playoff series in five Leonard-George seasons, two of those in 2021 when they reached the Western Conference finals before losing to Phoenix. George missed a play-in game against New Orleans in 2022 (which the Clippers lost) after coming down with COVID. Leonard missed all of that conference finals series against the Suns and parts of four others over the years with lower body injuries (usually his knee).
And consider this: Leonard won more playoff series (four) in one season in Toronto than he did in his seven seasons as a Clipper. In San Antonio, at the beginning of his career, his teams won 12 series and a title in six seasons. He won a title and a Finals MVP trophy with the Spurs and one more of each with the Raptors.
There’s a message there, but what would it be? Maybe the hubris of that first news conference/pep rally came back and bit the Clippers. Maybe this just continues to be a star-crossed franchise.
Or, more likely, the way the Leonard-George pursuit unfolded was just a big mistake even if it seemed like anything but at the time.
Leonard, always reticent to start with, was even more secretive when it came to injuries. The team seemed to consistently acquiesce to his wishes, mainly but not exclusively involving injury information.
Nor should we forget Kawhi’s role in popularizing the term “load management,” though that began in Toronto. But there’s a kicker here. The concept of sitting a star simply to reduce his workload might seem absurd to those not on the hamster wheel that is the NBA schedule, but eliminating back-to-backs – especially on the road – might solve, or at least mitigate, the load management issue.
If that happens, Kawhi should get some of the credit.
In the meantime, those of us who currently call the Inland Empire home or have in the past will miss the pre-game moment when Clippers public address voice Eric Smith would introduce Leonard as, “Number 2, 6-foot-6, from Moreno Valley, California …”
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Kawhi might not have put his hometown on the map, but he called attention to it.