Estimates vary on how many intact Clippers fans exist on the planet. Although there are many, it is no longer a good time to be one.
Paul George is long gone. Worse yet, James Harden is not. And the worst and most predictable of all, Kawhi Leonard is injured again.
It’s the knee. One more time. The man who eliminated him from the playoffs last year two games into a first-round series with the Dallas Mavericks, a series the Clippers lost in six games. The man who gave it to him left home from the Olympic Games. The Clippers’ sole president of basketball operations, Lawrence Frank, did not reference any other offseason processes when he said the swelling was “almost gone.”
Clearly, that’s not the case, as Leonard is now out “indefinitely” as he continues to act irritably, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania and Ohm Youngmisuk.
Reminder: The Clippers signed Leonard to a three-year, $153 million guarantee extension in January, when they decided to guess a few months of sustained status would continue when in fact there were years of evidence indicating otherwise.
Suffice it to mention that that decision to remain in the trade with Leonard (a walk that was once ill-advised at best and completely determined at worst) is looking exponentially worse through the snub. If you think it’s even a long shot that Leonard will somehow get healthy for a full postseason run, your optimism is commendable. Even enviable. But me? I stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago.
If you’re one of those optimists who sees hope in everything and looks for the positive instead of the negative (which will certainly be an unused breath of wind in this business), you might just make it to 2018. 19 is a good example of how a compromised Leonard can also be “managed” for an entire season and postseason.
That season, the Toronto Raptors slightly He controlled Leonard’s condition by not playing him in consecutive games and he lasted the entire postseason and won a championship. Then again, that was five years ago. Since then, Leonard, in addition to being in treatment for five years, has undergone three surgeries and then tore the anterior cruciate ligament and the medial collateral ligament in the same knee.
So if Leonard ever was slightly being controlled before a torn ACL and MCL, what was it like for the Clippers to think that the 68 games he played last season were anything but divergent? How could they tear away that small piece of misleading evidence and assume that not just the residue of one extreme season, but the residue of three subsequent seasons, at the end of which Leonard will be 36, was being taken to the extreme?
At some point, realism has to fully appear.
Let’s call this what it is: The Clippers pulled out all the stops when in the summer of 2019 they signed Leonard and traded for Paul George in a deal that netted them Shai-Gilgeous Alexander and a slew of draft-age opportunities, and they were desperately searching. to validate that call since then.
To be sunny, it was not a malicious determination. Leonard was once the newest product in basketball after that run with the Raptors, and no one knew what Gilgeous-Alexander was becoming in Oklahoma Town. If they had the opportunity, they tried like any other team within the league would have done.
Now, the business for Harden? Certain. Leonard’s extension? Certain. Save the debate about how good the Clippers looked during the last few months of the extreme season in the industry. It was never going to the extreme. Harden isn’t winning anything else without Leonard, and Leonard isn’t staying healthy.
The least they could have done, I guess, was latched onto George directly and then they were mostly on Leonard and Harden. But of course it was wise to allow George to go to Philadelphia in sovereign company. This factor is over. But then the Clippers did the worst and half-measured their way to an acceptable balance sheet. They will have to have gotten over the whole method and considered doing business with Leonard or just letting him go. Identical to Harden.
That’s what would have made the most sense in basketball. However, this also has a commercial side that cannot be ignored. The Clippers are opening up an unused field this season. They want names. It’s understandable that they didn’t want to gut their celebrity power list to this actual level. If that’s the reason to pay Leonard and Harden about 1/4 of $1000000000 over the next 3 years, fine.
Don’t buy the argument about basketball intact, though. Because Leonard doesn’t enjoy that much anymore. This is not a coincidence, nor bad luck, nor a bump in the road. This can be a power situation. It is what it is.
It seems like the Clippers couldn’t see that.
