It's flown under the radar a bit, drowned out byhigher-wattage,Wilt-abuttingfeats of offensive significance, but the Los Angeles Clippers earned their own bit of NBA history this week — a perhaps ignominious honor, but an honor all the same.
You might recall the Clippers were, well,down horrendousearlier this season. What was constructed to bethe oldest NBA roster evergot off to a positively disastrous start, going 3-18 from early November through mid-December amid an unsettling investigation into reports the organizationdeliberately sought to circumvent the salary capto sign Kawhi Leonard in 2019, a raft of injuries to a number of key contributors (including, most notably,Leonard) and thenear-immediate curdling and stunning endof Chris Paul's return to the franchise. A week before Christmas, they sat at 6-21, a half-game out of last place in the West, with the NBA'sthird-worst defenseand the point differential of a 24-win team.
No team in NBA history that had fallen 15 games below .500 had ever clawed its way back to a winning record in that same season … until now. Wednesday's emphatic153-128 drubbingof the Minnesota Timberwolves brought the Clippers to 33-32 on the season — back above .500 for the first timesince Halloween, making them the first team in NBA history to get all the way back into the black after being so deep in the red.
The Clippers have won six of their last seven, moving ahead of theinjury-wracked and sputtering Warriorsinto eighth place in the Western Conference. At 6.5 games back of the sixth-place Wolves with just 17 games left, it's nearly impossible that the Clips will be able to climb out of the play-in tournament; thepublic-facingprojectionmodelsgive them single-digit odds of rising all the way up to sixth over the final month.
If they can advance out of the play-in, though, they'll be the proverbial Team Nobody Wants To Face in Round 1 — a team that boasts the NBA'ssecond-best recordandfifth-best net ratingsince Dec. 20, that has outscored opponentsby 9.4 points per 100 possessionssince drastically overhauling its roster at February's trade deadline, that is undefeatedsince newcomer Darius Garland's debut two weeks ago… and that can enter damn near any matchup with a legitimate reason to believe it has the best player in the series.
After that dominant victory over the Wolves, head coach Tyronn Lue was asked what was working so well in an offensive explosion that tied the Clippers' franchise mark for the most points ever scored in a regulation game. His answer, according toClippers beat reporter Justin Russo, was two words long: "Kawhi Leonard."
The Clippers felt like a relative winner of the2026 NBA trade deadline, if only because their decisionsto tradeJames Harden (a 36-year-old All-Star point guard who can enter unrestricted free agency this summer) for Garland (a26-year-old All-Star point guardunder contract through 2028) and Ivica Zubac (an about-to-turn 29-year-old starting center) for 23-year-old Bennedict Mathurin, 24-year-old Isaiah Jackson andwhat could be a mid-lottery pickin the highly touted 2026 NBA Draft seemed to signal an organizational understanding that the time had come to look to the future. Those moves suggested a dawning awareness that the championship contender the franchise had hoped was on the horizon ever since 2019 just wasn't coming, and that the most prudent course of action would be to start focusing on building the next competitive iteration of Clippers basketball.
"Obviously, you need luck in this league," Leonardtold reporters after the Harden trade. "With shots, with injuries, with everything, so it's just how it played out. I wanted to give it another run, but it didn't happen that way, so now we're here. [...] [That era is] over. Guys are gone."
One thing the Clippersdidn'tdo, though — in spite ofsignificantreportedinterest— was trade Kawhi. And that matters. Because, as it turns out — even after all the load management and letdowns, all the injuries and investigations — "the next competitive iteration of Clippers basketball" might still just be "the one with Kawhi on it."
Advertisement
Leonard is averaging a career-high 28.3 points per game, tied for seventh in the NBA, to go with 6.4 rebounds and 3.8 assists, shooting 50.3% from the field, 38% from 3-point range and 90.6% from the foul line — good for a true shooting percentage of 63%. He'sshooting 75% at the rim and 51% from midrange, both matching or exceeding career highs; he is scoring more, and more efficiently, than he has in his entire 14-year career, all while beingtied for the league lead in stealsand ranking just outside the top 15 intotal deflections.
Out of 91 players getting at least 55 touches per game, Leonard ranksfirstin points per touch, ahead of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama and every other high-volume scorer in the game. He is drawing every team's best perimeter defender every night, demanding in-your-jersey attention toone of the league's highest degrees, and rendering it irrelevant with maddeningly metronomic consistency. (Leonard has scored 20 or more points in 43 consecutive games, whichmight not sound like a lotat this particular moment, but is, I assure you, a lot — thesecond-longest such streak in Clippers franchise history, and the14th-longest since the introduction of the 3-point line in 1979.)
His ability to just disregard a defense's best-laid plans and most honorable intentions, repeatedly getting to his spots for those automatic line-drive midrange pull-ups, can be awe-inspiring … even to theotherbest scorers in the world.
"In all honesty, Kawhi might be one of the best players to ever play the game when he's healthy," Minnesota superstar Anthony Edwardstold reportersafter watching Leonard hang 40-plus on his Wolves for thesecond timein just over a month. "I think a lot of his peers feel the same way about him. If he's healthy, 100%, ain't no stopping Kawhi. So I mean, you gotta deal with it. And he dealt it to us tonight. Again."
Yes, it's that time of year again: Winter's turning to spring,Lucy's holding the football, and Leonard — looking fully healthy after dealing with an early-season ailment — is dealing it to … well, everyone.
As ever, Leonard's brand of ball — high-volume, high-efficiency scoring; extremely low-turnover play; additive work as a defensive rebounder and secondary facilitator — makes him one of the highest-impact players in the sport, and an advanced statistical darling. For the season, he ranks second inDARKO daily plus-minus; third inplayer efficiency ratingandregularized adjusted plus-minus; fifth inbox plus-minus,value over replacement player,estimated plus-minusandThe BBall Index's LEBRON; and ninth inwin sharesandwin shares per 48 minutes. The Clippers have outscored opponents by 7 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessionsin his minutes— equivalent to atop-five net ratingover the course of the full season — and havebeenoutscored by 6.5 points-per-100 whenhe's not on the court. That plus-13.5 on/off swing is thethird-largest in the NBAamong players who've logged at least 1,000 minutes, behind only Nikola Jokić and Wembanyama.
That sort of résumé would put him in the company of upper-echelon MVP candidates like Gilgeous-Alexander, Jokić and Wembanyama, though the Clippers' status as a play-in squad would likely prevent him from climbingtoofar up the ballot … if, that is, he even winds up meeting the65-game requirement for year-end awards consideration. Entering Friday's meeting with the Chicago Bulls, Leonard has played in 51 of the Clippers' 65 games, meaning he can miss only three games the rest of the way.
The Clippers have gone 29-22 in those 51 appearances, compared to 4-10 without him — and25-9with Leonard in the lineup, a 60-win pace, since Dec. 20. That includes five wins in five tries since the addition of Garland — a hiccup-quick, high-volume and high-accuracy 3-point shooter who's also an elite pick-and-roll playmaker when healthy.
The Clips have outscored opponents by40 points in 77 minutes with both Leonard and Garland on the floor, scoring a scorching 136.3 points per 100 possessions. (They've alsowon the non-Kawhi minutes when Garland's there to run the show, which is a handy bonus.) They're still getting to know one another and ironing out the kinks, but the early returns have been very promising — and, to hear the new arrival tell it, the learning curve hasn't been nearly as steep as you might think.
"It's pretty easy to play with him," Garlandrecently told reporters. "Because everybody's afraid of him."
It's flown under the radar a bit, drowned out byhigher-wattage,Wilt-abuttingfeats of offensive significance, but the ...
