USA Basketball made the decision last week to move on from LA Clippers star Kawhi Leonard, with managing director Grant Hill saying, “USA Basketball and Clippers leadership felt it’s important to allow Kawhi to prepare for the NBA season.”
When Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank was asked to address Leonard’s withdrawal on Monday, he pushed back on the notion that the Clippers wanted to focus on the upcoming season and have Leonard drop out of what would have been his first Olympics. If it were up to the Clippers, Leonard would have stayed on the team.
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“It was USAB’s call, and I was quite frankly very disappointed with the decision,” Frank said. “Kawhi wanted to play. We wanted him to play.”
Leonard missed 12 of the Clippers’ last 14 games (regular season and playoffs) with inflammation in his surgically repaired right knee. Let’s drill deeper into the ongoing saga that is Leonard’s health and how it impacts the Clippers’ team-building efforts.
Is Leonard healthy?
All parties involved suggest he is. Leonard practiced with USA Basketball in Las Vegas, which is more activity than Kevin Durant (calf) has had this month.
Leonard told The Athletic he was planning on working out in Las Vegas for the remainder of the week before heading back home and preparing for the season. Frank declined to discuss any surgeries or other treatments for Leonard but expects him to be ready for training camp in October.
“He wouldn’t be out there and we wouldn’t put him out there if we weren’t confident that he’d be able to go through the entire Olympic experience,” Frank said. “I get it from USAB’s perspective; no one has a crystal ball. … Ultimately, they decided after the third practice that they didn’t feel as confident as we felt. That’s their right. It’s their team.”
The Clippers almost got a best-case scenario from Leonard last season. He missed 14 regular-season games, his fewest since 2016-17. He played a career-high 34.3 minutes per game and had a career-high 76 dunks. He returned to All-Star and All-NBA status for the first time since he tore his ACL in 2021.
But Leonard’s right knee kept him from finishing or participating in the postseason for a fourth straight year. Head coach Tyronn Lue joked after the Clippers were eliminated from the playoffs that LA would go back to load management with Leonard, but there’s an element of truth in that attempt at humor. It’s a matter of when, not if, Leonard will be unavailable. What can the Clippers do about that?
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James Harden insurance
Ioutlined earlier this month how Harden is basically a replacement for the departed Paul George with the Clippers returning to a two-star system. Last season was Harden’s lowest scoring season in 13 years, but unlike George, Harden improved upon his regular-season production in the postseason with Leonard mostly unavailable.
Harden turns 35 years old next month, and the Clippers will have to grapple with the cliff that approaches any player who has more than 40,000 NBA minutes played. Frank didn’t cite Harden’s age specifically, but compare Harden’s age and contract — a two-year deal with a player option in 2025 — with the deal George signed, one that gives George a $56 million player option in 2027. George will turn 37 that year.
“Team building is completely different when your best players are in their 30s,” Frank said.
Harden can still score, and his passing ability unlocks offensive options. As the point guard, Harden has shown he can make regular-season adjustments. Unlike last season, when the Clippers donated games while trying to start both Russell Westbrook and Harden along with George and Leonard, Frank is eager to see the Clippers have a simplified offensive approach that comes with playing through just Leonard and Harden.
Lue has had less to work with before, going 42-40 in 2021-22 despite Leonard missing the entire season and George missing more than half of the season. But is what surrounds Leonard and Harden going into next season enough?
Who is the third scorer?
The most obvious candidate on the roster is Norman Powell. Last year saw a drop in Powell’s volume, but his efficiency was solid, as he made 48.6 percent from the field and a career-best 43.5 percent from 3. Powell finished fourth in Sixth Man of the Year voting back-to-back years and will want a chance to start, but he also may be best suited to dominating second units.
Norman Powell had his best 3-point shooting season in 2023-24. (Cary Edmondson / USA Today)
Terance Mann is an intriguing candidate for an increased offensive role, and he is in a contract year. While Mann was able to become a starter last season, he usually was the last option on the floor offensively while being miscast as a primary point-of-attack defender. The acquisition of Derrick Jones Jr. puts Mann in a role where he likely will guard wings, which he is better suited to do. And while Jones likely will settle into the last option offensively, Mann has shown in the past he is capable of producing more when the ball is in his hands, particularly out of ball screens.
Average points per possession of PnR ball handler scorers last season (0.85, per @SynergySST)
Here’s Terance Mann total ball handler possessions and (PPP) by season
2020: 35 (0.74)
2021: 78 (0.92)
2022: 132 (0.99)
2023: 65 (1.19)
2024: 17 (1.06)Touches about to go way up.
— Law Murray 🛝 (@LawMurrayTheNU) July 16, 2024
Harden’s presence is a boon for Ivica Zubac, a proficient post-up scorer who enjoyed being involved in more roll-man opportunities than at any point of his career. It’s seems likely the Clippers’ top-five scorers will be Leonard, Harden, Powell, Zubac and Mann; all five should be in double figures with decent levels of efficiency.
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“Who elevates themselves as that third, fourth, fifth scorer? Norm obviously, he’s coming off the most efficient scoring season in his career; I expect him to get better,” Frank said. “There’s always the unknowns that take off. And, I think we’ll lean into our depth. I think we have much better depth potentially than we’ve had in the past year or two.”
Being deep means more when you have a player like Leonard who is more likely to miss games. And when one of your top scorers isn’t available, an idea is to win games with defense. The Clippers wanted to produce a top-five defense last season. Even when they were winning games at a high level, around the time of Leonard’s January contract extension, Frank wanted to see the Clippers be a defense-first team. When the Clippers lost 12 of 22 games following the February Grammy road trip, only the Utah Jazz had a worse defensive-efficiency rating.
The Clippers are clearly building a post-George identity. But it’s the offseason, so that won’t stop the noise about potential trades.
The Clippers should just trade for a bucket, right?
Two names that come up repeatedly as potential targets among Clippers fans are Chicago Bulls guard Zach LaVine and New Orleans Pelicans forward Brandon Ingram.
Offensively, LaVine would fit well in a George-type role. LaVine is a good on-ball player with playmaking chops and also has shown he can be a good off-ball player with the ability to shoot with range. LaVine is 6-foot-5 with a 6-8 wingspan, and when he’s focused, he can rebound well and hold up defensively.
The issue isn’t LaVine, the player; it’s LaVine, the asset. He will be 30 years old in March, and two of his past three seasons have been curtailed by injuries that required surgery. Last season, LaVine struggled with a right foot injury that ended his season in January. In the 2022 offseason, he underwent arthroscopic knee surgery on the same left leg in which he tore his ACL in 2017.
The 2021-22 season also was the only time in LaVine’s 10-year career that he was on a playoff team. LaVine signed a five-year, $215.2 million contract in the 2022 offseason that gives him a near-$49 million player option in 2026. The durability concerns for LaVine don’t get easier as he approaches 30, and he’s not the scorer he was in 2021 when he averaged 27.4 points per game. Last season, he averaged 19.5 points per game, with a seven-year low of 4.1 free-throw attempts per game.
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Most notably, LaVine hasn’t moved the needle for the Bulls in terms of winning. The Bulls were 39-43 last season with him playing 872 minutes. With LaVine playing 2,768 minutes in 2022-23, the Bulls were 40-42. Any team taking on LaVine has to determine whether it is prudent to give up the depth required to get him, how to defend competently with him on the team, how to keep him healthy and whether it is worth tying up short- and long-term flexibility.
There’s asimilar dilemma with Ingram. In a vacuum, Ingram is a 20-point scorer who gets to the free-throw line at a high rate and has a proficient midrange game while adding plus playmaking from the wing (5.7 assists per game last season). He turns 27 in September, and at 6-8, he’s a small forward capable of holding up defensively.
But Ingram will make $36 million next season in the final year of his contract. Any team taking on Ingram has to determine what it would give up to get him and how much it would take to extend him. Ingram has his own durability concerns, as he has missed an average of 22 games in his past seven seasons. When it comes to rebounding or making impact defensive plays, Ingram has mostly underwhelmed, and while he is a good shooter, he is not a particularly high-volume 3-point shooter, which lessens his impact off the ball.
Ingram also has to overcome some rough moments with elevated stakes. He is only 2-8 in the playoffs for his career, and he shot only 34.5 percent from the field in the Oklahoma City Thunder’s sweep of New Orleans in April. Ingram also acquitted himself poorly last summer in the FIBA World Cup, with Lue on staff.
OK, but what about a power forward?
The Clippers are not correlating Leonard’s knee issues with the position he nominally lines up at. Jones and Leonard likely are the starting forwards for the Clippers. Nicolas Batum (6-8, 230 pounds) and Amir Coffey (6-7, 210) likely are the backups. The average size of a starting power forward in the NBA last season was 6-8 and 229 pounds. Kobe Brown is 6-7 and 250 pounds, and the 24-year-old has a pathway for minutes whenever Leonard or Batum is out, as well as being a possible center option in certain lineups.
Leonard is listed at 6-7, 225. The NBA champion Boston Celtics started Jayson Tatum (6-8, 210) at power forward. The Western Conference champion Dallas Mavericks started P.J. Washington (6-7, 230) at the position. The Thunder started Jalen Williams (6-5, 211) at power forward last season, though 7-1, 208-pound Chet Holmgren is likely moving there to make room for Isaiah Hartenstein.
Among some of the frequently promoted names on the power forward trade market, Utah’s John Collins was such a bad fit next to center Walker Kessler that Collins had to start at center. Collins is a good rebounder but hasn’t been a respectable defender in years. Fellow 2017 first-rounder Kyle Kuzma is a decent player, but he’s not a particularly impactful one; he was the starting power forward on the worst rebounding team the NBA has seen in 10 years. Portland’s Jerami Grant is 30 years old, undersized at 6-7 and 214 pounds, and has missed an average of 25 games a year since leaving the Nuggets in 2020. He averaged 3.5 rebounds per night as a 33-minute-per-game starter last season and has a 2027 player option that would pay him $36.4 million.
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The Clippers want to be opportunistic for trades. But they seem to value sustainability, as well.
“We’re not going to (go) all of a sudden with, ‘OK, Paul’s out, let’s go run and do something that maybe doesn’t fit within the big picture, that could be reckless,'” Frank said. “We’ll look at everything, but we’re not going to be reckless if it really sacrifices future flexibility going forward, because I think we’re going to be very good in the short term. We’re also going to have flexibility long term to make this a sustainable organization that’s always in pursuit of winning championships.”
Required Reading
- Lawrence Frank talks Kevin Porter Jr. signing and more
- ‘Hungry’ Jordan Miller makes his case for roster spot
(Top photo of James Harden and Kawhi Leonard: Kiyoshi Mio / USA Today)
Law Murray is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the LA Clippers. Prior to joining The Athletic, he was an NBA editor at ESPN, a researcher at NFL Media and a contributor to DrewLeague.com and ClipperBlog. Law is from Philadelphia, Pa., and is a graduate of California University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. Follow Law on Twitter @LawMurrayTheNU
