The Clippers' superteam goes missing again

PLUS: It's getting cold in Boston and a rant about the NBA's cowardly scheduling.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Night and Sleep, Evelyn De Morgan, 1878

The L.A. Clippers were officially eliminated from the NBA playoffs on Tuesday night, losing to the Phoenix Suns 4-1 after a spirited fight by the team over the last couple of games despite missing both Paul George (injured late in the regular season) and Kawhi Leonard (re-injured in the series). In the four years since the superstars teamed up in Los Angeles, the Clippers have played in 39 postseason games (including the play-in tournament). George played in 33 of them. Kawhi played in 25.

This is obviously an abject failure, despite the Clippers franchise getting further than they ever had before in 2021. That was their best chance to win a title, though it was far from ordained even if Leonard stayed healthy: Giannis Antetokounmpo didn’t look like someone likely to be denied his first ring. But of course, we have seen Kawhi do crazy things in the playoffs against Giannis. This season — 2022-23 — was the Clippers’ next best chance, but George’s injury followed by the bad draw with Phoenix in the first round made the path more difficult. Kawhi’s knee sprain going into Game 3 ended it. They got into the top-6 to avoid the play-in, and their two stars were only able to play two games of the series. It’s just an enormous disappointment.

They likely have one more run at it before a shake-up, either self-imposed by them or handed down from the Clippers’ braintrust. Both are under contract for the 2023-24 season. As smart analysts have noted, the Clippers plan to debut in their new arena in 2024-25, so there is added incentive to keep a star-laden version of the Clippers rolling. That said, I’m not exactly sure how suited these Clippers are to building a fandom: they have not been highly competitive in the postseason, Kawhi is not exactly a universally known face of the league and they don’t play a particularly attractive style. The Other Guys on the team — especially Russell Westbrook, Terance Mann and Norm Powell — play their hearts out and gave Phoenix far more than it wanted or expected in this series. But they are not central to the squad. Kawhi and George are, and we have seen the issues with that.

On the other hand, we have seen something like this with LeBron re-committing to the Lakers despite a couple of disaster seasons of late. Los Angeles is its own recruiter for this generation, and the Clippers have the benefit of Kawhi and PG being Southern California natives. In that light, the stars may very well accept contract extensions that gets them through the opening of the Intuit Dome. And of course, it takes just one healthy postseason. We know what Kawhi is capable of in the playoffs. We know PG is a great player. It takes just one healthy postseason, and they could crown the franchise.

So this is a failed state, but one stuck quite possibly in mutual statis, unless Steve Ballmer gets frustrated enough with the shortfalls to demand a change or Kawhi and/or PG are annoyed enough to want to leave L.A. after all this. I’m not exactly sure who they’d be mad at other than The Fates, but never minimize the human capacity to unfairly assign blame.

I would say that we’ll see what the stars say in the next few days, but then one of them never really says anything at all. So we wait, like Clippers fans all these years, hoping this will all someday pay off.