The Kawhi Leonard renaissance that the NBA didn’t see coming

LOS ANGELES — Thursday night was the kind of scene the Los Angeles Clippers have dreamed about for nearly a decade: a raucous, sold-out crowd erupting in cheers following the first playoff win in their own arena.

After taking a resounding 2-1 lead in their first-round series against Denver, the Clippers are the NBA championship contender that no one predicted.

And it has been made possible by the career renaissance few saw coming.

In recent weeks, Kawhi Leonard has looked every bit the elite scorer and perimeter defender the Clippers thought they were getting in 2019 when Leonard, weeks removed from earning the second NBA Finals MVP honor of his career, signed with the Clippers in a free-agency coup.

Yet that was six years ago, a lifetime in a league where championship windows open rarely and close quickly.

“The best thing for him was taking the summer off and getting right,” said an executive from a rival team. “I just can’t believe how skinny he looks. He just looks like he’s so much lighter and moving so much better and playing back to the way he was before. It’s just amazing.”

Leonard has looked this dominant in the postseason before while in a Clippers uniform, starting in 2021. But during a second-round series against Utah, just as Leonard and Paul George were playing their best as teammates, Leonard took an innocuous bump from Utah’s Joe Ingles on a fast break and missed the rest of that postseason, and the entire 2021-22 season, as well, with a knee injury that required surgery.

Clippers playoff runs in 2023 and 2024 also ended with Leonard injured — a string of strains, inflammation and partial and complete tears to knee ligaments that left other teams so scared about his ability to stay on the court that in 2023, executives around the NBA described his trade value as zilch.

Entering this season, his premature endings to past campaigns, along with the departure of George in free agency, lowered his team’s championship expectations. Oddsmakers put the Clippers’ over-under for victories at 35.5 wins. Leonard didn’t even make his season debut until early January — when half the season was over.

Yet the Clippers finished with 50 wins anyway, after winning 18 of their last 21 games. And Leonard averaged 25.7 points on 52% shooting, including 42% on three-pointers, over his final 19 games. 

His injury history has led fans, scouts and executives around the league to continue to hold their breath as they wait to see how long Leonard can remain healthy while playing heavy minutes.

“If you have watched Kawhi closely enough you know what’s possible,” said Oscar-winning director and writer Phil Lord, a longtime Clippers fan. “He made it possible. His elite work ethic has led once again to elite play. But I never want to see Joe Ingles anywhere near him ever again.”

Yet for now, Leonard has produced emphatic playoff moments, such as his 39 points while missing only four shots in a Game 2 win to even the Clippers’ series with Denver. In Game 3, he scored 21 points and grabbed 11 rebounds.

“This is what Kawhi lives for,” Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said this week. “And we know if we have a healthy Kawhi, we can win any series.”

Leonard himself could have predicted this. After returning from a knee injury following the 2023 season, he routinely described his recovery as a two-year timeline that he wasn’t looking to rush by “skipping steps.”

“Anybody in the business that is playing knows how hard it is to come back from injury or playing in the NBA. They understand what we all go through and what I went through,” Leonard said after the win.

As a beat reporter who covered Leonard daily during his first five seasons in Los Angeles, I have never been around a more routine-oriented player. Each pregame warmup was done at the same speed, with the same repetitions and drills, against the same assistant coaches. The irony that complicated his team’s championship ambitions, however, was that it was never predictable whether Leonard would be on the court.

It had even led to criticism of Leonard’s desire to play. But Clint Parks, a skills trainer who worked with Leonard as a teenager and early during his NBA career, said that could not be further from the motivation that has allowed Leonard to turn from an overlooked college recruit and NBA role player at the beginning of his career into a No. 1 option for a title team.

“His self-belief from Day 1 has always been one of one. He’s never not believed in himself at the highest, highest level,” Parks said. “He’s always had this work ethic. He’s always been focused. He’s always been a self-starter. At 14, he said he wanted to be one of the best to ever play basketball. That was his thing.”

“Over the years, he’s pushed toward that, and that’s exactly what he’s become, regardless of the injuries. People always talk about, ‘Oh, he could be top 10 if he didn’t miss all that time and wasn’t injured.’ Shoot, if he can finish the job and somehow bring home a championship to the Clippers, he will still be top 10 all time with all the injuries and everything and all the time he’s missed.”

Each of the last two seasons, Leonard had produced stretches that resembled a return to the form that made him a six-time All-Star, two-time defensive player of the year and a member of the NBA’s team of the 75 all-time players. Yet in 2023, after a dominating start to a first-round playoff series against Phoenix, Leonard suffered a season-ending knee injury. And last year, after the Clippers looked to be the NBA’s best team for a two-month stretch, he hobbled out of the playoffs yet again in a loss to Dallas.

The feeling around the league one year ago, said the rival executive, “was just like, ‘Uh-oh, here we go again.’”

Playing under a carefully monitored ramp-up of his workload, it took Leonard one month after his season debut to crack 30 minutes for the first time. One month later, in March, he passed the 40-minute mark. And in the playoffs, he is passing most expectations for how this 33-year-old superstar could still perform.

“He’s back to looking like the best player in the world,” Parks said.