Hot Takes We Might Actually Believe: Los Angeles Clippers are your 2023 NBA champions
The 2022-23 NBA season is almost upon us, but Hot Take SZN is here, and at the end of another eventful offseason we will see how close to the sun we can fly and still stand the swelter of these viewpoints.
It has been more than three years since Kawhi Leonard led the Toronto Raptors to the NBA championship, cementing himself as the best player alive, and 16 months since we last saw him play basketball in earnest.
Why would anyone think, after losing two prime seasons to injury, the two-time Finals MVP can reach those heights again and lead the Los Angeles Clippers to their first title? Because they are built to get him there.
Kawhi Leonard, apex predator
Leonard has played 178 regular season games since former Golden State Warriors center Zaza Pachulia stepped under his left ankle midway through Game 1 of the 2017 Western Conference finals — an average of 36 games over the past five seasons. He missed all but nine games of his 2017-18 campaign for the San Antonio Spurs with right quadriceps tendinopathy and the entirety of last season to a partial right ACL tear.
In between, the Raptors load managed him to the playoffs in 2019, splitting back-to-backs and building in a handful of longer rest periods throughout the regular season. He proceeded to submit one of the greatest postseason performances in league history, averaging a 31-9-4 (49/38/88 shooting splits) and playing top-fight defense en route to avenging his 2017 loss to the Warriors and securing his second Finals MVP award.
Leonard joined the Clippers in 2019 free agency, recruiting Paul George to form one of the most formidable wing combinations the NBA has ever seen. Then, the world turned on its axis. The Clippers were in second place in the West when COVID-19 shut the league down in March 2020. They reconvened four months later in Orlando, where Leonard averaged a 33-10-5 to beat the Dallas Mavericks in a first-round playoff series.
It was then that George first shared on national television his battle with depression in the bubble. Within two weeks, the Clippers suffered a devastating playoff collapse, blowing a 3-1 conference semifinals lead and double-digit advantages in all three of their close-out opportunities against the Denver Nuggets. We were robbed of an all-Los Angeles finals in the Western Conference, and the Lakers went on to win the title.
The only time since 2016 a healthy Leonard has lost a playoff series was in the midst of a global pandemic. When he plays, he wins. A lot. Since Leonard's All-Star debut at age 24, the Spurs, Raptors and Clippers have won 73% of his appearances — a 60-win pace in the regular season. He turned 31 years old in June.
The Clippers continued to provide Leonard with regular rest during the 2020-21 season, as he approached his 30th birthday. They entered the 2021 playoffs as a home playoff seed, and he entered a man on fire. He again out-dueled Luka Doncic, averaging a 32-8-5 on 61/43/90 shooting splits to oust the Mavericks in a seven-game, first-round series. As Leonard was in the process of tying a second-round series the Clippers ultimately won against the Utah Jazz, he planted awkwardly on his right foot and partially tore his ACL.
In Leonard's absence, George pushed the Phoenix Suns to six games in the 2021 Western Conference finals, averaging a 29-11-6 in defeat. Leonard has not played since, despite reports throughout last season that he was "ahead of schedule in his rehab" and had not been ruled out of a potential playoff return.
Bottomless wings
George suffered an elbow injury in December 2021 and joined Leonard on the shelf for all but 31 games last season. Still, the Clippers won 42 games and finished eighth in the West. Amid optimism that they could emerge from the play-in tournament and extend their season long enough for Leonard to reenter the fold, George tested positive for COVID-19 hours before a win-or-go-home game against the New Orleans Pelicans. Just like that, their season was over, another blown 13-point, fourth-quarter lead withstanding.
Reggie Jackson led the 2021-22 Clippers in total points, scoring roughly 400 more than Terance Mann, Luke Kennard and Marcus Morris. There is a decent chance none of them are among the team's top three scorers this season, if not the top four. That is how frightening the reloaded Clippers' offense should be.
They owned the league's third-rated offense during the 2020-21 season, when Leonard and George combined for 106 appearances — a total they could eclipse in 2022-23, even with conservative load management. From their playoff rotation two years ago, the Clippers have removed only Patrick Beverley and added Norman Powell, John Wall and Robert Covington. All of them might come off their bench.
The Clippers are stacked on paper. They are deeper than any team on the wings, where most NBA games are won. The presence of Powell, Morris, Mann, Kennard, Covington and Nicolas Batum will allow them to regularly rest Leonard and George and still win regular-season games. This does not even account for Amir Coffey and Brandon Boston, both of whom have shown considerable flashes of promise. The Clippers can field five-man lineups full of wings who can score from every level and defend across any position.
John Wall, superfluous All-Star
The point guards, Wall and Jackson, are a luxury.
Wall has not played a full season since 2016-17, when as a perennial All-Star he led the Washington Wizards to within a quarter of the Eastern Conference finals. It has been 44 months since he ruptured his left Achilles tendon. He returned to play 40 games during the 2020-21 season, averaging 20.6 points and 6.9 assists in 32.2 minutes per game, before the Houston Rockets shelved him in pursuit of consecutive top-three draft picks. That included all of last season, when Wall was physically cleared to contribute.
This past summer, Wall secured a buyout of the $47.4 million owed to him this season, the final year of the supermax contract extension he signed in 2017. He joined the Clippers on a taxpayer midlevel exception salary of $6.5 million. Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue is expected to name Jackson the starter, but Wall — with the benefit of hindsight on a horrific chapter in his life — appears ready to accept the role he is given.
Even if his explosiveness has lost some juice, Wall still has some of the best court vision in the game. He is a master of creating corner 3-point opportunities for his teammates, and he has a roster full of players who can knock them down. We should never read too much into the preseason, but the fact Wall can score 20 points on 11 shots in 20 minutes of any game is not just encouraging for the Clippers — it's invigorating.
Jackson, also a buyout addition to the roster in February 2020, was a revelation in the 2021 playoffs, averaging 21.4 points on 49/37/86 shooting spits over the final eight games without Leonard. Jackson has a career's worth of experience vacillating between complementary and primary roles and fills both well. Regardless of who starts at point guard, opponents will face 48 minutes without a break at the position.
Tyronn Lue, superstar whisperer
The only position the Clippers do not have a plus player as their backup is center, where Ivica Zubac will start. Third-year journeyman Moses Brown and second-round rookie Moussa Diabaté were the only players taller than 6-foot-8 invited to training camp. Both emerged from the preseason with two-way contracts.
Zubac is good. He has averaged a double-double per 36 minutes on 60% shooting for his career. The losses of Isaiah Hartenstein and Serge Ibaka behind him are not insignificant, but the Clippers can fill their non-Zubac minutes with small-ball options, most likely Covington and Morris. They were in the plus column in limited possessions without a traditional center last season, largely without their two best players.
Denver's Nikola Jokic, the two-time reigning MVP, is the only serious threat among West contenders to leverage the Clippers' lack of size at center. He punished Zubac and Montrezl Harrell in the 2020 playoffs.
The Golden State Warriors demonstrated last season how small ball can be used as a weapon against Jokic, too. The defending champions scored 122.5 points per 100 possessions with Jokic on the floor in their first-round series. The final four teams standing in last season's playoffs closed games with Draymond Green, Al Horford, Bam Adebayo and Maxi Kleber at center. Every champion from the past decade has weaponized lineups featuring non-traditional centers to unlock their full potential and break games open.
Among them was the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers, who benched Timofey Mozgov in favor of playing Tristan Thompson, Channing Frye, Kevin Love and even Richard Jefferson at center. Their coach? Lue, who has a reputation as one of the league's best at making adjustments from minute to minute and game to game.
Lue's teams have never underachieved, and he has managed the biggest egos in the sport to maximize rosters that have never fallen short of a conference finals in four playoff appearances. He built a top-10 defense last season without his two-time Defensive Player of the Year for the entire year and another four-time All-Defensive wing for more than half of it. Imagine his excitement at this team's depth and versatility.
Lue can tinker with lineups all season long, resting his stars and satiating his well-compensated reserves, without sacrificing too many wins. They have the talent to field top-five units on both ends of the floor with any number of roster combinations. Everything, of course, hinges on getting Leonard and George to the playoffs, and then unleashing them on the league. Never has a team been better prepared to do just that.
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Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach
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