Kawhi Leonard injury: Where do Clippers go from here after latest piece of bad news for aging superstar

It’s hard to pinpoint an original sin here. Every step that took the Clippers to this point was at least defensible in the moment. Trading Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a mountain of draft picks for Paul George looks terrible now. It also created a championship favorite. Doubling down on James Harden was riskier, but, well, they had two aging All-Stars already. If there’s ever a time to invest assets in the present, wouldn’t it be then? Kawhi Leonard had played in 32 of a possible 36 games for the Clippers on the day they signed him to a three-year extension last season. He was averaging almost 24 points on nearly 50-40-90 shooting for a 23-13 team. Letting Paul George leave that same team over the summer made sense in light of how the season ended. The Clippers of January were far more promising than their April counterparts. The full weight of the new CBA was starting to come down on the entire league.

The decisions weren’t bulletproof, but the process largely made sense. The Clippers made an aggressive, five-year push for a championship that often included, if only for briefer stretches, championship-level performance. They mostly allocated resources in responsible ways and targeted the right sorts of players. They never came off like a team without a plan. Their plan just didn’t work. One of the three stars that was supposed to bring them their championship is currently a member of the Philadelphia 76ers. The one they imported from the 76ers couldn’t shoot 39% after the All-Star break. Leonard, the best of the three, seems injured beyond repair.

No matter what got the Clippers here, the outcome is the same. This era of Clippers basketball is over. Let’s make that clear from the jump. There’s no clever pivot. There’s no world in which the scrappy new crew of role players rallies, Leonard comes back healthy in a few weeks and the Clippers scrimp together whatever meager assets are left to trade for someone else’s unvalued All-Star like Zach LaVine or Brandon Ingram. This iteration of the Clippers has run its course. They are going to be bad this season. Maybe not “send Cooper Flagg to Oklahoma City” bad, but almost certainly “send a higher single-digit draft slot to Oklahoma City” bad. That is going to happen. It is going to be embarrassing. And there is very little the Clippers can do about that.

But the Clippers are, broadly, a team that tends to have a plan, and even if there’s no plan that salvages the present short of a miraculous leg transplant for Leonard, this isn’t a front office that is going to take half of a decade in the dumpster lying down. Even if it takes a few years to enact, the Clippers are clearly working towards something. They wouldn’t have let George walk for free without some idea of how they wanted to spend that money in the longer term. So the question we’re now facing is how the Clippers dig themselves out of this hole.

It’s going to be a herculean task. Most of the assets a normal team would use to rebuild currently belong to Oklahoma City and Philadelphia. The Clippers can’t tank their way out of this. There is no notable youth on the roster and their first-round picks are encumbered until 2030. Don’t count on them flipping Leonard for some of those assets back, either. Someone might have taken a risk on an injury-prone mega star under the 2017 CBA. In a world in which the younger and healthier Ingram barely registers a blip on the trade market because of his anticipated contract demands, no one is taking on a three-year Leonard deal. Who could afford $50 million on a player on who might not be able to suit up more than once a week?

This isn’t going to be a traditional teardown. It will have to be something closer to the rebuild the late-2010’s Nets embarked upon in the years leading up to their signings of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. They’re going to have to win on the margins while setting up some sort of lower-cost path to a star acquisition under a reasonable timetable. They probably won’t be able to draft a star until 2030 at the earliest. There are ways they can land an older one before then.

The Bucks might be an instructive example in this regard. Milwaukee cashed in its draft chips in 2020 by trading for Jrue Holiday. They were considered asset-poor thereafter, but still managed to trade for Damian Lillard three years later largely because of the natural replenishment of draft capital that comes with time. Teams can only trade picks seven years out. Milwaukee’s 2028, 2029 and 2030 picks were available to be traded for Lillard specifically because they weren’t available to be traded for Holiday. You can keep making YOLO trades if just wait a few years in between them. 

Right now, the Clippers have picks available in 2030 and 2031. Those probably aren’t getting them anywhere on the trade market. Let’s say the Clippers endure two more bad years before turning the page. Suddenly, the Clippers’ picks in 2030 and 2032, along with swaps in 2031 and 2033 are available. That’s a heftier package, and with Leonard’s contract expiring in the summer of 2027, the last year of his deal could be comfortably used as matching money in something bigger.

Leonard has one of the only deals on the books for that 2026-27 season. It’s him, Ivica Zubac, Derrick Jones Jr. and Kobe Brown. With the cap expected to rise 10% annually, the Clippers will comfortably clear max cap space if they don’t add any more long-term money between now and then. The question is who they might be able to use it on.

Free agency has fallen out of vogue as a vehicle for star movement lately. Stars have largely been able to have their cake and eat it too—the all-in era has fostered the idea that you can re-sign with your original team to ensure your financial future and then force a trade wherever you want and that team will simply pony up the vast quantity of draft picks it will take to land you. The aprons are a form of resistance against that thought process. The second apron, in particular, is so restrictive that star trades are going to be almost impossible for certain teams. More often than not, the teams a star wants to go to are the ones who will now be too expensive to get them.

The star the Clippers lost might be the example that sets their new blueprint here. The Clippers signed George at the height of free agency’s power in the NBA — 2019, an offseason in which four reigning All-NBA players signed outright with new teams. Free agency died down from there, but when George tried to get traded to Golden State before free agency began in 2024, the Clippers and Warriors couldn’t agree to a deal in part because of all of the moving parts financially. There were no such complications with the 76ers. He could sign with them outright, so he did. This might be the new model for star movement. Getting traded to an existing contender may no longer be financially feasible, so stars will have to build their own winners on more flexible teams.

This seems especially relevant in light of the potentially loaded 2026 free agent class. Luka Doncic, Trae Young, De’Aaron Fox and Kristaps Porzingis headline what could be the best group of unrestricted free agents in years. Many of those players will extend ahead of time. Inevitably, one or two will be available. Historically speaking, Los Angeles tends to be pretty appealing to free agents. Having those draft picks and an expiring Leonard deal could prove useful in this respect. If there’s a player that one of these 2026 free agents wants to link up with in a premium market, the Clippers could potentially have the tools to accommodate them much as they did George and Leonard in 2019.

The specific names involved here are unknowable on a two-year time horizon, but some version of this approach is probably the quickest path back to relevance available to the Clippers. The 76ers just showed us that free agency could be making a comeback, and the Bucks showed us how quickly a team can get back into the star trade market. If the Clippers are comfortable being uncomfortable for another few years, there are paths back in the playoffs available to them before the end of the decade. Given how bleak every other option now looks, that’s the only plan worth pursuing.