Why Kawhi Leonard's 7 Years with LA Clippers Were a Spectacular Failure

Kawhi Leonard's tenure with the Los Angeles Clippers is over, and it will go down as a failure—one almost every other team in the league would have signed up for if given the opportunity.

That's a proper paradox, which seems about right considering Leonard's defining characteristic was being hard to figure out.

But now that ESPN's Shams Charania has reported the two-time Finals MVP is headed back to the Toronto Raptors in a blockbuster trade, we can pass judgment on the entire Kawhi Era in L.A.

A proper assessment has to start at the beginning, with the wild night seven years ago when L.A. inked Leonard to a four-year, $141 million deal and simultaneously sent five unprotected first-round picks, two swaps, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Danilo Gallinari to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Paul George.

It was a massive price to pay for George, but the thinking at the time was that Leonard wasn't coming to L.A. (and was probably going to the Los Angeles Lakers) unless the Clips landed George.

In that sense, L.A. gave up all that stuff for both players—not George alone.

Clippers owner Steve Ballmer was mildly excited about the whole thing:

How might he have reacted if someone had told him his new superteam had just given up the best player in the bargain, wouldn't see the Finals and would win just the 14th-most playoff games in the league over the next seven years?

There's no such thing as a subdued Steve Ballmer, but he might have reeled things in just a touch.

An important point: Nobody knew Gilgeous-Alexander would become the best player in the league while leading the Thunder to a title, but the Clippers don't get a pass for dealing him. There's always a risk that a young player could grow beyond expectations, and L.A. took it.

If you want to torture Clippers fans, just bring up the alternate reality that features SGA, endless cashflow and all those picks.

In some ways, that's where the analysis could stop. SGA outperformed Leonard and almost everyone else in the seven years since that deal went down, securing the title that L.A. never won and running off several deep playoff runs that the Clippers couldn't match.

Leonard missed one entire season (2021-22) with injury and averaged 55 games played in the six other seasons he spent with the Clippers. Considering he finished fifth in MVP voting in 2019-20 and 13th in 2020-21, L.A. was the winner of the trade until things flipped in 2021-22. From 2022-23 onward, Gilgeous-Alexander finished fifth or better in MVP voting and won the award twice.

That said, the Clippers' .587 winning percentage is fourth-best in the entire league since Leonard joined the team. Not once did L.A. finish below .500, and the only time it missed the playoffs was the season Leonard sat out with a knee injury. Even then, the Clips were a respectable 42-40.

Whenever healthy, Leonard was basically who the Clippers needed and expected him to be: A two-way force capable of being the best player on the floor in any given game or series, regardless of the opponent. Across the entirety of his Clippers career from 2019-20 to 2025-26, Leonard averaged 25.1 points, 6.4 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 1.7 steals.

No player in the league matched or beat those averages during that time span, and it's worth noting that Leonard's playoff numbers—27.7 points, 8.2 rebounds, 4.8 assists and 2.0 steals—were even better.

Of course, L.A. only made it to one Conference Finals with Kawhi on the roster, and it hasn't won a first-round series since 2021. Relative to expectations when Leonard came aboard, that last fact is a colossal disappointment. Plagued by the same sporadic availability that defined his regular seasons, Leonard often struggled to stay healthy in the playoffs as well.

Perhaps the best illustration came in 2023 when he averaged 34.5 points in Games 1 and 2 of the first round against the Phoenix Suns, triggering no shortage of claims that this guy was as good as anybody in the league, always was and only needed to stay on the floor to prove it. And once we were all done being awestruck by Leonard's dominance early in that series, we had to sit glumly and watch him miss the rest of it with injury.

There's your microcosm of seven years in L.A. Leonard was unimpeachably spectacular when on the floor, and the Clippers seemed legitimately threatening at the highest levels during those stretches. It just never held together long enough and, to spread the blame a little, the supporting cast wasn't exactly a collection of iron men, either.

George averaged 53 games per season in L.A., fewer than Leonard.

The Clippers didn't get what they hoped for when they shocked the league with an exceptionally bold offseason gambit seven years ago. Their plans failed, even if they enjoyed more success than just about any team that didn't win a championship during that stretch.

In the end, L.A. aimed high and missed.

Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.

Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Bluesky and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.