The Kawhi Era

Just after midnight on July 6, 2019, the Clippers landed the best player in that summer's market and the All-Star he demanded as a partner. Kawhi Leonard, a Southern California kid fresh off carrying Toronto to a title, chose the Clippers. Paul George, from Palmdale, arrived in the trade that made it possible. For one night, the other team in LA won everything. The bill came later.

The price

To get George from Oklahoma City, the Clippers sent Danilo Gallinari, a young guard named Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and the largest pick package ever attached to one player: five first round picks plus two swaps. At the time, most of the league said you do it every time. You trade the maybe for the sure thing when a Finals MVP is asking to come.

Then SGA became a scoring champion and MVP in Oklahoma City, and the trade became the reference point for every all-in deal since. Clippers fans hold both truths at once: the logic was sound, and the outcome was brutal. If you want to argue with the universe about it, the What-If Machine is right there.

The bubble, and the wound

Year one ended in the strangest setting imaginable, the 2020 Orlando bubble, with the Clippers up 3-1 on Denver in the second round. They lost three straight, blowing double digit leads in the last two. No injuries to blame, no excuses available. It remains the most painful loss in a franchise fluent in painful losses. Doc Rivers was out within weeks, replaced by Ty Lue.

2021: the breakthrough nobody expected

The 2021 playoffs are the best sustained stretch of basketball in Clippers history, and they happened almost entirely uphill. Down 0-2 to Dallas, they won in seven. Down 0-2 to top-seeded Utah, and with Kawhi lost mid-series to a partial ACL tear, they won in six, closed out by Terance Mann's 39-point eruption in Game 6, the loudest Staples Center ever got for the home team's other tenant.

That put the Clippers in the Western Conference Finals for the first time in the franchise's 51 years. Short-handed, they pushed Phoenix for six games before the run ended. No banner, but something real changed: the word "never" got retired from one more sentence.

The long tail

Kawhi missed the entire 2021-22 season rehabbing. The 2023 playoffs ended early when his knee gave out again against Phoenix. On Halloween 2023 the front office added James Harden from Philadelphia, a former MVP betting on one more act, and the 2023-24 team played some of the best regular season ball of the era before Dallas ended it in six in the first round.

Then July 2024: Paul George, unable to agree on an extension, signed with Philadelphia. The Clippers got nothing back. Five years, two superstars, one conference finals, and the picks still owed to Oklahoma City stretching to the horizon. That is the honest ledger.

How to hold this era

It is tempting to grade it a failure, and by banner math it was. But this era gave the fan base its deepest run, its toughest playoff wins, and proof that stars will now choose the Clippers, which for 40 years was unthinkable. It also taught the league's hardest lesson about all-in trades, with our tuition money. Both things are true. Being a Clippers fan means holding both without flinching.