I'm not a huge Chris Paul fan, but, boy, did he nail this one.
Kawhi has been a millstone tied around the Clippers' neck from the day he signed. He’s dragged the whole operation straight down with him. We like to imagine NBA front offices learn from their mistakes, but the Clippers offer a cautionary case study in willful amnesia: no matter how many times reality smacks them in the face, they keep betting the franchise on an oft-injured, structurally unreliable, and chronically disengaged “star.”
No player in recent memory—maybe ever—has extracted more money, patience, and delusion from a franchise while giving so little in return. Kawhi has turned fleecing the Clippers into an art form, and the organization keeps thanking him for the privilege. And the blame starts at the top. Balmer’s naked desperation for instant legitimacy produced a string of catastrophes: the gut-the-future Paul George trade, the inexplicable commitment to re-sign Kawhi, and the broader organizational fantasy that this core was ever going to be anything but brittle. Anyone with even a flicker of basketball sense saw this future coming a mile away. (Though to Balmer’s credit, at least he didn’t fall for Paul George’s self-mythologizing—Daryl Morey claimed that honor.)
But Kawhi deserves his share too. He’s become the league’s highest-paid absentee: a disengaged, unmotivated, leadership-averse passenger who’s coasted for years on a reputation inflated by a title won mostly because the opposing roster was too injured to mount a credible opposition.
The fact that the Clippers responded to Paul the way they did indicates that they still have yet to accept reality. They still insist that Kawhi is a star and continue to hitch their fortunes to him, notwithstanding that Kawhi is thoroughly washed and his star has stopped shining years ago, proving yet again the boundless human capacity to ignore glaring evidence, abandon common sense, and delude oneself into believing just about anything.
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