Los Angeles Lakers should be happy Kawhi Leonard chose Clippers

We are nearing the two-year anniversary of Kawhi Leonard shocking the NBA world and signing with the Los Angeles Clippers, getting the team to trade for Paul George to bring him into the fold as well. At the time, it appeared as if Kawhi was going to come home to LA, but come home to the Los Angeles Lakers.

It definitely was a hard pill to swallow at the time. The idea of Kawhi with LeBron James and Anthony Davis was extremely exciting. The Lakers would have had the most talented big three in NBA history, even better than the big three that the Brooklyn Nets put together.

Instead, the Lakers received a superstar duo to go toe-to-toe with in Los Angeles and have been more successful over the last two years. The Clippers may have made it farther this season, but the Lakers won an NBA Championship. The Clippers haven’t even made the NBA Finals.

Kawhi now has another decision about his future. The two-time NBA Champion has a player option in his contract and even if he wants to stay with the Clippers, it makes more career sense to opt out and get a bigger deal.

It is unclear if he wants to stay with the Clippers, though. Kawhi has not necessarily been the most loyal player in his career and there are rumblings that he is unhappy with the medical staff. While his future with the Clippers may be unclear, there is one thing that is definitely clear:

The Los Angeles Lakers should be happy that Kawhi Leonard chose the Los Angeles Clippers.

I know, it sounds absurd. The Los Angeles Lakers should be happy that one of the seven best players on the planet passed on them. Why in the world would the Lakers be happy to not have a better basketball team?

The important thing here is perspective. Would the Lakers have won the NBA Championship in 2020 with Kawhi on the roster? Yes. Even with his load management and potentially not playing much with the other stars, they would have been way too talented to not win the NBA Championship.

They would not have had some of the same depth that they had without Leonard but it would not have mattered much. They most likely would have won the championship. The result would have stayed the same.

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The result would have also stayed the same from this past season as well. The Lakers lost in the first round of the NBA Playoffs mostly because the team could not stay healthy. It was a completely different series when Anthony Davis was healthy versus when he wasn’t.

Kawhi also got hurt in the NBA Playoffs as well. Granted, he played the entire first round of the playoffs, but could we have expected that if he was on the Lakers? He would have had a much shorter offseason, like the Lakers did, to get back into shape.

Plus, the Lakers would not have been able to make some of the same moves that they made with the cap space that would have gone to Kawhi. If LeBron, AD and Kawhi were all hurt in the regular season there is a good case to be made that they would have missed the playoffs altogether.

At the end of the day though, the important thing is that the Los Angeles Lakers do not have to be in the situation that the Clippers are in this offseason. They have a superstar that can outright leave if he so chooses unless they pay him one of the largest contracts in NBA history.

On the surface level, Leonard is worth the contract because of his talent. But is it really a smart thing to give a $200+ million contract to a player with a degenerative knee issue, who could not hold it together this season and needs to load manage just to be available in the playoffs?

Be thankful that the Los Angeles Lakers don’t have to make that decision. The team got its ring and still has a title window. As far as we are concerned, Kawhi could leave this offseason and the Clippers true title window will end and they won’t have any draft picks in the near future to rebuild the core.

The short-term result would have been the same. The long-term result would have been much worse. The Lakers should be happy.