a star, and the Clippers would soon find themselves on a
surprising 50-win pace.
“Despite the fun, despite the run, despite the extraordinary
chemistry that team had,” says Winger, “we had to again get
in our cave and shine the light on ourselves, on our roster,
our future, and have another hard conversation.” Harris was
about to become a free agent, and he wouldn’t come cheap.
So Winger completed a deal to send “the kindest, most
respectful player you’ll ever meet,” to Philadelphia at the trade
deadline last February. Just before the trade was announced,
Harris hit a game-winning jumper to beat the Hornets. “It
ripped our hearts out,” Winger recalls, “but we had to honor
the plan.” The blow was softened by the knowledge that
Harris would play for a contender. The Sixers are good people,
Winger thought, he’s from New York, he’ll be closer to home.
“It was a good fit for Tobias. That mattered to us.”
The Clippers made two more deals at the deadline, obtain-
ing forwards JaMychal Green and Garrett Temple from the
Grizzlies, and center Ivica Zubac from the Lakers—the first
trade between those two teams since the Clippers moved
north from San Diego in 1984. When the Clips arrived in
Boston for their Feb. 9 game against the Celtics, Zubac was
waiting for them at the hotel that the Lakers had just checked
out of. The Clippers fell behind by 28 points that night before
Shamet, one of the new guys from Philly, hit four threes in the
fourth quarter to push the Clippers past Boston, 123–112. “He
was running to the bench looking for hugs,” Winger recalls,
“and the other guys are like, Yeah, we did it! Who are you?”
The win kickstarted an 18–8 run to close out the regular
season. The sum of these moves might have portended the
shrewdness to come, if the NBA had been paying closer
attention. The only thing the Clippers had built, after all,trayed as broken and brooding, Leonard
listened to Spurs teammates and offi-
cials suggest that he seemed to be in no
rush to get back on the floor. Leonard
never wore a Spurs jersey again.
He played only nine games that year,
scoring 146 points—25 fewer than he
would score against the Warriors in
the 2019 NBA Finals, where he reward-
ed the Raptors, the team that took a
chance on him and his healed leg, with
a Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Suddenly, Leonard was being com-
pared, by one of the most respected
coaches in the league, with Michael
Jordan. Rivers was fined $50,000 for
that May 31 remark, deemed a viola-
tion of the league’s tampering rules,
but no one blinked at the comparison
(chart, page 44). The moral: Fates can
change quickly in the NBA. And no
team’s future stood to be reshaped
more dramatically than the one that
had patiently amassed an estimated
$59.7 million in cap space—the team
that drew the Warriors as their first-
round opponents in the playoffs. This
was back when Kevin Durant’s right
Achilles tendon was intact and he was
the top free agent in his class, seem-
ingly destined to sign with the Knicks,
the only team other than the Nets with
more cap room than the Clippers.43SPORT S ILL US TR ATED- OC T OBER 21–28, 2019