It's time for the Kawhi Leonard era to end for the Clippers, one way or another

A barrage of 3-pointers from Stephen Curry and Al Horford sealed their fate. As Twitter user Keith Black Trudeau put it, "The oldest team in the NBA being eliminated by two guys older than anyone on their roster is a level of irony I didn't even think was achievable." They bet three years of future draft pick control on James Harden -- yes, that James Harden -- to take them over the top in the postseason, and sure enough, he posted a seven-point performance in a critical Game 5 loss to Dallas in 2024 and followed that up with another seven-point outing in Game 7 of last year's first-round loss to Denver. The 2020 postseason was supposed to be their big chance to one-up the Lakers and stake a real claim as the best team in Los Angeles. They wound up losing to the Nuggets before they even got to play the Lakers.

Just banana peel after banana peel, disappointment after disappointment. Now the Leonard era is probably going to end as it began: with the Thunder getting the same lottery pick that launched all of this.

Do we know for certain that it's over? Not necessarily, but that seems by far the likeliest outcome here. The Clippers reset their organizational timeline when they traded Harden and Ivica Zubac at the deadline. Teams -- most notably the Warriors -- reached out to them about Leonard at the time, but nothing materialized. The Clippers didn't even really commit to the youth movement direction until around an hour before the deadline, when they dealt Zubac to the Pacers. Sorting through all of the complications of a Leonard deal in such a small window just wouldn't have been practical.

After all, we still don't know what the NBA's investigation into Leonard's dealings with Aspiration will find. It remains a possibility that the NBA will make this decision for them and void his contract. But even if the league doesn't, the time for a split has come. That has less to do with the perpetual disappointment this era has generated and more to do with where the two sides now sit.

Leonard was non-committal about potentially signing an extension with the Clippers after Wednesday's loss. "Let me cry about this loss a little more," he told reporters when asked about his future. The Clippers seemed more pessimistic before the season. "They're done building around [Kawhi]," one former Clippers staffer told ESPN's Baxter Holmes in September. "They know that, and he knows that."

Their deadline activity seemingly underlined that fact. Darius Garland is a plausible win-now player, and is still a decade younger than Harden. The Zubac deal returned Bennedict Mathurin, but was primarily centered around future draft picks. The Clippers had started their turnaround before the deadline and maintained it afterward. They went 13-6 with Garland in the lineup thanks in large part to Leonard's sustained excellence.

But Leonard played 65 games this year, the second-most of his Clippers tenure, and he turned in one of the best seasons of his career. His value is never going to be higher than it is right now. He's going to turn 35 in June. With only a single year left on his contract, he'll probably need a new deal. Health will be a perpetual concern, but the year he just had opens the door for a true reset.

The Clippers are still years away from fully controlling their own picks -- thanks again, James Harden -- but the Pacers trade got them two future first-rounders to compensate. One of them could be as high as No. 5 in June's draft. Leonard would likely yield a similar return: multiple first-round picks from a team eager to win in the very near future. Without their own picks, it's not as though the Clippers plan to tank. But with Garland in place as a cornerstone and relatively clean books beyond Leonard, we can probably see where this is going: the Clippers will set themselves up to try to pursue another star in the near future, either through free agency or another blockbuster trade.

The Leonard sweepstakes showed what a powerful recruiter the Los Angeles market can be. Maybe the next swing connects for the Clippers instead of the Thunder. But with Leonard nearing the end of his prime and the rest of the roster designed for a longer runway, there's no more use in clinging to the dream of what might have been. It's time for the Clippers to close this chapter, to hand the team over to Garland and the youngsters and start planning for a future without Leonard.