Kawhi Leonard left the Clippers behind in Denver on Wednesday, he travelled solo back to Los Angeles to meet his family as they evacuated their home in the Pacific Palisades. As of Thursday, the Palisades Fire — the biggest of the five separate fires burning in L.A. — has scorched through close to 20,000 acres of land, homes, buildings and infrastructure. Leonard’s family and their home are safe, and because natural disasters thankfully still trump the audience demand for athlete participation, Leonard’s also able to be away from the team and focus on what’s most important.
Not to draw too flimsy a point between disaster and basketball, but Leonard’s return to the Clippers had been top of mind for me prior to the fires, and his necessary absence now offers another lens to view his prolonged absence this season.
After he was pulled from Team USA’s Olympic play this summer, Leonard underwent a surgical procedure on his right knee. It’s same knee he had surgically repaired after an ACL tear in 2021 and a meniscus tear in April 2023, as well as the quad injury that eventually led to him parting ways with the Spurs over concerns of recovery mismanagement. On top of everything, the condition in Leonard’s knee, ostensibly some of which has been address through multiple surgeries, is degenerative. Simply put, it’s a point for chronic, ongoing pain that is likely to get worse, and inevitably exacerbated by pressures on it, e.g. playing basketball.
I want to lay it all out because we tend to look at athlete injuries as straightforward and linear. Some of this has to do with the way they’re reported, but mostly it’s because we aren’t privy to the full process of recovery. We see the injury, we wait for the timeline, the athlete disappears for a while and then, when that timeline is complete, returns. It all seems very clean when the reality is anything but.
Leonard is already a man of few words, at least publicly, but in a recent — and brief — interview he gave The Athletic, he was candid about the differentiation between this latest return and any time before.
“I’m looking at this as my preseason. This is [game] number two, so I’m playing 20 minutes. I’m happy the knee is responding well. That’s what I’m more focused on than anything,” he said. “Once my lungs and my legs get there, start building up, I’ll start really assessing my play and seeing what I need to do better.”
Asked about what he’d learned in previous “return-to-play protocols” and Leonard was quick to correct the assessment, “Last year… it wasn’t really a return-to-play protocol, It went well, played 68 games. Now, [I’ve] just got to match my recovery with what I do on the floor. Growing up — or just being in the league — I never really did that. I always was focused on the work. Now I’ve got to either bring down the work or bring down the recovery, in a sense. So, trying to do what I can, it’s going to be a long process.”
It’s his clarity on the time this recovery, and subsequent return to full-health, that stands out. The play, as he puts it, is part of the recovery but ultimately secondary to how his body responds to it. It’s an uncomfortable reality, I’m sure, for Clippers fans and for fans of Leonard, who just want to see him playing consistent basketball again, but in many ways there’s nobody better than Leonard to deliver this kind of straight-faced, no fuss prognosis.
His condition is degenerative, it’s worth repeating and remembering. This is the knee and the leg that will carry Leonard around for the rest of his life, the majority of which will come off the floor. The flip side of Leonard is that we know, because we’ve witnessed it, how essential basketball is to his personality, even his very being. It’s what he’s happiest doing and it’s apparent for the zen-like (alternately called robotic) way Leonard plays the game. He wants to get healthy more than anyone, because it’s the fastest track to get him back on the floor, even if that fastest track is actually quite deliberately slow. A paradox, maybe, for impatient fans, but a worthwhile lesson of what recovery really takes — in effort and toll — from a person.
