Doc Rivers Spills The Beans Over What Went Down In The Wild Kawhi Leonard Situation
If there’s one thing I know after spending so much time watching Doc Rivers, he is not one to give you bullshit spin. He tells it like it is and while he’s secretive while things may be going down, once the dust has settled you can open him up like a book and get all the details. That’s what we have here with the Kawhi signing. I mean I don’t think anything was more surprising than what the Clippers did this summer, none of us saw Paul George demanding a trade, the details have been few and far between on how everything went down, so I found this little story by Doc rather interesting. Remember, the Kawhi camp demanded absolute silence, some teams listened (Clippers), some teams obviously didn’t (Lakers), and look where he ended up. Privacy was the most important thing it appears through this whole process so any nugget we can get from the people involved I am very much here for.
For starters, I would have paid any amount of money possible to be a fly on the wall during that dinner. Kawhi’s camp basically telling the Clippers that if they want this to happen they have to make Paul George happen. That had to be so out of left field I would have loved to see Doc/Ballmer’s face. You need to get a guy that JUST signed a massive extension in order for me to come here is a big time power move. Oh and you also can’t really gut your team in order to pull it off. No big deal, that’s easy! It’s why Ballmer caved and eventually threw in all those picks. You don’t get Paul, you don’t get Kawhi, he goes to the Lakers and that is VERY bad for your business/franchise. It’s also pretty interesting that at 10 that morning they thought they were out. That there was too much red tape to make the George deal happen. Remember this was at a time when the media was saying they were 99% sure about where Kawhi was going. The actual team he went to had no idea! Then a few hours later they thought the deal was back on, only to then think it was officially dead a few hours after that. Talk about a goddamn wave of emotion. We’re talking about franchise altering, NBA title caliber roster moves here. That must have been insane to deal with. Then you get a quick test and boom, the entire landscape of the NBA has changed forever. Man that’s cool.
I also like how Doc admitted that the Lakers played a tiny role in this whole thing. He doesn’t try and hide his disdain for the Lakers which is why I will always love Doc, and even he knew if the Lakers were going to add Kawhi to LeBron/AD then the rest of us were big time fucked. It’s why I think they ultimately paid whatever OKC wanted. Sure the goal was to always land Kawhi, but the fact that they could prevent their city rival from doing it also played a role.
My only hope is that if the Clippers win the title that there is some sort of documentary with unseen footage about how this whole thing went down. Shit, even if they don’t maybe in a few years. You know Kawhi’s camp of George’s camp was filming shit since everyone has a production company these days, and that’s the stuff I really want to see. You pull off one of the biggest blockbusters in NBA history, we need all the content that exists from it.