If Kawhi Leonard keeps this up for the Clippers, the West needs to watch out

When Kawhi Leonard is at his best, he looks almost frictionless. He maneuvers through the typical traffic and trammels of an NBA basketball court as if nothing anyone else does is all that relevant to his comings and goings.

Leonard finds the ball, determines his destination and begins navigation — fastest route possible, please, no time to savor the scenery. He picks the spot on the floor where he wants to be, and he just … gets there. Once he arrives, chances are he’s going to rise straight up, an arrow pointed directly at the rafters, and promptly deposit the ball in the net, free of the surly bonds of quotidian concerns like “defenders” and “coverages.”

If you’re having trouble envisioning it — somewhat understandable, as the six-time All-NBA selection and two-time NBA Finals MVP has missed 43 games this season and 299 since 2017, including the entire 2021-22 campaign — it looks an awful lot like what he did to the New York Knicks in the second half on Wednesday night:

After falling down by as many as 14 points in the first half, Leonard’s Clippers stormed back to score 72 points on 42 shot attempts after intermission — a scorching 1.57 points per possession — en route to a 126-113 road win. Leonard led the charge, scoring 19 of his 27 points after halftime, calmly and decisively dismantling whichever defenders Tom Thibodeau sent his way; he added 10 rebounds and seven assists without a turnover in a season-high 41 minutes for good measure.

The right-block mastery, the terror-inducing jab steps out of the triple threat, the metronomically consistent stop-and-pop jumpers from the midrange — it was all there. And it, along with stellar contributions up and down what’s become one of the league’s better bench rotations, was more than enough to bury a Knicks team playing on the second night of a back-to-back without injured superstar point guard Jalen Brunson.

It’s been enough more and more frequently of late for the Clippers, who have now won nine of their last 11 to rise into sixth place in the West, with victories over the playoff-bound Cavaliers, Knicks, Grizzlies and Pistons — plus a down-to-the-final-few-seconds loss to the league-leading Thunder — in that span. And it’s been enough because it — the footwork, feints and fakes; the deep bag off the dribble and physical capacity to repeatedly reach into it; the taciturn Terminator swagger — has been there more and more frequently for Leonard, who missed the first 34 games of the campaign working his way back from yet another knee surgery, and played under a minutes restriction for the first month following his return.

“Just having him on the floor is huge for us,” Clippers head coach Ty Lue told Law Murray of The Athletic back in January. “We’ve just got to keep getting him reps, keep getting him minutes, keep stacking them up, keep getting him games. He’ll get back to [being] Kawhi.”

Update: He’s back.

Since first hitting the 30-minute mark at the trade deadline, Leonard has played 35.7 minutes per game. And after getting a couple of months of games under his belt, he’s really started to hit his stride, averaging 25.1 points, 7.5 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.6 steals over his last 11 games, on .611 true shooting. Among 104 players to average at least 50 touches per game in March, he ranks fifth in points per touch. Among players to play at least 10 games this month, he ranks 10th in steals and 20th in deflections.

Which is to say: For the past month, he’s beenproducinglike Kawhi freaking Leonard.

Which makes the Clippers — who have outscored opponents by 7.5 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with Leonard on the court, according to Cleaning the Glass, a net rating that would trail only Oklahoma City, Cleveland and Boston over the course of the full season — pretty damn interesting coming down the home stretch.

When Leonard was unavailable, Lue built the foundation of his team on a smothering defense (fourth in points allowed per possession) staffed by long-limbed, aggressive, active and versatile stoppers at all levels of the unit; on the pick-and-roll chemistry between Harden, who earned his first All-Star selection in three years for his work as one of the league’s premier tablesetters, and perennially underrated center Ivica Zubac, averaging 16.4 points, 12.5 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game (all career highs) while holding opponents to 56.2% shooting at the rim; and on the downhill attacking and shot-making of Norman Powell, the team’s leading scorer at 22.6 points per game (and who, in my view, deserved an All-Star nod himself). That’s all still there … and now they can layer a fully operational Leonard, with his pitch count lower at this stage in the season than it’s been in years after front-loading the injury absences, on top of it.

Where does that leave the Clippers? With a top-five defense that scores like a top-seven offense with Kawhi on the floor. With the second-most dominant five-man unit in the NBA this season (minimum 150 minutes played): Zubac, Leonard, Powell, Harden and ace defensive swingman Derrick Jones Jr., a quintet that has blown opponents’ doors off by 23.6 points per 100 possessions. With a deep core of contributors — point of attack menace Kris Dunn, resurgent combo guard Bogdan Bogdanovic, do-it-all wings Nicolas Batum and Amir Coffey, huge backup point forward Ben Simmons — giving Lue a ton of options to find answers as matchups and schemes dictate. And with a ceiling that, at full strength, could pose serious problems for the favorites in the Western Conference playoff bracket … provided, of course, the Clips make it that far.

L.A. enters Thursday’s action in sixth in the West, with the same 41-31 record as the Warriors but holding the head-to-head tiebreaker over Golden State, and a half-game ahead of the Timberwolves. Various projectionmodels peg the Clippers’ chances of securing a top-six spot and avoiding the play-in tournament at anywhere from 44% to 68%.

Those probabilities will likely shift dramatically over the final two and a half weeks of the regular season; on this week’s episode of The Big Number, my colleague Tom Haberstroh noted that the Clippers’ season finale in San Francisco against the Warriors could very well decide who gets the sixth seed and who has to scrap it out in the play-in. That means that every Clipper game from here through April 13 is essentially a playoff game — high stakes, high leverage, high pressure. In situations like that, it’s pretty cool to be able to toss the ball to a player whose pulse never seems to quicken, who perpetually exudes the unbothered imperial confidence of someone who knows exactly what to do, how to do it, and how to remove variables like the opposition from the equation.

The fear, with a player with Leonard’s phone-book-thick medical file, is that you’re always one false step away from disaster. What he’s been doing for the past month, though, is why the Clippers continue to choose to live with that fear — because, if you can just get him to springtime healthy, in a seven-game series, Kawhi Leonard can put the fear of God into anyone.