The Los Angeles Clippers have had their healthiest start to a season since acquiring Kawhi Leonard and Paul George in 2019.
Leonard hasn’t missed a game yet, while George has only missed one due a sore hip. Leonard and George played in the first 23 games, which is their longest stretch of consecutive games together on the court since joining the Clippers in the summer of 2019.
Leonard and George were often cited as the most prominent example of the NBA’s new player participation policy, but they have been on the other side of it so far this season.
“We should sue for — what do they call it? — negligence,” Leonard joked to ESPN.
“We had injuries that we were trying to keep minimal,” said George.
“No one knows what we go through, what and where our bodies are at. But they paint that picture on us as if we were sitting games out like we wanted to.”
“I thought it was very, very unfair and a low blow,” Lawrence Frank told ESPN. “But we’ve said from the beginning we have to earn it. … Were our guys hurt? Yeah, they were hurt. When they’re healthy, do they play? Yeah, they play.”
“What I love with [Leonard] and Paul is just the ownership they’ve taken in being Clippers,” he continued. “Your best players, they do it with their actions.”
Leonard said playing every game this season is just about being healthy again and “was never about no rules [policy].”
