Last summer was a rough one for the Clippers, who saw Kawhi Leonard go down with a partial ACL tear. Once the diagnosis was revealed, everyone knew he’d be out for the entire season.
Now, things have gotten even worse for the team. Recently, their second star (Paul George) suffered an injury of his own, and now reports say he’ll be out for the rest of this season.
“The team will re-evaluate him in 3-4 weeks, they’ll see if rest can get him on a pathway to recovery,” Wojnarowski said on NBA Countdown. “But he’s gonna be out certainly a significant period of time and there’s no real sense of when, or if, he’ll be back this year.”
"The team will re-evaluate him in 3-4 weeks, they'll see if rest can get him on a pathway to recovery, but he's gonna be out certainly a significant period of time and there's no real sense of when, or if, he'll be back this year."@wojespn on Clippers' star Paul George.
— Tomer Azarly (@TomerAzarly) December 26, 2021
It’s obviously a crushing blow for the Clippers, who have yet to make amends for their failures over the past few years.
Without Kawhi or PG, they have no hope of making any type of noise in the playoffs.
The good news is, George has experience coming back from injuries. In 2014, he suffered a gruesome leg injury that led some to doubt whether he’d return to the league at all. He recently broke down that moment in a chat on ‘All The Smoke’ podcast.
“I remember I’m on the ground tho, and I tried to get up, and I’m like wait, hol’ up. It was crazy because everything happened in slow mode,” said George. “I can hear the crowd gasp. As I tried to stand, I notice I can’t stand. So, I like just look back, look at my surroundings, I see phones and s**t coming out. And I’m like, wait, what? So, I look at my leg, and by the time I look at my leg, shoutout, the trainer, he came and threw the towel on it. As I’m trying to get up he holds my chest down, like ‘yo, just relax, you gonna be okay.’ And that’s when the panic hit, and still, I didn’t feel it, just so much adrenaline, my body in shock.”
“I’m laying there, I’m not really understanding what’s going on. So I see my moms come down, I see my pops come down, and they say you gonna be okay son. The part where it started to hurt was when the stretcher came, and they had to move my leg to pick it up and put it on.”
George made an astounding recovery from that horrific play and has become one of the NBA’s most elite wing players.
Unfortunately, he’s faced with another long recovery process again. But if he can come back from having his leg shredded on the court, he can come back from anything.
When he and Kawhi return together, the Clippers will be a team to watch out for.
