I view him as the ultimate “sum is less than the parts” type of player – dude has essentially all the tools you could want in an NBA player, but due to his attitude and lack of mental fortitude he just can’t put it all together w/ any kind of consistency. George is well past his prime at this point, which is understandable given his age and injury history, but the Sixers just paid a max deal to a dude who is on his way down athletically, and who has never been tough mentally and/or a real leader in the locker room. Feels like his entire tenure here, he’s just been the type of guy who was a great front-runner, but would peace out when times got tough – like, have any of us ever thought “it’s fine, Paul has got this” or “Paul can help pull us out of this hole” when the team was struggling? I know I’ve had plenty of the opposite thoughts, where I’d be watching the team trying to claw its way back into the game and meanwhile I’d just be waiting for Paul to chuck up a deep contested 3 early in the shot clock to kill any momentum the Clips had built up.

This team is obviously less talented w/o him on it, but the fit should be better, and we can finally move on from his incessant passive-aggressive chirping on his podcast and to the media and just focus on enjoying the games again (…assuming we don’t sign Miles Bridges).

The thing with all the Paul George commentary seems to be that they’re assessing him as a general All-Star/semi-All-NBA asset, that the Clippers offered him the Kawhi deal, 3/150 more or less, and who wouldn’t want him, why wouldn’t you just give him the 4th year. He’s a good fit on Philly and a good pick-up for them, no doubt. He’ll be a very expensive 38-year-old player down the road, but in the meantime good luck to them.

What’s missing in all of this is any in-depth analysis of Paul George’s performance on the Clippers. The shorthand that we’re getting is that he put up good numbers and percentages this year, and he had a bad playoffs. But Clipper fans know that there’s so much more to the story than that, that there have been stages, levels, and all sorts of roster and performance machinations and issues, and none of that is being mentioned.

My first note is that the Kawhi extension keeps being mentioned as pon 1/16art of the general storyline. The part that gets left out is that Kawhi earned it, that his play over the first 30-35 games, leading up to making the deal, was absolutely superb, showing his return to virtually transcendent, winning levels. There were questions going into the season after the 22-23 campaign and his injury during the playoffs–no mention of PG missing the 23 playoffs lately, btw–and Kawhi answered those, gelled with James Harden, and was clearly the leader of the team as it went on a remarkable December streak. Kawhi wasn’t able to finish off the season, and his durability is still highly suspect of course, but his play, tenacity, and ability to lead the team and generate wins was firmly established. The extension Kawhi signed was less than a max deal, and it featured an abbreviation and accomodation for his injury history–which was borne out by his unfortunate failure to be available for the playoffs yet again.

The same can’t be said of Paul George. He didn’t earn anything special. His play was good during the period of Clipper dominance, but it wasn’t close to what Kawhi was doing. James Harden was making everybody better, especially Zu, and George certainly played well as part of that, but he didn’t flourish, and he never showed a higher gear. The Clipper juggernaut was initially derailed by Zu’s injury before the 1/14 Minnesota game. PG was 5-19 in that loss, then had one of his best games against OKC on 1/16 (38 pts), but he was lackluster and tweaked over the next 6 weeks and 17 games, scoring more than 20 pts just 3 times, and missing 3 games. He performed better after March 1, but he was rarely dominant, if ever.

PG had many opportunities to pick up the abundant slack with Kawhi sidelined. His best effort came in the ’21 playoffs after Kawhi went down in Utah. At the end of this past season and against Dallas he was paired with another star in James Harden, and he failed to lead a strong supporting cast out of the first round, exiting with a whimper.

The Clippers brought in PG at his peak, paying, as it turned out, the highest price (SGA, the Jalen Williams and Jaime Jaquez picks, etc.). He never performed at close to the OKC ’18-’19 level, when he had 2159 pts and 628 rebounds in 2841 minutes/77 games. Give PG credit for coming back to post that effort in the wake of a major injury. But prior to this season (74 gp), when he was at new post-peak lows in ppg/rpg, he never played 60 games (48, 54, 31, 56), his own lack of durability looking decent only against Kawhi’s sad record, and his absence for last year’s playoffs was especially notable.

There’s more to it than that. But I’ve been listening to a lot of chatter, and I needed to get started on a breakdown. Especially after the disappointment of this past season, a lot of us feel like we won’t miss PG. He needed to be great, and he wasn’t. Chemistry is tough, and misfortune continues to haunt the Clippers. It’s better for PG, and for the Clippers, for him to leave. Sayonara.