It’s flown under the radar a bit, drowned out by higher-wattage, Wilt-abutting feats of offensive significance, but the Los Angeles Clippers earned their own bit of NBA history this week — a perhaps ignominious honor, but an honor all the same.

You might recall that the Clippers were, well, down horrendous earlier this season. What was constructed to be the oldest NBA roster ever got off to a positively disastrous start, going 3-18 from early November through mid-December amid an unsettling investigation into reports that the organization deliberately sought to circumvent the salary cap to sign Kawhi Leonard in 2019, a raft of injuries to a number of key contributors (including, most notably, Leonard) and the near-immediate curdling and stunning end of Chris Paul’s return to the franchise. A week before Christmas, they sat at 6-21, a half-game out of last place in the West, with the NBA’s third-worst defense and the point differential of a 24-win team.

No team in NBA history that had fallen 15 games below .500 had ever clawed its way back to a winning record in that same season … until now. Wednesday’s emphatic 153-128 drubbing of the Minnesota Timberwolves brought the Clippers to 33-32 on the season — back above .500 for the first time since Halloween, making them the first team in NBA history to get all the way back into the black after being so deep in the red.

The Clippers have won six of their last seven, moving ahead of the injury-wracked and sputtering Warriors into eighth place in the Western Conference. At 6.5 games back of the sixth-place Wolves with just 17 games left, it’s nearly impossible that the Clips will be able to climb out of the play-in tournament; the public-facingprojectionmodels give them single-digit odds of rising all the way up to sixth over the final month.

If they can advance out of the play-in, though, they’ll be the proverbial Team Nobody Wants To Face in Round 1 — a team that boasts the NBA’s second-best record and fifth-best net rating since Dec. 20, that has outscored opponents by 9.4 points per 100 possessions since drastically overhauling its roster at February’s trade deadline, that is undefeated since newcomer Darius Garland’s debut two weeks ago … and that can enter damn near any matchup with a legitimate reason to believe it has the best player in the series.

After that dominant victory over the Wolves, head coach Tyronn Lue was asked what was working so well in an offensive explosion that tied the Clipper franchise mark for the most points ever scored in a regulation game. His answer, according to Clippers beat reporter Justin Russo, was two words long: “Kawhi Leonard.”

The Clippers felt like a relative winner of the 2026 NBA trade deadline, if only because their decisions to trade James Harden (a 36-year-old All-Star point guard who can enter unrestricted free agency this summer) for Garland (a 26-year-old All-Star point guard under contract through 2028) and Ivica Zubac (an about-to-turn 29-year-old starting center) for 23-year-old Bennedict Mathurin, 24-year-old Isaiah Jackson and what could be a mid-lottery pick in the highly touted 2026 NBA Draft seemed to signal an organizational understanding that the time had come to look to the future. Those moves suggested a dawning awareness that the championship contender the franchise had hoped was on the horizon ever since 2019 just wasn’t coming, and that the most prudent course of action would be to start focusing on building the next competitive iteration of Clipper basketball.

“Obviously, you need luck in this league,” Leonard told reporters after the Harden trade. “With shots, with injuries, with everything, so it's just how it played out. I wanted to give it another run, but it didn't happen that way, so now we're here. [...] [That era is] over. Guys are gone.”

One thing the Clippers didn’t do, though — in spite of significant reported interest — was trade Kawhi. And that matters. Because, as it turns out — even after all the load management and letdowns, all the injuries and investigations — “the next competitive iteration of Clipper basketball” might still just be “the one with Kawhi on it.”

Leonard is averaging a career-high 28.3 points per game, tied for seventh in the NBA, to go with 6.4 rebounds and 3.8 assists, shooting 50.3% from the field, 38% from 3-point range and 90.6% from the foul line — good for a true shooting percentage of 63%. He’s shooting 75% at the rim and 51% from midrange, both matching or exceeding career highs; he is scoring more, and more efficiently, than he has in his entire 14-year career, all while being tied for the league lead in steals and ranking just outside the top 15 in total deflections.

Out of 91 players getting at least 55 touches per game, Leonard ranks first in points per touch, ahead of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama and every other high-volume scorer in the game. He is drawing every team’s best perimeter defender every night, demanding in-your-jersey attention to one of the league’s highest degrees, and rendering it irrelevant with maddeningly metronomic consistency. (Leonard has scored 20 or more points in 43 consecutive games, which might not sound like a lot at this particular moment, but is, I assure you, a lot — the second-longest such streak in Clipper franchise history, and the 14th-longest since the introduction of the 3-point line in 1979.)

His ability to just disregard a defense’s best-laid plans and most honorable intentions, repeatedly getting to his spots for those automatic line-drive midrange pull-ups, can be awe-inspiring … even to the other best scorers in the world.