Nylon Calculus: How much will Paul George and Kawhi Leonard play together?

Most of the NBA world woke up Saturday morning to the news that everything had changed. Kawhi Leonard had decided to sign with the Los Angeles Clippers and he had convinced Paul George to join him — requesting a trade from the Thunder and landing a massive package of compensatory draft picks for Oklahoma City.

The ramifications were immediately obvious — adding a pair of elite two-way wings, among the five or 10 best players in the league, to a scrappy, versatile team that had already pushed the Warriors in the first round — the Clippers are now serious contenders, perhaps even the legitimate favorites heading into next season.

The end game for the Clippers is, obviously, a title, a goal that is still 11 months off. To get there they’ll need to navigate a long regular season, building chemistry and rhythm while doing everything they can to make sure they are physically prepared when the postseason rolls around. Last season, Kawhi stat out more than 20 games for load management, softening his transition back from a year off for injury recovery and helping him save energy for that mammoth postseason run. George, on the other hand, appeared in 77 games, averaging the second-highest minutes average of his career. Bothered by a shoulder injury and perhaps worn down from the regular season, he often looked gassed in Oklahoma City’s first-round loss to the Trail Blazers.

As tantalizing as the potential is for lineups featuring both wings at the same time, one of the additional advantages the Clippers can leverage is staggering their minutes to get as much out of the partnership as possible.

Analysis done by Todd Whitehead last January, showed that both George and Kawhi operated in some of the least-staggered star pairings in the league.

While having another high-volume creator on the floor lightens the load during those minutes, simply being able to be on the floor less would seem to have a much higher value for reducing injury risk and wear-and-tear.

According to PBPStats.com, the Raptors were plus-10.4 per 48 minutes with both Lowry and Leonard on the floor last season, but still very strong when either player played alone (plus-6.5 for just Leonard, plus-14.4 for just Lowry). Here, the extremely low stagger percentage may have been something of a luxury. They held Leonard out of so many games that when he was actually playing they didn’t feel the need to find rest for him by staggering minutes with Lowry.

The Thunder, on the other hand, avoided staggering out of necessity. They were plus-9.4 per 48 with both Westbrook and George on the floor, in the same ballpark as the Raptors when they doubled-up. However, Oklahoma City was plus-5.9 per 48 when George was on the floor alone and minus-7.2 when Westbrook was by himself. Those numbers would seem to indicate that George was more comfortable to maintain team efficiency when flying solo in the lead creator role and having Leonard will mean George is able to play fewer minutes.

The other advantage the Clippers have is a much deeper roster of supplementary creators to help scaffold the offense for those stretches when George or Leonard might have to play alone. The Lou Williams-Montrezl Harrell pick-and-roll combination looked borderline unstoppable for much of the playoff series against Golden State. Williams would be a primary creator on most teams and here gets to play as the third-fiddle, working as a complement to both George and Leonard.

The table below looks at the 2018-19 Box Creation and Offensive Load numbers for George, Leonard, the secondary-creators they played with last season and the secondary-creators they’ll get to play with this season. Box Creation is a box-scored based estimate of how many open scoring opportunities a player creates for his teammates, either through passing or with their scoring gravity warping the defense. Offensive Load is an estimate of how many meaningful offensive actions a player is involved in creating, either through shooting, passing, turning the ball over or creating with their gravity. Both metrics are the work of Ben Taylor and both are presented here in per-100 possession versions.

Factoring in his passing, we can see that Williams created in even greater volume than George or Leonard last season and even carried a larger overall Offensive Load in his bench role. While George and Leonard will have each other to lean on in the ways they leaned on Lowry and Westbrook last season, they’ll also have Williams as a third option, one who is far more accomplished in that role than anyone they had last season. In the case of George, simply sharing some creation responsibility with Patrick Beverley and Landry Shamet should be a breath of fresh air after Alex Abrines and Terrance Ferguson.

Leonard played 2,040 minutes across 60 games last season. Williams played 1,993 across 75 games. George was at 2,841 in 77 games. Assuming the Clippers keep Leonard on a similar plan they could also potentially significantly reduce the load on Williams and George, keeping all three fresh for the playoffs.

If Los Angeles kept Williams around his 26 minute-average from last year but held him to 70 games and cut George down to 70 regular-season games and about 2,200 minutes (just over 30 minutes per game), without any of their load-management games overlapping, they could still play about half the regular season with all three of those creators on the floor and the other half with at least two. In the games where all three are available, they would easily be able to stagger minutes to make sure at least two of that group is always on the floor, even for the full 48 minutes of a competitive, important game. And, of course, there are all sorts of ways the Clippers could juice the margins of that rough outline to maximize both rest and competitiveness, depending on what was most important at the moment.

So, while George and Leonard will be the faces of the Clippers, we may not see them on the floor together as often as you might expect next season. But even when one is resting, players like Lou Williams, Patrick Beverley and Landry Shamet are going to make sure there’s no offensive drop-off.