NBA Halloween: Playing trick-or-treat with each team’s early season trend

Los Angeles Clippers

Load management is still a thing: Treat

Are you surprised? Last year, the Toronto Raptors unlocked the blueprint to championship glory by strategically withholding Kawhi Leonard from regular season games due to “load management.” Despite all the preseason talk about how there wouldn’t be a limit on the Klaw this time, we’ve already seen it happen twice over the LA Clippers‘ first five games.

In Phoenix, Doc Rivers kept Leonard on the bench for a conspicuously long time in the fourth quarter of a tight game the Clippers would go on to lose, later citing how he wanted to keep Kawhi under a certain number of minutes. Then on Wednesday, in a primetime showdown with the Utah Jazz, Leonard sat out the entire game to rest.

This is really only a big deal to fantasy users who have Kawhi on their team; the Clippers have already shown how dominant they can be with the Klaw out there, and they don’t even have Paul George back yet. Leonard remains one of the most dangerous players in the game when he’s on the floor, and his leap in playmaking represents the next terrifying step in his evolution. It’s just unfortunate it’s already looking like Leonard will miss more games for rest than we were originally promised, even if it was foolish to get our hopes up in the first place.