NBA Playoffs 2020: 5 reasons the Los Angeles Clippers can win it all

4. Paul George

Close your eyes and you can picture it. Paul George isn’t Paul George. Paul George is something broken and hindered. He is something that fell from great heights. He had to look himself in the mirror and realize he was just like everybody else, and for a time, maybe he did look like Buzz Lightyear in an apron holding his own arm. And then he didn’t.

Paul George, through all the nicks and bruises and tears, has emerged as a better player than he was in Indiana. Yes, he is oft-injured and missing time, but he is a more mature and efficient basketball player than he ever was when he introduced himself as a challenger to LeBron James’ throne. Of course, he has also never conquered LeBron, and he has never found the same level of team success as he did with the Pacers. But perhaps those truths will only render him as hungry as he ever was.

He has made the journey home to Los Angeles. He was always headed home to Los Angeles. Like the Owens River, it was his destiny all along, even if unnatural and belabored and a product of communal erosion.

Better than anyone Kawhi played with a season ago in Toronto — yes, even Pascal — and possibly even better than anyone Kawhi played with in San Antonio (given when his career intersected with the Big Three’s there), perhaps no one in the league has more to gain from this postseason than Paul George. Of course, such statements are always foolish, weighing one person’s narrative more than all the rest. But the point is whatever’s to happen in Orlando over the next few months could catapult Paul George into a different tier of NBA stars.

A year ago, in Oklahoma City he averaged 28.0 points per game and 8.2 rebounds. That’s flashes of Tracy McGrady, but McGrady never won a ring. Then again, Tracy McGrady never played with anyone quite like Kawhi Leonard, for McGrady played in the era before artificial intelligence.