Swanson: Clippers-Mavericks III could be epic – if Kawhi Leonard plays

PLAYA VISTA – A word with the basketball deities, if I may?

Small ask, please?

Can we get Kawhi Leonard on the court for the Clippers’ first-round Western Conference playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks? Pleeease?

Because, without Kawhi – currently considered questionable with what his team is describing as “very, very stubborn” right knee inflammation – this won’t be the first-round series basketball fans want to see.

But with him? This will be the first-round series. No. 4 vs. No. 5 and far and away the most compelling matchup on the NBA’s opening-round docket – which has something to do with why two of the first four games will be Sunday afternoon ABC telecasts.

This is the type of entertainment you’d gather the family around the TV for. That you’d wait in a long, couple-season line for. (The Clippers missed the 2022 playoffs and the Mavs whiffed last season, interrupting what’s otherwise become a postseason collision tradition.)

It’s a chess match on a roller coaster. An upside-down feast with all the fixings: Supernova sightings. Mad main-character energy. Home court advantage? Ha! A punchline.

The matchup that’s guaranteed to deliver. That always has. Wild swings and high drama, and Clippers coach Tyronn Lue writing and rewriting basketball code on the fly. A newcomer – Derrick Jones Jr. – raising his hand, wanting to audition for the role of Kawhi Stopper, telling reporters in Dallas he’ll just make Leonard “go left.”

So I’m begging whoever up there in hoops heaven that might be reading – please?

Pretty please, can we get another showdown between a couple of the game’s ultimate on-court killers: Luka Doncic, the Slovenian sensation due soon for a monumental breakthrough, in one corner. And in the other, Leonard, the all-time playoff performer and two-time NBA Finals MVP out of Moreno Valley.

And those undercards! Luka vs. Terance Mann, the Clipper fan fave who’s had a running, uh, conversation with the Mavs star since a preseason game in Mann’s rookie season in 2019.

Even some Brooklyn Nets baggage, toted on court by James Harden and Kyrie Irving.

Paul George vs. Paul George?

Remember – and maybe you don’t, but you ought to – in 2020, before the Clippers’ second-round collapse against the Denver Nuggets, how PG pulled himself out of miserable three-game 10-for-47 slump against Luka and his Mavs with a brilliant 12-for-18 35-point heater in the Clippers’ 154-111 Game 5 victory.

How on an emotional night, as the world raged on outside of the NBA’s uncomfortable bubble, George helped the Clippers stake a 3-2 series lead. How that win would propel them past Dallas – and overcome Doncic’s dramatic overtime series-tying buzzer-beater in Game 4 – in the first of these tantalizing postseason meetings between the teams.

These heavyweight matchups have been the stuff legend is made of – legend that gets passed down, apparently, by word of mouth. Like a story over campfire, embellished without fact-checking so many times that there’s an astonishingly large segment of the basketball-watching world seems to believe that Doncic simply owns the Clippers and that Dallas won one of these past two meetings, if not both.

Luka owns the Clippers @ShannonSharpe @GilsArenaShow pic.twitter.com/1ydreYxtiI

— Nightcap (@NightcapShow_) April 11, 2024

The Mavs have won neither, of course.

The Clippers beat them 4-2 in 2020 and then, despite being down 0-2 in 2021 after consecutive home losses, Lue’s squad was revived after it rallied from a 19-point first-quarter Game 3 deficit in Dallas. The Clippers went on to win in seven games, with Leonard bludgeoning the Mavs on their home floor in Game 6 – 45 points on 18-of-25 shooting – and the final blow coming at home, in an empty Crypto.com Arena, in what was the only home victory of the whole series.

But Dallas could do it this time; the Mavs are coming in hot, winners of 16 of their past 20 games – but, with all due deference to basketball’s generous divinities, you’ve got to make ’em earn it. You just have to.

And for that, Leonard has to be available.

And who can say? Not the Clippers, Lawrence Frank said Thursday.

The president of basketball operations sat and took questions at the team’s training center before practice and promised that the Clippers aren’t playing games with Leonard’s status.

“There is no gamesmanship here,” Frank said. It’s just what’s unknowable is unknowable, he said: “We’d love to have a crystal ball and Kawhi would love to have a crystal ball and know exactly on this day, but you just control what you can control.”

So the Clippers – like all of us – can hope: “Hopefully,” Frank said, “the inflammation reduces in a short amount of time.” As of Thursday, though, Leonard was “avoiding any contact work” while dealing with the inflammation, before “he can make functional basketball movements.”

And there are some seemingly significant steps to take after the “swelling’s is at an acceptable level and then you start the ramp up,” Frank explained. “You do some exercises in the performance room, you start doing court work and then where you get to a point where you’re able to go full-speed contact-type work.”

And yet! With Game 1 bearing down in fewer than 72 hours, Frank insisted he was hopeful: “Yeah, it’s Thursday though, right?”

I suppose that’s the “cautious optimism” that the Athletic’s Shams Charania talked about earlier in the day? Cautious optimism in miracles? Or is this the Clippers’ annual postseason gambit, but in reverse – with Leonard set to take the court this time?

Whether by miracle or mind game, science or prayer, I almost don’t care. Let’s just get Leonard in the Mavericks’ way, please. Let’s have us another Clippers-Mavericks series that lives up to its billing.

A familiar battle in the Playoffs. Mavs vs Clippers Vol. III, here we go #MFFL pic.twitter.com/8b2RQxbVNT

— Dallas Mavericks (@dallasmavs) April 19, 2024