Kawhi Leonard is heading back to Toronto, and the road to get there was unlike anything the NBA has processed in years.
The Clippers and Raptors agreed on the framework back on June 30, per reporting from ESPN and others. Toronto sends Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, unprotected first-round picks in 2031 and 2033, a 2027 first-round swap and two second-round picks to Los Angeles. Leonard goes north.
Then everything stopped. The league’s investigation into salary cap circumvention involving the Clippers and Leonard put the deal in limbo for two months while both franchises waited.
The Penalties Changed Everything
The NBA announced the conclusion of that investigation in early September. The findings were brutal for Los Angeles. The organization was fined $30 million and stripped of first-round picks in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033.
Owner Steve Ballmer was suspended and fined, and team president Lawrence Frank was suspended as well. Losing five future firsts is a decade of roster-building tools gone.
Critically, the league declined to void Leonard’s contract or suspend him. That was the domino everyone was waiting on. Shams Charania reported the expectation around Toronto, Leonard and the league was that the trade would be completed within days of the ruling.
Some voices, including analysts who cover the cap closely, floated the idea that Toronto should go back and renegotiate given how badly the Clippers’ leverage collapsed. That is a fair instinct. The Raptors agreed to those terms when Los Angeles still had a future. Now they are trading with a franchise that has almost nothing to build with.
What Toronto Is Actually Getting
Leonard is 35. He has not played a full season since before the pandemic, and the last six years in Los Angeles produced exactly one conference finals appearance for a roster that was supposed to win titles.
The basketball case is that when Leonard is available, he is still one of the toughest two-way wings alive. The business case is bigger. Toronto has not had a legitimate star draw since Leonard left the first time, and bringing back the man who delivered the 2019 championship is the kind of move that sells a decade of goodwill in one press conference.
The cost is real, though. Two unprotected firsts that land in 2031 and 2033 are lottery tickets you are handing a rival, and Ingram is a 20-point scorer. If Leonard’s knees give out in January, Masai Ujiri’s successors will be answering for this deal for years.
Where This Leaves the Clippers
Bleak. Ballmer is out of team operations for a year, Frank is sidelined, the pick cupboard is empty through 2033, and the best player of the Ballmer era is now playing in the Eastern Conference.
Ingram and Dick give the Clippers something to put on the floor, and the picks coming back from Toronto soften the blow slightly. But a team that just forfeited five first-rounders cannot rebuild through the draft, and it cannot spend its way out either while its owner is suspended.
Our take: the trade goes through, and it should. Toronto is buying a story as much as a player, and that story is worth the risk for a franchise that has been drifting. For the Clippers, this is the most expensive lesson any front office has been handed in the modern cap era, and they earned every dollar of it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
