With seven seconds left in the third quarter of Game 2 of the 2013 Eastern Conference finals, Paul George, then the budding third-year star of the Indiana Pacers, sized up LeBron James at the top of the arc.
George blew by James with a left-handed hesitation dribble, planted his feet inside the dotted line, and rose to dunk -- elbow almost at rim level -- over and through Chris Andersen. George roared in triumph.
After George completed his and-1, LeBron rushed up the floor and drained a buzzer-beating 3-pointer. George walked back to Indiana's bench. A voice called for him to stop. It was LeBron. George turned. LeBron reached out his right hand. George grinned. The two slapped hands. "That was kind of a cool moment," said Steve Kerr, calling the game for TNT.
James does not offer public affirmation during a high-stakes playoff game without pointed meaning behind it. That slap of hands was the game's apex superstar acknowledging a new peer: You belong. George iced Indiana's win that night by stonewalling James on a drive and forcing a turnover.
It had taken James' overtime buzzer-beater for the Miami Heat to survive an onslaught of clutch play from George in Game 1 two nights earlier. George sent that game into overtime on a game-tying triple with less than one second left. He scored eight of Indiana's 10 points in overtime, including three consecutive free throws to give Indiana a one-point lead with 2.2 seconds left.
George looked like someone who would be a fixture in big moments in May and June.
George's teams have made one conference finals since -- a six-game loss in 2014 to the Heat. A traumatic leg injury that summer kept him out for eight months. He was part of four consecutive first-round losses from 2016 to 2019 -- two in Indiana, then two more with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
The 2020 Clippers, a would-be superteam George built with Kawhi Leonard, blew a 3-1 lead in the second round against the Denver Nuggets -- losing the last three games in increasingly humiliating fashion. George scored 10 points on 4-of-16 shooting in Game 7, the nadir coming when he hit the side of the backboard on a corner 3 with about 4:00 remaining.
He was mocked on social media as Pandemic P and Wayoff P, twists on the Playoff P nickname he gave himself before the 2018 playoffs -- which ended for the Thunder with George scoring five points on 2-of-16 shooting in a Game 6 loss to the Utah Jazz.
The rising superstar anointed by LeBron all those years ago had become a punchline. And the Clippers on Thursday responded by signing George to a four-year, $176 million maximum extension that could pay him almost $50 million in 2024-25 -- the season he will turn 35.
Perhaps that commitment was inevitable the moment LA traded one outstanding young player and five first-round picks to pair George and Leonard. It is mammoth nonetheless. It is a contract so big, the Clippers may have a hard time trading George for anything good down the line. It is a wager that George's position and skill set will make him more valuable as he ages than other stars -- Kevin Love, Russell Westbrook, John Wall -- who became difficult to trade for anything but one another once they inked giant new contracts.
In the meantime, George becomes one of the most important swing players in the 2021 title chase. He has said he is fully healthy after undergoing surgery on both shoulders ahead of last season.
He'd better be. You never know when a collapse like the one LA suffered breaks a team forever -- when it leaves fractures that show the next time it faces postseason adversity. The previous iteration of the Clippers never recovered from blowing their own 3-1 lead against the Houston Rockets in the second round of the 2015 playoffs.
Gut-punch losses can also galvanize teams. The Clippers have tried to move forward with the right mix of continuity and change. They were a brand-new team starting to click when the NBA suspended the season in March. They did not adapt well to the bubble -- an environment that will hopefully be a one-off. They have no shared history of failure beyond last season; the 2015 Clippers had melted down the year before in the same round against Oklahoma City. Maybe one embarrassment inspires, but two is too many.
They changed head coaches and swapped out Montrezl Harrell, who did not seem to jell with Leonard and George, for Serge Ibaka -- a friend of Leonard who offers a combination of shooting and rim protection the Clippers did not have. They tweaked the bench.
But whether the Clippers rally or shrink will come down to George more than anyone else in the franchise. Leonard is a two-time Finals MVP, impervious to criticism or fear. George was supposed to be the league's ideal second option, a borderline top-10 player who could carry the offense for stretches and envelop opposing stars on defense.
He was not quite that last season. This is his chance to regain his standing and rewrite the narrative of disappointment coalescing around his career.
We tend to prioritize what we just saw in evaluating players. We work backward from the end result. George's playoff record is uneven, but as Kevin Pelton noted, it's about what we'd expect given his regular-season production.
It got lost, mostly because it didn't matter, but George scored 33 points -- including 16 of LA's 35 second-half points -- in Game 6 of that debacle against Denver, and he outplayed Leonard.
In Game 5, he canned a jumper to cut Denver's lead to 102-98 with 2:38 left, and then smothered Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic into empty possessions -- the last on a steal from Jokic in the post with 47 seconds left that gave LA, down 5, one more chance to come back. (The Clippers missed a 3 on the next possession.)
His defense in that series was mostly very good; George was one of several LA defenders who largely contained Murray until his Game 7 eruption. He defended Jokic hard on switches.
Our lasting memory of George from the 2019 playoffs is his desperate lunge on Damian Lillard's 36-foot bye-bye walk-off: George memorialized as sullen victim.
George scored 36 points in that game on 14-of-20 shooting. His midranger with 39 seconds left gave Oklahoma City a two-point lead.
That was one of three shots George took in the fourth quarter, compared to seven for Westbrook and five for Dennis Schroder. George spent much of that quarter standing in the corners as Westbrook and Schroder ran pick-and-roll together, hunting mismatches.
When George commandeered the offense on one key late possession, this happened:
A half-decade earlier, Frank Vogel, then the Pacers coach, banned George from splitting traps. George was too turnover-prone and has generally had a high turnover rate on pick-and-rolls. The Clippers' cough-up rate spiked when George played without Leonard last season; they outscored regular-season opponents by only three points in 528 George-solo minutes. George has never averaged more than 4.1 assists per game. He's a good, unselfish playmaker, but not a pick-and-roll centerpiece.
All of that -- the seeming passivity followed by unproductive activity -- gets at the good and bad of George's strange place in the NBA star hierarchy. Part of George's greatness is that he remains valuable every second he is on the floor, even when he's far from the central action. For most of his career, George has been one of the league's best defenders across three perimeter positions.
He has hit at least 40 percent of catch-and-shoot 3s in six of his last seven seasons. His gravity unclutters the lane. He is lethal running off pindowns and cutting backdoor when defenders overplay those actions.
Empowering other superstars when they have the ball is a kind of meta-skill. Players who have it tend to age well. There are players -- Westbrook is one -- better equipped than George to be the No. 1 ballhandling engine on offense. That does not make them better than George. As No. 1 types, they can take a team only so far. As second options -- the role they likely must inhabit on championship-level teams -- their games are diminished, and they can diminish superstar teammates.
The very best players amplify superstar peers and dictate games (or at least segments of them) in superstar terms. The latter is where George has faltered.
For a player of his stature, George has never indulged much in the traditional trappings of superstardom -- or been all that effective at them. He averages about six isolations per 100 possessions, in the same range last season as Tobias Harris, Schroder, Eric Gordon, and Spencer Dinwiddie, per Second Spectrum. He has cracked one point per possession on isolations -- a general marker of acceptable production -- only once in the last seven seasons.
The Clippers scored 0.848 points per possession when George shot out of an isolation, or dished to a teammate who fired right way -- 183rd among 254 players who recorded at least 25 isos, per Second Spectrum.
He typically averages only two or three post-ups per 100 possessions. He has exceeded 0.9 points per play on them -- a middling mark -- only once in his last seven seasons. The Clippers averaged 0.738 points per possession when George fired out of the post or passed to a teammate who launched -- 120th among 129 guys who recorded at least 25 post-ups, per Second Spectrum.
What the fancy numbers say is that George is not that effective punishing mismatches. A lot of high-stakes postseason basketball comes down to punishing mismatches. A pick-and-roll between George and Lou Williams (with George on either end of it) or Ibaka is not all that threatening if defenses switch without worrying George will brutalize Williams' man or roast Ibaka's.
That is one reason George can fade to the background: His team may have two superior mismatch-exploiters.
Leonard is obviously one. He is LA's undisputed fulcrum. The downside of Leonard and George being around the same size is their defenders often are too; elite opponents switch without fear of exposing a fatal mismatch. George and Leonard ran only 122 pick-and-rolls between them in the regular season and playoffs, per Second Spectrum. Leonard and Williams combined for 326 such plays in about 250 fewer minutes of floor time.
That leaves George off to the side. He can still have a superstar-level impact from there. That is where he is best -- catching the ball after someone else compromises the defense, sprinting into a pass from Leonard and immediately around a high screen.
Provide George a small advantage, and he can morph into a superstar. George has to leverage those advantages with decisive aggression. When a crease opens, zip through in one burst. When a defender is teetering one way, bolt the other without pausing to let him regain his equilibrium.
George goes through languid stretches when that sort of ferocity escapes him.
There is a precious moment where George, after slipping out of a screen for Leonard, has an alley to his left.
A hard drive might unlock an open corner 3 for JaMychal Green, a drop-off to Harrell, or if the defense swarms there, a kick-out to Landry Shamet in the right corner. Instead, George surrenders his territorial edge, and retreats into a pick-and-roll.
George at first capitalizes on the advantage Leonard gifts him, wrong-footing Gary Harris with an instant catch-and-go drive. And just as quickly, he settles.
George has plenty of time on the shot clock. The only Nuggets standing between him and the basket are Murray and Jokic. One more dribble could pry open a host of juicy stuff -- including free throws for George.
George averaged just 4.1 free throws per 36 minutes in the playoffs, his lowest figure since 2012. In the two seasons before his leg injury, that number was around six. In two first-round losses -- against Portland in 2019 and Toronto in 2016, a seven-game near-upset in which George was outstanding -- he got the line about 8.5 times per 36 minutes.
Only 21 percent of George's shots last season came at the rim, the second-lowest mark of his career and well below average for his position, per Cleaning The Glass.
George is a good midrange shooter, but not a great one; he has hit fewer than 40 percent of long 2s three seasons running. All of this leaves him prone to streakiness, as evidenced by some of his ugly postseason shooting lines.
In addition to the stinkers mentioned above, George scored just seven points on 2-of-9 shooting in Game 7 against Miami in 2013. He managed 15 points on 5-of-21 shooting in the finale of the Cleveland Cavaliers' sweep of Indiana in 2017 -- a series in which George was excellent for an overmatched No. 7 seed. Max superstars just cannot have too many nights like that, if any, in a playoff series.
He shot 10-of-47 over Games 2-4 of LA's first-round series against the Dallas Mavericks, and he revealed later that the isolation of the bubble was wearing on him.
Free throws and drives are bulwarks against the vicissitudes of shooting luck. In Oklahoma City's lone playoff win against Portland two seasons ago, George offset a 3-of-16 performance from the floor with 17 free throw attempts.
Give me more of this dude:
George has run that action thousands of times. He catches on the move and leverages Royce O'Neale's momentum against him with one shoulder fake, which flows into a strong drive. From there, George obliterates Rudy Gobert with slithery explosion.
That is the kind of in-motion, secondary pick-and-roll George can feast upon -- the weakside action LA should hunt more when its offense bogs down. Contrary to his recent criticisms of Doc Rivers, George enjoyed his highest-volume and most efficient pick-and-roll season ever with the Clippers, per Second Spectrum. He is an elite pull-up 3-point shooter.
Staying in top gear is taxing. But there is a certain cavalier laxity that can creep into George's game. In two of his team's recent late-game collapses -- the Lillard game in Portland, and Game 5 against Denver in the bubble -- George helped fuel opposing rallies by admiring 3-pointers while his man leaked out for dunks. He can get too cute straying from elite shooters, overconfident in his ability to recover. His defense dropped off a tick last season.
The healthy, dialed-in George can still be a top-12 player, and maybe better -- a championship-level second option. He finished third in Most Valuable Player voting two seasons ago.
The Clippers bet everything on the George-Leonard combination. They just doubled down with George's extension.
Their players could not even agree whether last season was championship-or-bust, with George declaring after the Denver series it was not.
This one is. And it will go bust unless the Clippers get peak Paul George again.