Paul George, along with the Clippers as a whole, is off to a tremendous start to the 2020-21 season.
On Wednesday night, L.A. picked up a 22-point win in Cleveland to end a 4-2 East Coast road trip, that began with George and Kawhi Leonard absent while in contact tracing procedure. Averaging 23.7 points, 6.3 rebounds, 5.4 assists, and 1.3 steals per game, George returned from a rough playoffs in the Bubble to play some of the best basketball of his career.
He will have to wait just like the whole Clippers team until the postseason to really prove his well performance. For now, he and the team are planning a course to what they hope is a recovery this summer. To do that they will almost certainly have to go through the Lakers, who won the title last year after getting out of the West without the highly anticipated Battle for L.A. in the conference finals because the Clippers fell to the Nuggets in the semis.
On Wednesday, that rivalry was ignited more as Jared Dudley’s book on the Lakers title run in the Bubble came out and included a part noting that the entire Laker team took it as “disrespectful” that Paul George put himself in the same class as LeBron, Anthony Davis, and Kawhi having not won anything — this seemed to overlook that AD had likewise not won anything prior to last year, but, alas.
In any case George was asked about that excerpt following L.A.’s win over the Cavs and seemed to have not heard of this new story yet, and had a pretty funny response.
It’s about as good as you can do when someone brings this up and you’re learning of it for the first time. He doesn’t ignore it, he just brushes it off and gives a clever soundbite in the process. Not that any Lakers-Clippers series this year would need any added juice, but this is just another layer to what would be one of the most highly anticipated conference finals in some time.
