Swanson: Clippers can’t complete Game 5 rally against Suns, close frustrating season

PHOENIX — Hope is a four-letter word.

Sticks, stones, and four little letters with the power to break hearts and wreck dreams and spoil the best-laid plans.

The fifth-seeded Clippers mounted a wild, willful comeback on Tuesday night but finished just short, 136-130, against the fourth-seeded Phoenix Suns in Game 5 at the Footprint Center.

That wrapped up a valiant, undermanned effort in the best-of-seven Western Conference first-round playoff series that was reminiscent of scrappy efforts of years past. It also ended probably the most frustrating season in Clippers’ history – leaving them 0-4 since Kawhi Leonard and Paul George joined the team.

The Clippers, you remember, raised hopes precariously on July 5, 2019, the night the news that All-Stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George were teaming up in L.A. It turned a historically downtrodden franchise into something previously unimaginable: A bona fide championship contender. The odds-on favorite, in fact.

But for all the excitement surrounding that announcement – for all the hope – there remained a streak of hard-boiled trepidation running through a fan base conditioned by nearly 50 years of failure and discord: “There’s really no reason for Clippers fans to think this is going to work out the way it should,” longtime Clippers devotee Matt Johnson told me a couple of days after the deal got done, a prescient sentiment shared by other fans too.

Four years – a presidential term – in, and there’s been no joint NBA Finals appearance for Leonard (No. 2) and George (No. 13).

Four years, a whole high school career, and only one Western Conference finals appearance.

Four years, an entire Olympic cycle, that will be remembered for Leonard’s torn anterior cruciate ligament, for George’s sprained UCL in his elbow, for Leonard’s on-off routine in back-to-back sets of games, for George’s hamstring issues. …

Year 4 started with the greatest expectations yet, Leonard and George both professing to be healthy, ready to lead their deepest supporting cast so far.

It ended Tuesday night in the desert with Leonard, the five-time All-Star and two-time NBA Finals MVP, and George, an eight-time All-Star, on the bench, nursing a pair of right knee sprains, the billboards around L.A. also proving prescient: “One of a kind, but we’ve got two!”

Without them, the Suns’ 50-24 third-quarter explosion served as the buffer to boost them into the second round for a showdown with the top-seeded Denver Nuggets, despite the Clippers’ desperate 36-25 fourth-quarter surge.

It’s wrong, it is, to feel any sort of way but bummed about injuries – though not about the Clippers’ bedside manner, the organization’s unsteady drip-drip-drip of painful news. Just tell your long-suffering fans: Is the patient going to make it back soon or what? By season’s end, or not!?

It’s not wrong to lament what coulda been. This season, the Clippers were 24-14 when Leonard and George both played. They were 3-9 when neither did – and 0-3 in three hard-fought postseason games, following Leonard’s surprise scratch hours before Game 3.

Said Coach Tyronn Lue postgame: “The encouraging thing, with PG and Kawhi healthy, we haven’t lost a series yet.”

That left Russell Westbrook – in a plot twist no one could have seen coming to start the season, when he was still a Laker and the Clippers’ roster seemed impeccably set – sparking a short-handed Clippers contingent against a star-studded Suns squad that proved too much.

On Tuesday, the Clippers built a nine-point halftime lead, lost it and then clawed with all their might to save their season in the final few minutes, cutting a 20-point lead to 132-130 with 1:02 to play. They missed multiple chances to tie the score in the final three minutes.

So what now? How are the Clippers ever going to get over the hump?

Norman Powell, a champion with Leonard in Toronto, expects it will happen eventually – if the Clippers can stay healthy.

“In those teams when we (could finally) break through, we had a full healthy team,” he said. “We could figure out what happened this series, who do we need to bring in, what improvements we need to make. … This group, even before I got here, haven’t had that togetherness and health to make a deep run and see what happens.”

As it stands, Leonard and George, the Clippers’ reliably unreliable top-tier talents, are signed for at least another season, with player options for 2024-25 – when Intuit Dome opens in Inglewood. They’re owed $94 million apiece in that span.

And the Clippers will continue paying Oklahoma City for trading them George, a bill that still includes three first-round draft picks and another possible first-round pick swap – and the ignominy of however many points former Clippers phenom Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drops on them going forward.

It’s hard to imagine that trading either of their injury-prone stars now would return players of commensurate skill sets or abilities – save for the crucial one: availability.

But rebuilding? In a new building? Seems unlikely.