Here’s Los Angeles Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank giving opening statements on the 2024-25 roster at Tuesday’s media availability (will play home games at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California this season).
(via LA Clippers):
Introductory statement about 2024-25 team: “We’re super excited to start the season. It’s been awesome. We got into this building August 25th, and the vibe and energy here has been incredible. We’ve had an extremely productive offseason with guys in the gym. We’re very, very fortunate to be the best market in the league where guys live here 12 months of the year. So to have the group together has been terrific to see the growth of some of our veterans and our young guys taking steps moving forward. We’re really, really looking forward to the season. I think we’re going to be extremely competitive, hard playing, tough, high IQ group. I think our defense is going to be significantly improved due to some of the offseason additions where we really wanted to address having multiple point of attack defenders, it’s been a weakness of ours for a number of years. I think there’s a great deal of pride in our group and what we’ve done.
“We feel extremely fortunate that we have the longest active consecutive streak of winning seasons in the NBA. We’re also extremely prideful to have two first ballot Hall of Fame players who all they know in the regular season is winning. Kawhi [Leonard] is first of all active players I think who have played 400 or more games in winning percentage, James [Harden] is six, and those guys when healthy, they make the playoffs. That’s what they’ve done. I think we have a really, really good group around them, the vibe and the chemistry. It’s easy to say that in September and training camp, but just really, really excited to see this group come together.”
Addresses Kawhi Leonard’s health: “And then, a couple of you guys called me, so I’ll address it right now last week about Kawhi’s status. So his right knee, the swelling has significantly gone down. It’s almost gone. He wants to participate in everything in training camp, but we’re going to hold him back from drill work and really focus on strengthening because the goal is to get him 100% so he can have a great season, not just this year, but for many years. We’ll have a detailed plan step by step kinda just having objective measures to go from one phase to the next, but he’s super determined, super excited, and can’t wait to get started.”
