INGLEWOOD, Calif. — It was not looking like Kawhi Leonard’s night. The LA Clippers star forward had missed 12 of 18 shots when the Clippers took a timeout trailing by one point in overtime with 21.6 seconds left to play. The visiting Sacramento Kings took a lead after two free throws by DeMar DeRozan, the Toronto Raptors legend who was traded for Leonard in 2018.
The Clippers trusted Leonard, though. Acting head coach Brian Shaw, who found out before Sunday’s game that he would be managing due to head coach Tyronn Lue’s back pain, believed that Leonard was the best option to end the game outright.
“Cleared everybody off and out to get Kawhi in his spot in the middle of the floor,” Shaw told The Athletic. “Told him to make sure that he took the last shot. And for everybody to just space out and stay flat and let him do his thing. I mean, it really was that simple.”
Leonard got the inbounds from point guard James Harden in the middle of the floor and held it for 15 seconds while being guarded by Kings power forward Keegan Murray. The sellout crowd at Intuit Dome got antsy once the clock fell under 10 seconds. With six seconds to go, Leonard advanced toward the paint, using eight dribbles to get to his spot.
With the entire Kings defense collapsing upon him, Leonard stepped through, jumped off of two feet in the paint, and used his left hand to get a shot up. The buzzer sounded as Leonard’s attempt hit the back of the rim. But after the buzzer went off, Leonard hopped in pre-celebration, and the ball fell into the hoop to give the Clippers a 111-110 win over the Kings, extending the team’s win streak to three games.
It was Leonard’s second career buzzer-beater, and first since he ended the 2019 Eastern Conference semifinals against the Philadelphia 76ers with an iconic shot that required four bounces before going in. But that game winner with the Raptors came with the score tied. This was Leonard’s first buzzer-beater as a Clipper, first in the regular season and first with his team trailing.
WHAT A SHOT BY KAWHI LEONARD.
HIM. pic.twitter.com/o7cDfpcJas
— LA Clippers (@LAClippers) March 10, 2025
“Read the defense, got to a spot on the floor, and was able to get a shot off,” said Leonard, who finished the game with 17 points while breaking 40 minutes for the first time this season. “I wanted to play. I’m kind of capped on the minutes — 36 is a lot of minutes. But it was just about me just wanting to finish that game. They told me they were going to sit me for a minute and bring me back. So just itching to get back in and didn’t want to sit.”
The Clippers improved to 35-29 while clinching the head-to-head tiebreaker with the Kings (33-30) with one more meeting left in the last week of the season at Sacramento. It was also the first Clippers buzzer-beater of any kind since Lou Williams broke a tie against the Brooklyn Nets with a 3-pointer in March 2019, and the first Clippers buzzer-beater with LA trailing since Blake Griffin made a 3-pointer at Portland in October 2017 while down by two points.
“I do (remember), we ran to the opposite side of their bench,” said Ivica Zubac, the longest-tenured Clipper, about the Williams buzzer-beater from 2019. “I remember, that was fun. That was fun, that was one of my first games with the Clippers. It’s always fun, we needed that. We needed this win. We were down seven with two minutes to go and came back, go to overtime, burning out, and finish like that, win like that — we needed it. We needed some positivity.”
The Kings had a 97-90 lead with 1:48 left in regulation. Leonard got the game-saving 7-0 run started with an and-1 through Murray. Then after drawing an offensive foul on Jonas Valanciunas, Harden found a rolling Zubac for a wide-open dunk. Shaw registered a critical coach’s challenge to negate a 3-shot foul called on Derrick Jones Jr., who contested DeRozan’s 3-point attempt. With 11.9 seconds left, Harden scored on a floater to tie the score at 97.
“The best shot available,” said Harden, who also made a go-ahead floater with 29.7 seconds left in overtime and led the Clippers with 29 points. “He was playing me close. I got by him, and nobody stepped up. So you know, tough finish.”
To save the game in regulation, Clippers defender Kris Dunn was assigned to Zach LaVine, who finished Sunday’s game with 30 points while DeRozan scored a game-high 31 points. LaVine missed a tough look that would have won the game for the Kings at the buzzer.
“Make him take a tough shot,” Dunn told The Athletic about his instructions guarding LaVine going into LA’s last defensive possession of regulation. “You don’t want him to have any kind of rhythm into the shot to get a good look. He took a falling fadeaway. He went from the top all the way to the corner to take a falling fadeaway. We’ll live with that.”
Now the Clippers go on the road to face three Eastern Conference teams under .500. First is a back-to-back at New Orleans and Miami, and then the Clippers visit Atlanta before returning home next Sunday to host the Charlotte Hornets.
It gives the Clippers a chance to make up for a 1-6 start to their play after the All-Star break. The Clippers will be without Norman Powell (hamstring) and Ben Simmons (knee) to begin the trip, but Powell will be reevaluated by the end of the trip, while Simmons has a chance to join the team during the trip, per league sources.
In the meantime, Leonard reaches a major accomplishment with the buzzer-beater. But he also isn’t focused on the challenges of trying to return to play this season and what this moment means. As usual, he is focused on the main goals of the team.
“I’m not thinking about that, it’s one game,” said Leonard, who did not debut this season until January due to rehabilitation of his chronically injured right knee. “My goal is to be healthy at the end of the season so I can have a good summer, not worried about doing a whole rehab process again or missing a training camp … we need these wins down the stretch. I think this will help us be a better team moving forward. So us getting that win, everybody was excited and know we needed it.”
Required reading
(Photo: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
