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The Los Angeles Clippers' season is over, despite a valiant effort in the first round of the playoffs against the Phoenix Suns with stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George both sidelined by the end of it. At his end-of-season press conference on Thursday, team president Lawrence Frank said that, while they competed admirably in the postseason, that same energy wasn't always there in the 82-game slog that is the regular season. 

"What I don't want to do is have the injuries or how hard we fought in the postseason to mask a disappointing regular season," Frank told reporters, via The Athletic's Law Murray. "We have to be honest with ourselves, and we have to look in the mirror. It starts with me. And we have to get back to honoring and respecting the regular season."

The Clippers finished with a 44-38 record, which was good enough for fifth in the unusually flattened Western Conference standings. Despite their depth, they had the statistical profile of a slightly below-average team: 17th in offense, 17th in defense, 17th in point differential. Much of this had to do with injuries -- Leonard and George played 995 minutes together in 38 games -- but, in Frank's estimation, that wasn't all of it. 

"I just think we need to compete harder every single night," Frank said, via the Los Angeles Times' Andrew Greif. "I think we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the fans. We want to be a championship organization and we have to invest deeper into the process. I mean, the last 28 years, the NBA champion has been a top-three seed. So you have to earn it, the regular season matters. And not that our guys don't think it matters, but I just think we, all of us, starting with me, we can compete harder every day. We can hold each other accountable every day. And that's what we have to do. 

"And I think you think about when you watched us in the playoff series, even if you go back to last year's team that won 42 games, the trademark of this organization has to be about competing, hard work, toughness. And it's not that we didn't do it at times this year -- we did, there were some really good moments, there's some really good individual stories. But as a team, in terms of what our goal is, we can compete harder in everything we do. We know we can."

Frank said that, "regardless of who plays," the Clippers need to make competing harder part of their identity. While he said they'd like to bring back Russell Westbrook, Mason Plumlee and Eric Gordon and they remain committed to building around Leonard and George, the front office will need to "step back and look at it all," including the roster.   

"A lot of times, there's always a focus on the playoffs 'cause that's when everyone's watching, but we have to be honest about where we're at," Frank said, via The Athletic. "We'll evaluate the season, we'll evaluate the roster, we'll get this team better, we'll explore all possibilities, we're open-minded, we're creative."

Upon seeing that Frank said the team needs to respect the regular season, you might immediately start thinking about load management, the practice of resting players and/or limiting their minutes in order to manage or prevent injuries. Leonard became the face of load management in Toronto in 2018-19, and, due to chronic knee problems and a torn ACL in the 2021 playoffs, Los Angeles has taken a similar approach with him.

This is not, however, what Frank is talking about. "Injuries are real," he said, via Tomer Azarly of Clutch Points. Leonard was coming off a torn right ACL, and his season eventually ended because of a torn meniscus in his right knee.

"Sometimes what gets lost [is] there's a difference between being injured and what people term 'load management,'" Frank said, via Joey Linn of Sports Illustrated's FanNation. "Kawhi had to deal with three different injuries coming off ACL reconstruction. That's not load management."

None of this is to say that load management and respecting the regular season are entirely unrelated. In 2023-24, the Clippers will need to do whatever they can to maximize the odds that Leonard and George will be healthy at the beginning of the playoffs and hold up for a potential championship run. The challenge, for coach Tyronn Lue and the players, is to not let any absences -- be they because of injuries or injury prevention -- drag down the group's competitiveness in the regular season. This season, that was a difficult needle to thread.