The Los Angeles Clippers held Kawhi Leonard out in their Tuesday night loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder due to stiffness on his recuperating knee. With the season in its early legs, Clippers fans will be especially understanding of just how much the team is being careful with regards to its handling of Leonard's health, especially when The Klaw holds the keys to what could be a historic Clippers title run.

However, some pundits like the notorious Kendrick Perkins questioned why Leonard is already missing games despite it not being a back-to-back set. (Newsflash: Leonard wanted to play but the team ruled him out.)

Perkins even resorted to an argument of false equivalence, saying that those who criticized Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving's absences on the court should “keep the same energy” for Kawhi Leonard's precautionary missed games.

“Come on now! Kawhi has been out entire damn year… why in the hell is he sitting out tonight and they didn’t play yesterday?! We gotta keep the same energy we were doing with Kyrie! Carry on…” Perkins wrote.

To the uninitiated, Kyrie Irving has missed 123 games since signing with the Nets, although it requires mentioning that hardly anybody dragged Irving's name through the mud when he missed 52 games in his first season in Brooklyn after he went through an operation to ease the pain on his right shoulder. That was a lost season for the Nets anyway, with their prized free agent haul of Kevin Durant still recovering from the Achilles tear he suffered during the 2019 NBA Finals.

In 2021, Irving was mostly healthy, but he missed more than 10 games due to personal reasons after a myriad of off-court issues. Even then, Irving drew criticism because he was spotted partying at a club with his sister while disregarding COVID protocols back in January while the Nets were struggling at the time.

And most memorably, Kyrie Irving was sent away from the team at the beginning of the 2021-22 season due to his inability to suit up in home games after his ardent refusal to get jabbed with the COVID vaccine. Irving was eventually allowed to play in Brooklyn after a change to the vaccine mandate in March.

Meanwhile, Kawhi Leonard has missed mostly back-to-backs in recent seasons in a bid to keep himself fresh for the postseason grind. Load management worked for him in 2019, and if not for a freak injury in the 2021 playoffs, it may have worked for the Clippers too with how well they were playing that year. Kendrick Perkins was just being flat out ridiculous in comparing two entirely different situations.