WHAT IF THE SHOT DID NOT DROP?
Raptors might have ended up where Clippers find themselves with Kawhi
In this world in which reality feels like it's been turned on its head, imagine, for a moment, an alternate timeline.
It's May 12, 2019, and on the last possession of a tie game between the Toronto Raptors and the Philadelphia 76ers, Kawhi Leonard releases a floating, three-point attempt from the corner. It hits the rim, bounces up, bounces again and again — and then drops to the floor. The Miss, it becomes in Raptors lore. Deflated, Toronto loses in overtime.
Six weeks later, after the Sixers are the surprise NBA champions with a win over the injury-depleted Golden State Warriors, Leonard surprises no one by leaving the Raptors as a free agent.
Stories begin to emerge that the arrival of Leonard had put a strain on the Raptors' carefully built culture, suggesting frustration some in the building had with the previous unassailable decisions of president Masai Ujiri. Leonard is said to have received preferential treatment while in Toronto, which was already somewhat obvious since he sat out more than a quarter of the team's games.
But he had kept to his own private workouts before and after games, with his own coach, a longtime friend. Some teammates were annoyed that Leonard made no effort to bond with them, and seemed to only speak to them when they were literally on the court. He never spoke to the media unless he absolutely had to, and after games he would disappear for long workouts, meaning his teammates had to handle most of the media responsibilities. There was an understanding that the organization was tolerating all of this because Leonard was a pending free agent, but it was plain to see that he was a mercenary.
That lack of connection spilled over on to the court. As good as the Raptors had been in 2019, they were the product of two distinct systems. There was Kawhiball, when the offence ran through him and let him find his own shot, and then there was the ball-movement offence that coach Nick Nurse had implemented when he was still an assistant. That one still worked pretty well, as evidenced by the team having a better winning percentage in the games when Leonard sat out. Kawhi was so good that the team was effective with him as the fulcrum, too, but he was so ball-dominant at times that some teammates, notably Kyle Lowry, were marginalized. The veteran team leader said all the right things publicly about just wanting to win, but there were nights when Lowry, long the angry heart of the Raptors, seemed like an afterthought.
And so, after the second-round exit to the 76ers, the Raptors were left to consider a season in which they had traded a beloved star who was committed to Toronto for someone who never had a kind word for the city.
He never integrated himself with the team, never really seemed to try to sink into the experience, and in the end he didn't help them get any deeper in the playoffs than the other guy, despite noted roadblock Lebron James having left the Eastern Conference.
When the 2019-20 season dawned, the Raptors were mostly an afterthought. But with Leonard gone and with a very large chip on their collective shoulder, they put together a good regular
season until the pandemic hit. But in the Orlando bubble, it was another second-round exit, this time to the Boston Celtics. In the whirlwind off-season, Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol departed for Los Angeles, and then the Raptors found out that they would have to move to Tampa for their home games, with quarantine rules making frequent border crossings impossible.
As training camp opened in Florida, the players and staff were talking about playing hard and not making excuses, but it was hard not to feel that the franchise was particularly snake-bitten. They had been to the playoffs in seven straight seasons, but only won more than one series once. They had blown up a good team for a one-year gamble that busted with The Miss. Now they were starting a daunting task: a season based more than 2,000 kilometres from their home, and a largely unproven roster that still hadn't done much of anything in the playoffs. The early betting lines expected them to miss the post-season by some distance, and fans were wondering if the franchise was headed back to the wilderness.
This is an alternate reality, but it's hardly fanciful. Post-mortems on Leonard's first year with the L.A. Clippers, chronicled in detail this week in The Athletic, described how his special treatment and isolated ways disrupted the team's chemistry. None of it sounded dissimilar to Leonard's only year with the Raptors, except for the part where he commuted to work from San Diego. The difference, of course, is that the Raptors won. They were perilously close to the same scenario that befell the Clippers, but The Shot fell. It changed the way we view everything that has happened since.
The Raptors aren't unproven now, they are battle-tested. They may be facing a season with a stupidly high degree of difficulty, building facilities on the fly while the rest of the league settles back into their homes, separated from their families for who knows how long. If things didn't break their way in the spring of 2019, we'd be saying the job ahead of them was impossible. But this is a team with championship pedigree now. They've done surprising things not that long ago, which at least makes it possible to imagine them doing it again.