Leonard among NBA’s elite
Newest Raptor isn’t flashy, but earned his spurs
Kawhi Leonard needs no introduction to basketball diehards, but to casual fans, he remains a bit of a mystery. They don’t know the backstory, they don’t see him in commercials or all over social media like LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, James Harden, or even Anthony Davis or Giannis Antetokounmpo, even though Leonard, when healthy, is considered a peer of those top players.
So then, to borrow from Seinfeld; What’s the deal with Kawhi Leonard and is he really an ultra-elite player?
To answer the latter question first, yes, Leonard is a top-tier talent. It starts defensively, where he can smother opponents across multiple positions, generating tons of deflections, steals and blocks while also rebounding at a high rate for a small forward. By most accounts, he is the NBA’s best perimeter defender and it has been that way for some time now. Leonard, who turned 27 late last month, won his first of two consecutive defensive player of the year awards at just 23 years old.
His emergence at the other end of the floor took a bit longer, but Leonard is one of the few players to increase his scoring average in each of the first six years of his career, going from 7.9 points a game as a rookie to 25.5 in 2016-17, when he finished third in MVP voting. The previous year he had finished second, averaging 21.2 points a game for a 67-win club, before Tim Duncan headed off into the sunset.
Leonard was supposed to succeed Duncan as a quiet, emotionless, generational talent, who would lead the Spurs to further greatness. It didn’t happen, but it was never supposed to happen, either.
You see, Leonard was viewed as merely a marginal recruit coming out of Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, near Los Angeles. ESPN ranked him 56th in his class and 14th at his position and Leonard elected to stay close to home, choosing San Diego State over schools like Alabama State and Arizona and L.A. programs UCLA and USC. Switched to power forward from his natural spot, Leonard immediately emerged as a standout defender, but showed little evidence of an outside shot or an ability to create off of the dribble during his two years with the Aztecs.
Unlike nearly all future MVP candidates, Leonard was not on anybody’s radar in the high lottery when he decided to declare for the draft and he ended up going 15th to Indiana, who promptly dealt him for George Hill in a prearranged deal. The Raptors liked Leonard a lot, but not nearly enough to grab him with the fifth pick.
His shooting issues and lack of size at the power forward position (at the time, the league trended much bigger than it does now) scared off NBA teams, but everything changed when Leonard started working with Spurs shooting coach Chip Engelland, who felt confident that Leonard’s shot was not broken and in fact could be moulded into a dangerous weapon. As fate would have it, Engelland was able to work with Leonard for a few days before the 2011 lockout hit, shutting down the NBA and barring team employees from working with players. Luckily, Engelland had given Leonard a program to work with during the long layoff, that would see him model his shot after that of Kobe Bryant’s.
When the league started up again in late-December of 2011, Leonard was behind the 8-ball, having not had a training camp and he shot well under 30 per cent from beyond the arc in his first 22 games. However, back at his natural small forward spot, which he had played in high school, and encouraged to shoot as part of San Antonio’s free-flowing offence, something clicked and Leonard hit 40 per cent of his outside attempts in the 30 games following the all-star break.
Still, Leonard remained well under the radar for his first couple of seasons, though that soon changed.
Despite Leonard’s best efforts (14.6 points, 11.1 rebounds and two steals per game), LeBron James reached a new level of brilliance during the 2013 NBA Finals and everyone remembers Ray Allen’s miracle shot to deny the Spurs a ring. What many forget is Leonard, after a brilliant Game 5 performance which was one of his first breakouts, had missed a crucial free throw late and then was one of three Spurs who failed to secure a rebound, allowing Allen to create an indelible hoops moment.
Leonard and the Spurs recovered in fine fashion, rampaging through a regular season revenge tour, before Leonard hit an absurd 58 per cent of his three-point attempts and enveloped James (who averaged just shy of four turnovers per game in the series) in earning Finals MVP honours in the fivegame wipeout that ended the Heat dynasty.
There was no doubt about what Leonard was now. He had served notice, even though he had barely uttered a word to the media along the way, that he was in line to be one of the faces of the league and the accolades and awards would follow, along with a huge salary bump.
Because Leonard doesn’t play the media game or promote himself at all — and partly because the Spurs organization is not big on glitz and glamour either, merely results, just like Leonard — he arrives in the huge market of Toronto as a rare bird indeed, an unknown superstar, despite the gaudy resume.
He won’t move tickets or sell products like others of his ilk, but if winning is all that matters, he’ll fit in here just fine and Canadians will quickly get to know him. At least as much as he lets them.