Raptors play long game by resting Leonard
Sitting the superstar against the Bucks part of new reality
TORONTO — These are different times for the Toronto Raptors and their fans, heady days of great expectations and a historic start to the season, and it’s all going to take a lot of getting used to.
Never before has the team had to decide when to rest a superstar this early in the season. Never before have the fans needed to comprehend a growing trend across the league.
Monday hammered that point home hard.
By sitting out Kawhi Leonard against the Milwaukee Bucks as a preventive measure and nothing more, the Raptors made — for them — another bold move and obvious statement that the season is not about October. It’s about May and June, and, if sacrifices have to be made, they have to be made.
Leonard has now missed two games for rest — the start of this back-to-back in Milwaukee and at home to Philadelphia, after sitting out a game in Washington following a home win over
Boston — and it’s assuredly not the last time.
Coming off a 2017-18 National Basketball Association season in which he played only nine games, Leonard is wisely being treated with kid gloves. Given the leaguewide reliance on improved sports science when it comes to rest and preventive medicine, it was more surprising that Toronto coach Nick Nurse hinted Sunday that Leonard would play both games than it was when the forward was scratched Monday morning.
Whichever side you fall on the “rest” discussion and its benefits, teams pay medical staffs and fitness consultants a lot of money for guidance, and, with so much at stake, teams tend to err on the side of caution.
Toronto hadn’t played since Friday and won’t play again after Tuesday until Friday in Phoenix, so this move is caution taken to the extreme. The team has never said a firm protocol is in place for Leonard, but he’s now missed half of each back-to-back and why would anyone think he won’t miss half of them all given what’s transpired? Maybe he will play some — Nurse has said publicly that they’ll manage him on a case-by-case basis — but the trend this early in a long season has been to sit him down.
Perhaps fans can be soothed a bit by the fact Leonard has yet to miss a game at Scotiabank
Arena, and the league will be assuaged by the fact the Raptors play later this season in Milwaukee. Bucks fans may not be totally shut out of a Leonard sighting so the head office can’t have many complaints.
Fans are, frankly, stuck having to deal with an issue that’s never been a factor in Toronto. Leonard’s a unique case. This is a year building solely toward a chance to play for an NBA championship, and, if the ticket-buying public misses a chance or two to see the team’s top draw, the franchise seems more than willing to suffer any repercussions.
The decision to rest Leonard — and Giannis Antetokounmpo’s concussion-caused absence from the Milwaukee lineup came to light after Leonard was ruled out — took much of the air out of what was a statistically fluky game that gave it weight out of all proportion. If, for instance, it had been a game between a 4-2 team and one that was 3-3, there would have been much less anticipation than a meeting of 6-0 squads.
How fluky was it that it was the first time in NBA history two 6-0 teams were facing off, which provided an angle and gravitas that made even marginal fans of either team pay attention?
It was also the seventh game of the season, though — not entirely meaningless, but not hugely significant. In fact, all the fans bleating about using Leonard on Monday and sitting him against Philadelphia on Tuesday would surely have been singing different tunes if they had tickets Tuesday and Joel Embiid and
Ben Simmons were bringing an unbeaten Sixers team to town.
The immediate reaction to Monday morning’s news about Leonard was part dismay, part anger, part sadness at a missed opportunity to have what some saw as a great early season.
It probably should have been a realization that there’s a new reality around the Raptors, one that might take some getting used to.