Leonard starts shaking off the rust
New Raptor offers hints of his all-around game in pre-season opener
VANCOUVER— He got his big mitts on one pass out of nowhere to deflect it out of bound. He made a nice pass a minute or two later that led to the pass that led to an open corner three-pointer. He missed a bunch of shots but made a couple of others.
And one thing rang true about Kawhi Leonard at the Rogers Arena on Saturday night: He has not forgotten the nuances of playing in an NBA game.
Getting on a court at full speed for the first time since Jan. 13 — or at least what full speed is for the first exhibition game of the season — Leonard eased a few minds with his Toronto Raptors debut.
The numbers weren’t astonishing — 12 points, a rebound, three assists, and a couple fouls in 19 first-half minutes — but the encouraging signs were everywhere.
Now, it’s not a game to hang a season on, it wasn’t a game to even hang a pre-season on, but Leonard’s involvement in a fast-paced Raptors offence and his growing cohesion with Kyle Lowry were just what Raptors coach Nick Nurse wanted to see the first night.
“I think there were a couple of pretty cool sequences where they found each other in areas, and I think that’s neat,” Nurse said after Toronto’s 122-104 win over the Portland Trail Blazers.
“I think everybody saw Kawhi, he was shaking off some rust, right? But you can obviously see the level that he has and I think he looks like we’re all run- ning around really fast and he gets it and everything goes into slow motion. It’s kind of a gift for guys that are as good as him and it’s neat to watch, too.”
Leonard did have his moments. He was as advertised on defence, disruptive and active, and the step-back move that wobbled the legs of Portland’s Caleb Swanigan in the second quarter had his teammates on their feet.
“I think it’s just going to take on-court minutes, getting the experience together, going out there and playing and getting a feel for the overall team, the overall game that he likes to play,” Lowry said. “And the pace. We played at a really good pace tonight. It was a fun game, just good to get out there and compete against another team.”
The fans in the audience of 18,654 at the Rogers Arena? Well, they cheered loudly when Leonard dunked on one of his first runs down the pre-game layup line so they were happy from the start.
The Lowry-Leonard coupling, which will be vital to any suc- cess Toronto has in the coming season, looked fine in their 19 minutes together.
Nurse had kept them together for most drills during four days of practice and mirrored that in the game. Lowry and Leonard played about 11 minutes together to start the game and then the final eight minutes of the first half.
“I’m just looking at a whole bunch of different combinations, maybe get the guys into some other positions that we want to make sure we look at,” Nurse said.
Jonas Valanciunas, who started on the bench but opened the second quarter, piled up 17 points with seven rebounds. He had one stretch in the first half where he faked a three-pointer, blew by a closing defender and finished with a left-handed layup, then went coast-to-coast after grabbing a rebound and using a so-called Euro step move to elude a defender.
The qualifier, of course, is that it was the first pre-season game and had bloated rosters of players unfamiliar with each other.
No one played extended minutes. The Raptors used 17 players and the Blazers held stars Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum to 12 minutes each.