Leonard looking like his old dominant self
Toronto star red hot as fellow MVP hopeful Antetokounmpo arrives for a showdown
It has been familiar refrain around the Toronto Raptors through the start of the NBA season.
Teammates and coaches get asked — when is Kawhi Leonard going to be fully comfortable with his role on the court and within the team?
He’s close, observers suggest, even as they wonder if the all-star forward is fully back after missing all but nine games a season ago, whether the timing and game conditioning and all the other little parts that go into greatness are yet at their peak level.
Raptors coach Nick Nurse dutifully an- swers all the queries with patience and a measure of caution. “You can see it,” he says in some form or another, “he’s almost there, getting better and more comfortable every day.”
But now, that line of questioning can be put to rest.
Leonard has been on a tear of late, spectacular more often than not, dominant at both ends of the floor, and it can be assumed he’s as back as he’s ever going to be. Check out his last five games: á 30 or more points in four of them. á 17-of-34 from three-point range, including two games in a row with five made shots from beyond the arc.
á 58-for-109 from the field, a rather impressive 54.1 per cent. á 11 steals. á 37 rebounds. It’s still far too early to start thinking about awards and honours, but fleeting thoughts about all-star and all-NBA and, yes, most valuable player awards aren’t far away.
“The guy, he’s talented, man,” Raptors teammate Pascal Siakam said of Leonard. “I think people forgot that a little bit, how talented he is, the things he can do at the level he can do them at.
“Not just (score), but be on defence and guard the best guy on the team, get steals and do all those other things. It’s fun to watch.”
The thing that stands out most is that Leonard has this amazing combination of brutish power and subtle elegance to his game.
The left-handed dunk he threw down on Brooklyn’s Jarrett Allen on Friday night was eye-popping but so, too, was a sneaky little steal along the sideline in front of the Nets’ bench that set up a transition opportunity for the Raptors.
Toronto has had a number of outstanding players over the years like Damon Stoudamire, Vince Carter and Chris Bosh, each of whom could dominate a game.
But the breadth of Leonard’s game dwarfs the others.
“You can probably say he is the best two-way player in basketball,” Washington Wizards coach Scott Brooks said earlier this month.
“And the way he takes the challenge of guarding the best players every night — that takes a lot out of you physically but mentally you have to be mentally strong to challenge yourself every possession to guard the best players. And if you do get scored on you have to reboot pretty quickly because you have to do the same thing the next time down the court.
“But he has the quickness, he has the post-up game, the mid- range game, he shoots threes, he gets to the free throw line. There is nothing he doesn’t do well.”
Leonard is not one to boast about his accomplishments, all he wants to do each night is play hard and win. Even the pros- pect of facing Milwaukee’s star Giannis Antetokounmpo on Sunday doesn’t get him going, at least publicly.
“They’re a great team, he’s leading them at a high level,” Leonard said Saturday.
“Like I said, going into any other game, wanting to go in and play my hardest basketball and try to get a win and have fun.”
Regardless of what Leonard says, however, the meeting with Antetokounmpo adds a large measure of “juice” to a nonde- script December regular-season game.
Neither star played when the teams met in the first weeks of the season, so the hype for Sunday is building.
“I think it’s intriguing in general just because they are both going to want to go at each other a little bit,” Nurse said Saturday.
“Guard each other and go at each other and while we don’t want it to be a personal battle I’m assuming there will be a little personal-ness going on between them. I would imagine both of them are going to be excited to play and play with a lot of energy and force and try to get a lot of things done.
“They are both talked about (as being) among the best players in the East, both are in MVP talks now, so I think this is a game for them to see what happens.”