Relative says Kawhi lost trust in Spurs
Why did Kawhi Leonard want to leave San Antonio so badly and so suddenly? His divorce from the franchise might be the most consequential non-Warriors, non-LeBron development in the NBA over the last five years, and its origins have always been vague. Kawhi and Gregg Popovich have some inscrutable beef? Kawhi really, really wanted to play for the Lakers? Neither was a totally satisfying explanation. In an interview with Yahoo Sports, Kawhi’s uncle gave what might be the closest we’ll ever get to one: the Spurs didn’t believe he was injured, and he was.
Dennis Robertson, Kawhi’s uncle, told Chris Haynes that:
“They didn’t believe Kawhi couldn’t play and that caused a lack of trust in us and then us not believing in them. Any time a player says he’s not capable of playing, you should believe him. Why would Kawhi just stop playing all of a sudden? He’s a competitor. Sometimes you get these team doctors telling you what you can and cannot do, and Kawhi was just in too much pain to get out there. This was a serious issue. They didn’t believe him, and after that, the relationship couldn’t recover and we decided we had to move on.”
This tracks pretty closely with what was reported during Leonard’s bizarre 2017-18, when he returned for nine games in January before sitting out the rest of the season. In March of last year, the Spurs had a players-only meeting where, reportedly, the rest of the team pressured Leonard to return for the playoffs.
After that meeting, players and executives were openly questioning Leonard’s quadriceps injury to the media. Tony Parker said that “mine was a hundred times worse, but the same kind of injury.” And Spurs GM R.C. Buford passive-aggressively criticized Leonard’s reliance on outside medical experts, saying that Parker, and by extension not Leonard, “exhibited great trust in our whole process from the very beginning … I was anxious to make sure that we got the world’s best experts engaged before the surgery started.”
Toronto has accommodated Leonard in a way that San Antonio was perhaps unwilling to do, resting him for over a quarter of the team’s regular-season games. And it worked, allowing Leonard to take over the playoffs. Even with a visible injury, he’s played every game and more minutes than anyone else in the postseason. He leads or is close to the playoff lead in almost every major statistical category. If he leaves in free agency, this run will still have been worth it for the Raptors.
Someone shouted, “They know darn well he ain’t gonna be there next year” in the background of a video that Leonard’s sister posted after the Raptors beat the Bucks in Game 6, but it wasn’t Uncle Dennis. He was at the game in Toronto; she was watching in California.
There are still three more days before the Finals start.