| Sometimes it is hard to know how to start a story about Kawhi Leonard. As a writer, you can sit and stare at a blank page for a while if you’re not careful, an endless sea of white space torturing the mind. It is not the job of an NBA player to make things easy for journalists and commentators, but many do it anyway, with catchy sound bytes, flashy highlights, padded stat lines and various forms of social media snark. Leonard, nine years into his NBA career and a two-time Finals MVP, remains largely a mystery. He is indisputably one of the greatest players on the planet, but he’s not the kind of athlete to dish out hot takes, strong proclamations or signals of intent. He doesn’t attract headlines away from the court. He doesn’t seek the spotlight. He doesn’t care for the hoopla. He’s an anti-hero, who just happens to be chasing a slice of NBA history. When you listen to Leonard, it would be easy to get confused into thinking he doesn’t care. He talks slowly and in hushed tones, while keeping his cards so close that they might as well be stapled to his jersey. “Everything is not going to go your way,” Leonard said on Sunday, as his Los Angeles Clippers eliminated the Dallas Mavericks in six games. “You’ve just got to keep playing.” |
His quotes from press conferences often seem like a form of filibustering, filling time while saying nothing much, with no great enthusiasm for being there. Once, when a Sports Illustrated journalist spent weeks chasing a feature with Leonard, the most telling insights came during interviews with those around him, not the player himself. It included this from San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich, a remark that now has eerie prescience. “If [the arenas] were empty,” Popovich said, while explaining how Leonard craves greatness, but not stardom, “he’d probably like it a lot more.” Leonard’s latest masterpiece came as the Clippers turned up the heat on the Mavericks in the final two games of their opening round series, and gave further proof that no other player is able to be so effective while generating so little media splash. The NBA is a personality-driven league, yet when you can play at the kind of rare level reserved for Leonard and maybe a handful of others, it simply doesn’t matter that you keep much of yourself under wraps. |
When you can lift a team to a title (the Spurs), then go somewhere else and do it again (the Toronto Raptors), and maybe, historically, do it once more after that, well, then people are forced to pay attention, even if they need a jolt of reminder every now and then. He has made his excellence seem routine and reduced the other noise around him to nothing more than a whisper, so much so that at the end of a series in which he was spectacularly good, he wasn’t close to being the biggest story. That was reserved for the Mavericks’ young phenomenon Luka Doncic, and it is understandable, a superstar barely out of his teens emerging before our eyes and trying to lift a plucky underdog to a sublime upset. Yet Leonard wasn’t even the biggest story on his own team, with Paul George’s on-court struggles and brave comments about depression dominating the news cycle in the first part of the series. Then, it was Marcus Morris and his overly-physical handling of Doncic gaining all the chatter at the end. |
“This series was all about the other headlines outside of Kawhi,” former NFL wide receiver Brandon Marshall told First Things First. “He ended this series with 33 points, while he was diving on the floor and playing lights out defense. Kawhi Leonard needs to be talked about more but I get it, I understand, we were talking about PG, we were talking about Luka and how amazing he is. “It is time for us to give this guy respect and continue to talk about how awesome he is: Kawhi … best guy on the court right now.” It is hard to argue with that take. Doncic, as well as Jamal Murray, James Harden, Donovan Mitchell and LeBron James have had their huge offensive moments, but Leonard’s two-way impact is mostly unrivaled. Against Dallas there were no monster games but stunning consistency, and a difference of +38 points during the time he spent on the floor. People have been asking and wondering whether he can do it again like he did in Toronto, taking a team all the way to the championship just a year after joining them. A better question now is, can anyone stop that from happening? Could it be that when it comes to the postseason, having Leonard is the ultimate cheat code? |
At FOX Bet, the Clippers are now listed as a slight favorite to win the Larry O’Brien trophy, at +260. They are followed by the Lakers at +270, and the Milwaukee Bucks at +300. The truth is that Leonard is, simply put, a nightmare to play against. When it comes to the postseason, where everyone is looking for a certain level of comfort and familiarity, he is the last face you want to see across from you. “You can see it every game,” Doncic told reporters. “He shows up every game. It’s just hard to stop him. It’s almost impossible to stop him.” Leonard is not the face of the league and he never will be. He is not interested in being part of the off-the-court headlines. Instead, he’d rather be playing, or preparing to play at his peak. It was hard to know how to start his story and it’s not so easy to neatly end it, either. Until you realize that the end is what Leonard is all about: the end of games, the end of a series, and ultimately the end of a season – the outcome of which he might just have within his control. |
Here’s what others have said … Paul George, Los Angeles Clippers: “Kawhi’s a man of business. He stepped up and stepped in time after time, whenever we needed him he put us on his back and he finished the series. I can’t say it enough. After this series, he’s the most reliable guy. His shot-making and his time on awareness plays — he is one of a kind … Everybody knows Kawhi is a man of few words. But when he speaks, it’s coming from a great place and he’s going to get his point across. His demeanor was felt, his presence was felt and was powerful in all our meetings.” Doc Rivers, Los Angeles Clippers Head Coach: “You could tell he was the one guy that was used to closing out a series. He was calm, he got us in place. During games, you fall on a set, and we fell on that little elbow set for him. He just took what was there. If they didn’t come, he scored; if they came, he made the right pass. The one thing I didn’t know — I knew he could pass, and I knew he may be a good passer — I didn’t know he was an elite passer. And that’s something you don’t know until you coach a guy.” Scott Polacek, Bleacher Report: “Leonard stuffed the stat sheet by battling for boards, deflecting passes as he racked up steals, facilitating when doubles came his way and powering his way to the rim, sometimes through those doubles. When the game was somewhat in doubt, he took over in the fourth quarter with an array of mid-range shots and unstoppable drives. It was another reminder of how individually dominant he can be, and the team’s ceiling only figures to be higher when Patrick Beverley returns to anchor the defense alongside him.” |
