Kawhi Leonard, seen here celebrating the Raptors' 2019 NBA finals win over the Golden State Warriors, appears set to return to Toronto after his tenure with the L.A. Clippers didn't pan out.The Associated Press
Kawhi Leonard didn’t leave Toronto in 2019 under cloud. He left under the sort of storm that tears up a trailer park and scatters it around.
He didn’t ask for a bunch of money. He wondered if he could be part owner of the hockey team.
Having extracted a promise of maximum enrichment (minus the hockey team), he left for the Clippers anyway, which always seemed to be his plan.
In his wake, Leonard left competitive ash. After winning a championship with him, the Toronto Raptors were still viable, but just barely. Within a couple of years, they were a disaster. All their best players from the title generation followed Leonard out the door. One of them, OG Anunoby, just won with the Knicks.
In other towns, in other leagues, this sort of behaviour might be held against you. Some people, in some places, might feel you had been – and I hesitate to use the word in the current environment – a little American about it.
Kawhi Leonard reportedly moving back to Toronto as Raptors, Clippers near deal
But not Toronto. This city loves pain. Which must be why, according to multiple reports out of the NBA, Leonard will soon be a Raptor again.
According to the league’s most reliable insider, ESPN’s Shams Charania, the deal is Leonard for Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, two firsts, a swap and two seconds. If so, that is the club’s short-term future.
Considering that their best players – Scottie Barnes, Collin Murray-Boyles and RJ Barrett – are in their early to middle-20s, that’s their future full stop. Apres this trade, le deluge.
Does this deal – assuming it comes off – make basketball sense? No, not really. It’s not that Leonard isn’t a transformative figure. It’s that he can only be transformative when he’s on the court, which he doesn’t do so much any more.
Leonard is 35 years old, so large it really is difficult to convey through print and has the lower body resilience of a Marseilles frog destined for the pot.
When healthy, Leonard is one of the league's best players. Staying on the floor consistently has been an issue for the injury-prone Leonard throughout his career.Mark J. Terrill/The Canadian Press
After arriving in L.A. like the resurrected John Wayne, he managed somewhere between 37 and 68 games, except for the entire season he missed. He got the Clippers into the playoffs most years, but not all, at which point they collapsed underneath him like a fold-out chair made of toilet rolls.
Some teams are nearly there. With Leonard in charge, the Clippers were just barely alive. Given the hype when he arrived, his tenure was a shambles. Now it’s over and Leonard needs to sleep at a friend’s place for a while. Guess who appears to have volunteered?
Some trades are smart. Some are cunning. Some you won’t know for a while. Some are a terrible idea the minute you hear about one.
This is my favourite trade ever. I don’t get worked up about the sports, because I don’t own stock. But I love this trade like family. It’s welcome in our house any time. It can have our bed. My wife and I will sleep on the couch. I’ll tell her about it later.
I love it because I hope it shames every other franchise in the country. None of them is anywhere close to this bold. They’re not in this level of boldness’ postal code.
Finally, a perfectly competent, slowly-on-the-rise Canadian team, whose building is full every night, making tons of money, looked at itself and thought, ‘Good Lord, we’re boring.’
The Raptors are so boring it makes my head ache thinking about having to think about them. The team’s boring, the players are boring, the stories told by those players are boring, and everyone knows to an absolute certainty where the whole thing is headed – nowhere. Which is boring.
There are many locales around the sports world where boring is unacceptable. Those are the places you want to follow sports. London, New York, L.A., Barcelona, Milan, etc., etc. Their teams aren’t always great, but they are always fascinating. That is their magic.
Leonard holds his NBA finals MVP trophy up during the Raptors' championship parade in 2019. The Raptors have broken free of their boring persona, Cathal Kelly writes, in swinging for the fences with the reported Leonard return.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
We don’t do that in Canada. Everybody’s doing fine, so why take a chance? The Leafs just convinced a guy the Tampa Bay Lightning didn’t really rate to take a bucketload of money after one great season. From the reaction, you’d think they’d convinced Mario Lemieux to start mainlining stem cells and come out of retirement. That’s how bad it is.
Everyone takes measured cuts, because they can trust that all of their competitors, in and out of the leagues they compete in, will do the same. A receding tide unfloats all boats.
Now this.
This isn’t a swing for the fences. This is a swing so hard that if the Raptors fail to make a Newtonian connection with the ball, they’ll continue all the way around, corkscrewing infinitely until the franchise’s hips dislocate. This either works or everyone’s getting fired, from GM Bobby Webster to both Raptor mascots (regular and inflated).
So, bad basketball move? Maybe. But are you interested?
I’m betting that upon hearing about this, and for the first time in a long time, you have cleared a small section of your mind for the Raptors. What’s Leonard going to say at his press conference? If there is one, will he show up? Once there, will he utter a mumbling word? Can someone make him laugh?
What do his remaining teammates think? And the coach? How does the GM explain it? Will MLSE CEO Keith Pelley show up and speak? Or owner Ed Rogers? Are all of basketball’s absent landlords going to wander back now that the building has an anchor tenant again?
That’s just the next week or so. A million chances for things to go wrong. It gets whackier from there.
The goal of professional sports is not to win. It is to entertain (which winning accomplishes). The whole point of sports is distracting us from the irritations of life, big and small.
The Raptors were failing in their basic duty. Now they may be succeeding at it like no other team in the country. Depending on how this goes, maybe on the continent.
I don’t care if the Kawhi Leonard deal ‘works’ or not, however you define that. It’s already a success. It has annihilated the Raptors’ deeply entrenched boredom, and replaced it with fascination.