Sports fans are used to the usual suspects performing unusual feats of brilliance during the playoffs. Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Kevin Durant have always shone on the biggest stage while this season Steph Curry, Paul George and the other Gasol brother have begun to make the leap to the next level. These things make sense to us, even if we weren’t entirely expecting the latter three to explode like they have.
We never expect the ones who quietly sneak up on us, impacting the games we’re watching, calmly and cooly changing the identity of a series, switching the narrative up on us.
Kawhi Leonard has been that player for the 2013 playoffs.
The avid basketball fan already knew what Leonard does for the San Antonio Spurs. The casual fan is learning fast. Through 12 postseason games this season, Leonard is averaging 13.9 points and 7.9 rebounds per game while shooting 57 percent from the floor and 42 percent from beyond the arc. In San Antonio’s second-round series against the Golden State Warriors, it was Leonard who was given the task of slowing Klay Thompson. After Thompson exploded for 34 points in a Spurs’ Game 2 loss, Leonard held him to 34 percent shooting over the remaining four games as San Antonio went 3-1 to close out the series.
While the Spurs continue to be the model of consistency, their game plan wouldn’t work without the right supporting cast. While the core of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili have been together since 2002, year after year San Antonio has plucked the perfect complementary players from the NBA Draft.
How badly did the Spurs want Leonard? Enough to send George Hill to Indiana in exchange for the Pacers selecting Leonard with the 15th overall pick in 2011. While other teams and GMs had questions about Leonard’s shooting and offensive game, the Spurs focused on the rest: The 6-foot-7 swingman with a 7-foot-3 wingspan, the largest hands in the entire draft class of 2011 (9.8 inches long and 11.3 inches wide), a motor that does not quit and a demeanor that accepts coaching.
Speaking with Leonard during the pre-draft experience, it was painfully obvious he was in a different frame of mind than most of the other guys preparing for the draft. Interviewing him wasn’t awkward, but it was a challenge.
The thing that was abundantly clear about Leonard in a single, 10-minute conversation: he does not care about all of the things that come along with being a professional athlete. He cares about basketball. Diligent, hard-working and focused, Leonard had little interest in showing his personality or joking about non-basketball things with media members because he had his eyes focused squarely on the prize of an NBA contract.
The summer after his first NBA season, talking with Leonard in Las Vegas during the NBA’s summer league, little had changed. Leonard had inked a first-round guaranteed contract with the Spurs, had a coach and veteran teammates who, even more than believing in him, trusted him to make the correct decisions on the floor, and proven himself the right choice for San Antonio. Despite everything turning up Leonard, despite the pressures from pre-draft being long behind him, Leonard was as low-key and focused as a year earlier.
He just wanted to get better. He still wasn’t entirely used to the attention. He loved the challenge of being assigned with the job of guarding the NBA’s best and despite patience and kindness, he still wasn’t great at disguising his distaste for being interviewed.
In short: Leonard is the Spurs. We will look at San Antonio and think of Duncan, Parker or Ginobili as long as each is still in uniform, but Leonard embodies all things Spurs as much as any other player on the roster. There is a calculating patience and calmness to Leonard. He is steady. He does not get rattled, even when his coach or Duncan is lighting into him for a rare mistake.
Leonard is 21 years old. Cory Joseph is 21. Danny Green is 25.
As the Spurs core continues to get older, the small window for winning that we’ve grown accustomed to continues to get extended by the young talent that surrounds them. Leonard may be the future, but he’s also proving to be the now.