It’s safe to say the wound inflicted by Kawhi Leonard’s departure in the wake of his championship run in Toronto hasn’t yet healed for the Raptors faithful.
That much became clear this week after an in-depth feature from ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne — detailing how the Leonard-Paul George Clippers came to be — sparked a frenzy this side of the 49th parallel due to a minor detail about where the duo hatched their plan to join forces.
“It started innocently enough, with George calling Leonard — whom he’d known since their high school days in Southern California — a few days after the Raptors won the championship,” Shelburne wrote in the piece.
“…There were countless text messages and phone calls and then two in-person meetings at Drake’s house in Hidden Hills, California. (Drake had befriended Leonard during his season in Toronto and let Leonard — who lives in San Diego — stay there when he was in Los Angeles for free-agent meetings.) By July 1, they had decided to put their plan in motion: Leonard told the Clippers that he was interested in playing for them but only if they could improve their roster by adding an All-Star caliber player like George.”
The mention of Toronto’s favourite son potentially betraying his city by way of offering up the venue in which Leonard plotted his exit from the Raptors didn’t sit well with the club’s fans. But Shelburne saw it differently.
“I think people are reading that totally the wrong way,” she said Thursday on Sportsnet 590’s Good Show. “I think, for me, that was Drake offering up his house to a friend, but also if he goes back to Toronto, you’re doing the guy a solid. He’s in L.A. for meetings, he needs a place to stay while he’s there, but also he likes staying there — it’s a nice place out in Hidden Hills, okay. That’s where the Kardashians live. It’s a nice little spot.”
If anything, it should be Leonard who played the role of villain in the story, rather than Drake, argued Shelburne.
“He doesn’t know that Kawhi was using his house to have a meeting with Paul George — he just said, ‘Here are the keys, man,'” she told the Good Show crew with a chuckle. “He doesn’t know — he was just being a good ambassador, a good friend. I don’t know that you can blame Drake for what happened there. He didn’t ask questions. He just said, ‘Yeah you can stay there.’”
The veteran ESPN reporter also discussed why she believes Leonard and George did eventually settle on the Clippers, with the desire to be closer to their families the central reason, as outlined in her recent feature.
But there’s another key aspect that’s often overlooked, too.
“I think the LeBron factor is a much bigger factor than anybody realizes or acknowledges here,” she said. “It’s not just going to the Lakers, or going to L.A.’s other team or the underdog team or whatever it is, it was, ‘Do I want to play alongside LeBron or not?’ Both those guys had that opportunity — Paul George had that opportunity the year before, and Kawhi had the opportunity this summer — and chose to go and try to dethrone LeBron and try to take LeBron down rather than be on his team.
“I don’t think it’s like a personal dislike of him, I think that’s the challenge that they both wanted. They don’t want to be defined as LeBron’s sidekick.”
Listen to Ramona Shelburne’s full interview with Sportsnet 590’s JD Bunkis and Ben Ennis via the audio player embedded within this post.
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