PHILADELPHIA — There is nothing about Kawhi Leonard that reminds anyone about Cinderella other than the centre of the Toronto Raptors universe comes with an expiration date.
It’s not a specific time on the clock, but the privilege of having access to one of the best playoff performers in NBA history runs out the moment the Raptors season ends. What happens after that? There are no guarantees other than Leonard’s ride won’t be turning into a pumpkin.
He’ll just be free to find a slipper that fits anywhere else – or maybe a pair of flip-flops emblazoned with the Los Angeles Clippers logo.
So Game 4 of the Raptors best-of-seven series against the Philadelphia 76ers is bigger than your average big game. Lose and the Raptors are down 3-1. Teams that are down 3-1 have gone on to lose the series in the NBA about 96 per cent of the time according to WhoWins.com.
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Lose the series and the Raptors moment in Kawhi Leonard’s sun may well be over. The Raptors will have gone all in to take advantage of the window to the NBA Finals opened when LeBron James headed west and gotten exactly as far as they have the two previous seasons.
Win Sunday and Toronto’s in a best-of-three series with homecourt advantage. Dreams of an NBA title remain alive, concerns about a post-Kawhi future can be pushed off.
But here’s the conundrum the Raptors are in as they figure out why they largely no-showed – Leonard’s 33-point night the notable exception — against the Sixers in Game 3 and what they need to change going into Game 4:
The solution may lie in the Raptors relying a little less on the player who has so far cut through playoff defences like a snow blower through powder.
This seems counterintuitive, maybe even unwise. It is for sure risky.
Leonard is averaging 31.5 points with a true shooting percentage of 69.4 per cent so far in the playoffs, an act he’s been pulling for several years now. Against the Sixers he’s been, well, I’m not sure what the proper adjectives would be to describe someone averaging 37.7 points with a TS% of 71.4 per cent. It’s like a combination of Wilt Chamberlain and Steph Curry materialized out of nowhere and slapped a Raptors logo on his chest and said ‘I got next.’
With Leonard on the floor, the Raptors are scoring 110.7 points per 100 possessions which is very good. Their net rating is 7.2. With the exception of Game 4, they’ve looked dominant.
But in the 27 minutes Leonard hasn’t played in the series, Toronto turns into squirrels racing around, jumping from place to place, accomplishing nothing. They have scored 54.1 points/100 possessions with a net rating of -52.5.
The non-Leonard lineups cannot play worse than that. It’s hard to imagine any collection of any five NBA players playing worse.
And the wild thing?
During the regular season, the same group of Raptors thrived when Leonard was being load managed. They went 17-5 and averaged 117.2 points a game, with 28.6 assists and only 23.4 turnovers. Extrapolated over an entire season the Kawhi-less Raptors would have been the equivalent of a 63-win team that was third in the league in scoring and second in assists.
Now that’s probably a stretch, but it is proof over a fairly significant sample that the Raptors success this year wasn’t only dependant on Leonard, far from it. And it also suggests that it makes no sense that with Leonard off the floor, the remaining Raptors turn into a ninth-grade team playing the 76ers varsity.
Are the Raptors, like everyone else, too caught up in watching Leonard paint the analytic version of the Mona Lisa? Does Leonard’s brilliance throw them off?
“It might have last night, right?” said Nurse. “It felt like it might have last night a little bit”
“I did go over a lot of those sections in the last two games [when Leonard was off the floor], and I just … it’s not like we can’t dribble or even get open or find shots. There are stretches there where it’s one really good offensive sequence after another, but not much to show for it.”
It’s the finest of all balancing acts. Even Michael Jordan only really reached his peak when his fellow Bulls were emboldened to make plays around him. LeBron James only won his titles when someone else stepped into space he creates on the floor and made plays – be it Chris Bosh or Ray Allen in Miami or Kyrie Irving and JR Smith in Cleveland.
The catch is it took multiple seasons for those teams to find that right mix between letting the best in history dictate the shape of a game but not getting too caught up in watching and failing to be alert to the opportunities that their gravity presents.
The Raptors have had less than a full season to figure out their balancing act and now have about 48 hours to fine tune it, to identify what they can do to make sure Leonard’s performances don’t get wasted.
“For a little bit of a stretch of [Game 3] I thought we were throwing the ball to Kawhi and letting him go to work,” said Nurse. “Just for a few moments there. It was kind of weird because there was one stretch … where he went a long time without touching it and then there was one stretch where he touched it every time down and he was bringing it up and we were at the point where we needed a bucket…
“That’s fine at points but both of those were on the extreme I think …. the other thing is when they put two on the ball — which they are going to do — then the other guys need to step in and play. He‘s got to hit the open man and we got to take the shots and we got to hit them.”
The rest of his teammates know that. Kyle Lowry knows better than any of them and after his 2-of-10 night Thursday he was insistent: “He’s playing unbelievable right now. We’re not giving him any help. Me, I’m not giving him any help. We’ve got to help him.”
What they really have to do is help themselves. They need to step into shots that are there. They need to leverage the presence Leonard brings in order to create more opportunities for themselves. They need to remember that they played some of their best basketball this season when Leonard didn’t play at all.
They are playing with the best player most of them will ever get a chance to play with and with a real chance to go farther than most of them have ever been.
They just can’t get caught watching, not with midnight approaching.
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