SAN ANTONIO – There are 82 games on every NBA team’s schedule, but there are almost never ones like this: two former franchise players face off and a fanbase gets to vent their feelings about a relationship gone wrong.
There is no point pretending that Thursday night’s matchup between the Toronto Raptors and the San Antonio Spurs will be just another game. Even the principles have come to acknowledge that.
Kawhi Leonard played seven seasons with the Spurs, was tagged to be the next in their long line of Hall-of-Fame calibre franchise stars and led them to their most recent NBA championship in 2014.
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But after an injury-plagued season a year ago, Leonard’s relationship with the Spurs fractured, could not be repaired and he ended up being traded to the Raptors in the off-season – along with former Spurs stalwart Danny Green – for Toronto icon DeMar DeRozan and third-year centre Jakob Poeltl.
Thursday night, all the storylines converge and Leonard will be on centre stage, taking on the franchise where his career took root and first flourished.
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"It meant a lot, you know what I mean?" he said at the Raptors morning shootaround at the AT&T Center. "I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears wearing that jersey, believing in something. I put a lot of work in here."
But star players never force their way out of San Antonio and while Leonard has remained steadfast in not going into the details – "I’m not going to discuss that here today" – he’s preparing for a hostile reception.
"I mean, I’ve said this before, it can only make me a better player for what we have down along the road," he said.
It should be a different story for Green, who was only included in the trade by the Spurs to help the salaries align. One of the more popular players over the course of his eight seasons in San Antonio, the plan is for Leonard and Green to be introduced together before the tip, theoretically to make it more difficult for the crowd to single out Leonard.
Does Green expect a rough reception for his former Spurs, now Raptors teammate?
"Still waiting to see," Green said. "Hope for one, predict and guess another but we’ll see what the fans show."
It also marks the Raptors’ first game against DeRozan, who has emerged as the 21-17 Spurs’ leading scorer (22.9 points per game) and playmaker (6.3 assists per game), and represents a novel challenge for Raptors head coach Nick Nurse, who was an assistant with the Raptors and DeRozan for five years before taking over the head coaching position this season.
"It’s been strange already, preparing for him," said Nurse. "The guys know him. We kind of almost tell him, ‘You guys know this is how we want to guard him.’ It’s almost like you’re going over things they already know, but you have to do that just to cover it. We’ll see. There are games DeMar plays with a lot of juice and he’s really hard to handle. He gets his athleticism going, his speed game going, and he’s really hard to handle. I imagine he’ll have that game going tonight."
Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry – who had injections in his troublesome back on Dec. 29th – went through shootaround with the team and has had his status upgraded from “doubtful” to questionable.
