Forgive the plight of the weary sportswriter, but writing about Kawhi Leonard is difficult. There’s rarely an obvious story when he goes full-Terminator on some unsuspecting playoff opponent.
The first question after any legendary performance is “how did he do it?” The answer is always the same for Leonard. He took around 20 heavily-contested shots and all of them went in. Of Leonard’s 19 shot attempts against the Nuggets on Monday, only one came in the restricted area. The other 18 were jumpers, and 14 of them went in. There’s not an aesthetic quality to those shots that invites flowery language. This isn’t Kyrie Irving or Stephen Curry defying the limits of the human body with their heaves or contortions. Leonard is so impeccably balanced and precise in his motions that it all looks easy even when it obviously isn’t. When the games start to matter, it mostly just feels as though he’s toggled the video game sliders as far in his favor as possible.
His personality has never leant itself to the sort of mythology and hero worship we look for in our superstars either. He wasn’t on the cover of Sports Illustrated at 16 with the headline “The Chosen One” like LeBron James. He’s not chasing the ghost of Michael Jordan like Kobe Bryant did. Basketball is an exceedingly narrative-driven sport. This isn’t football where faces are hidden behind helmets. Players are remembered as characters in the story of the league. Finding Leonard’s place in that tapestry has never been simple.
Say you want to play the all-time ranking game. What on Earth do you do with a player whose peak was essentially “Kobe Bryant but bigger and more efficient,” but through his age-33 season has been outscored in the NBA by Antoine Walker? Leonard has been the best player on two different championship teams. He might add a third in June. Yet he’s been healthy enough to finish only two of his last seven postseasons, with another season missed entirely tossed into that mix for good measure.
If there’s a narrative thread for us to follow here, it’s probably health-related. We’ve seen injuries ruin legendary careers before. The Ringer’s Raheem Palmer called him the NBA’s Terrell Davis, a running back whose peak matches and perhaps even exceeds those of contemporaries like Emmitt Smith and Barry Sanders, but who only played four healthy seasons. Davis, like Leonard, was a two-time champion.
The natural NBA comparison would be Bill Walton, and there’s something historically gratifying about the way this is ending here. Walton never bounced back from his injuries, save one memorable bench season with the Celtics. But Leonard has. This isn’t a facsimile of his best self. He’s not reaching and straining for one last dance like many other aging legends have. The version of Leonard that scored 39 against the Nuggets on Monday was no different than his 2019 self. An all-time legend we thought might be lost just picked up where he left off several years ago. It’s almost as if Leonard is what Walton could’ve been with 40 years of advances in medical science. At least one of the two best basketball players that San Diego ever produced is getting his happy ending.
For one more night at least, Leonard was at the center of the basketball world. If he keeps playing like this, he could have quite a few more ahead. It feels thematically appropriate, at least in the context of the last year or so in basketball history. Go back to the Olympics. Team USA won a gold medal with James, Curry and Kevin Durant, the three standard bearers of this era, leading the way. It felt, in the moment, like the end of something. Curry’s team had just missed the 2024 playoffs. James and Durant were both bounced in the first round. It seemed, in that moment, as if the three of them might be done contending for championships, and willingly or not, forced to hand the reins of the league over to the next generation.
The season that followed has been one of rejuvenation. Durant’s Suns fell to the lottery, but James and Curry are right back in the thick of the championship hunt thanks to mid-season blockbusters. Leonard didn’t get a splashy new teammate. His team let the co-star he once recruited, Paul George, walk for nothing last summer. Yet here he is, in the same place as James and Curry, fighting for the same trophy, and arguably outplaying both of them.
James and Curry are one side of the bracket. Leonard is on the other, trading haymakers with Nikola Jokić, winner of three of the past four MVP trophies. If he beats the consensus best player in the world three more times out of five, he escapes that figurative Thunderdome in Denver only to exchange it for a literal one in Oklahoma City, where the 68-win Thunder are almost certainly awaiting him. It’s a fitting next stop on the Leonard revenge tour. First he takes on the team that overcame a 3-1 lead to beat him in the Orlando bubble, next he’d face the budding dynasty built on the George trade he forced the Clippers to make.
How far he’ll be able to take this, only time will tell. But if the past few years had really been it for Leonard, the injuries would have wound up defining his career historically. Instead, he gets another chance to write the story we’re struggling to tell, to stand up to the best players of his day and say that even if he didn’t last quite as long as they did, he was every bit as good. He’s beaten James, Durant and Curry in the playoffs before. On Monday, he started sizing Jokić’s head up for his mantle as well, and whether or not he ultimately beats him, that he’s even facing him as an equal at this point represents a legacy that to this point has gone sorely underappreciated.
