There’s Nothing Else Out There For You
Kawhi Leonard was born 9 days before me in Los Angeles, California. He is entering his 14th season in the NBA and he probably won't see the floor as he is out indefinitely with a knee injury. Injuries are nothing new to any player, especially Kawhi. Out of a possible 1,066 regular season games he could have played in his career, he's participated in 696 of them. That's just above 65%, barely passing in high school.
This is sad, but only sort of. At his best in 2019, while leading the Toronto Raptors to a title, he was the closest thing to Michael Jordan since His Airness left the game for good. On offense he was a relentless bully, forcing you to play his game, muscling you into his spots, and scoring at will (30.5 points per game that playoff run). He hit one of the most iconic shots in NBA history in game 7 of the Eastern Conference semi-finals over a soon-to-be MVP Joel Embiid. Defensively it was even worse for the opposition. A two-time Defensive Player of the Year, it just felt like you couldn't even dribble near him without losing the basketball and watching him stride the other way with it, his long arms extending to the basket as he laid it in, unimpeded. There's a good chance that none of us will ever see this version of him anymore, and it is possibly the case that at 33-years-old he will never again play meaningful basketball.
It never looked like he cared while playing meaningful basketball. The two-time NBA Finals MVP just sort of moved the way you'd imagine a velociraptor would before killing a fawn. No need to jazz it up, this is what I'm supposed to do. Expressionless, lethal. The first of his Finals MVPs came when he was merely 22 and the award essentially functioned as a trophy for LeBron James or whoever did the best job slowing LeBron James down. His second trophy, with the Raptors, was an undeniable excoriation of every other player on the planet. No one even came close to what he did.
Most of us will never know this kind of talent. We're all naturally better at some things than others, most of us aren't historically great at anything, and that's okay. The paradox of Kawhi, however, is that he was historically great and it still didn't seem to matter much to him. After his 2019 championship with the Raptors he opted to go back to Los Angeles and sign with the Clippers, ostensibly to be closer to home albeit on a historically dysfunctional and incompetent franchise. He could have gone to the Lakers, he could have gone anywhere, but when asked about his feelings on Los Angeles' favorite basketball team, he responded, "I like Allen Iverson. I was an AI fan so I didn't like the Lakers." Hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, LA and hometown immortality, but he was an Iverson fan, so why would he like the Lakers?
I was an Allen Iverson fan too, this is probably one of the only things Kawhi Leonard and I have in common. We were both 9-years-old when a brutally injured Iverson played the most inspired basketball I've ever seen, winning MVP and reaching the Finals against a Lakers team featuring Kobe and Shaq that hadn't lost a game that postseason. Until they played AI. It would be the only game in that Finals the Sixers would win, I would weep with pride, and the Sixers wouldn't return to the Finals until (redacted). I wonder if Kawhi learned, as I did, that winning ultimately wasn't that important. That Finals is still the best memory of my life as a sports fan.
And moreover what's the talent for? What is its function? Materially, sure, it's to play basketball supernaturally well. But when one lays down at night alone and balances accounts, what did the talent do for you? The difference between 90 and 250 million dollars probably isn't that much, emotionally, but you were close to your family and that is. I work on the road (another thing Kawhi and I have in common, I guess) and as long as my bills are paid, the rest doesn't really matter. To be around who you love usurps material greatness every time in the heart of the mind.
He only played like Jordan once, and that was more than enough.
-Michael Campana