Spurs Playoff Preview: On Kawhi Leonard, San Antonio and the rebuild that never was

Conventional wisdom says that when you spend a decade or more crafting a team concept around one cornerstone player, and that player then succumbs to age and fades away, it should take a while to rebuild. The reasons for this are obvious. When you have a superstar in the middle of it all, his presence tends to be a drain on the team’s resources, making it hard to build for the future. He takes away the cap space you need to sign young free agents. He makes your team too good to land top draft picks, which means no blue-chip youngsters and no tantalizing trade assets. In short, you have to play it out with your superstar until the bitter end. There isn’t really any alternative. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway.

Then you have the Spurs and their brain trust of owner Peter Holt, general manager R.C. Buford and coach Gregg Popovich, who combined have about as much use for conventional wisdom as a vegan has for a bacon cheeseburger. The Spurs have now won 50 games, or its lockout season-prorated equivalent, in 20 consecutive seasons. This is not supposed to happen. It was easily explained for the first 19 of those seasons because the Spurs had on their roster one of the eight-ish best players of all time in Tim Duncan. In year 20, though, Duncan was gone and it didn’t seem to matter. Most teams wither away as their franchise star does — look at the Lakers with Kobe Bryant, the Suns with Steve Nash or the Mavericks with Dirk Nowitzki. The Spurs, meanwhile, are better than ever. In 2015-16 and 2016-17, they recorded back-to-back 60-win seasons for the first time. Duncan was 39 one of those seasons and retired the next. How have they done it?

Certainly part of the answer is that Popovich has a way of unearthing picture-perfect role players that no one else sees. Danny Green in 2010 had been waived by the post-LeBron James Cavaliers, then one of the worst teams in the NBA, until Pop found him and quickly turned him into a starting two-guard who makes 40 percent of his 3s and locks down opposing guards. Boris Diaw was likewise cut by the historically bad 2012 Bobcats; he became a key bench guy on a Spurs team that went to two NBA Finals. More recently, Dewayne Dedmon went from a nobody at the bottom of Orlando’s depth chart to a solid big man on both ends of the floor, switching pick-and-rolls defensively and finishing them offensively, and David Lee went from virtually out of the league to a productive big man himself. That’s four very capable rotation players the Spurs have acquired in recent years for nothing.

But in the grand scheme of things, all those guys are little acquisitions the Spurs have made at the margins, and none of them are the primary reason the Spurs are legit contenders this spring to win their sixth championship of the Popovich era. That reason would be Kawhi Leonard, another Pop diamond in the rough, taken at No. 15 in the draft six years ago and traded to the Spurs on draft night. Leonard was already a Finals MVP in 2014 and has only improved since then; he has since transitioned seamlessly into Duncan’s role as the Spurs’ floor leader on both ends, guarding the opponent’s best wing player every night and meanwhile using 31.2 percent of the team’s offensive possessions with deadly efficiency. Leonard doesn’t sell out arenas or headline soda commercials the same way the league’s other, starrier MVP candidates do, but he’s been every bit as impressive this season. They say you need a top-10 offense and top-10 defense to be a truly great team; Leonard’s two-way brilliance alone makes it virtually impossible not to have both.

Every MVP-caliber player has a way of making himself the focal point of his team’s identity. With guys like Russell Westbrook and James Harden, those ways are visceral and unsubtle. They attack on every possession and singlehandedly make things happen. Leonard is different, but he’s equally central to what the Spurs do. Their offense is motion-oriented, notable for its constant ball movement and off-ball cutting, all building toward the eventual open jump shot; Leonard is an incisive cutter and much-improved passer, and his jump-shooting has made him into a deadly weapon offensively. He now takes 18 shots a night and makes damn close to half of them.

Defensively, he smothers even the LeBrons and Hardens of the world, often even mixing in effective help against their teammates at the same time. On a team rife with subpar defensive players — Lee, Pau Gasol, Tony Parker et al — Leonard is good enough to somehow hide all of those teammates at once. Without him, the Spurs would be nowhere, on either end. In that regard, he’s much like Duncan was. While never quite dominating the ball or the spotlight, he’s found sublime ways of carrying the team nonetheless.

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He’s got a chance to carry them all the way to the promised land again, but the road ahead will be difficult. The Spurs are not winning the championship in 2017 unless Leonard, a great player but never a singularly dominant one, outplays a series of bigger names in May and June. He’ll likely be matched up with Harden in the second round of the West playoffs, then Kevin Durant in the conference finals and James in the NBA Finals, if the Spurs should advance that far. We’ve seen Leonard shine before, but to outshine three straight superstars in three straight grueling series would be an extraordinary feat even for him. Can he do it? Even the biggest Spurs homer would have to admit it won’t be easy. Having said that, it will be fun as hell to watch him try.

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