The Kawhi-ary: A year without a Kawhi Leonard

An entry from Bryan Harvey’s Kawhi-ary, an ongoing diary about a season without much basketball:

This is a true story.

If Kawhi Leonard is a robot, he is poorly programmed. A robot would not need to heal. A robot would not worry about shoe contracts. A robot might not even wear shoes. If Kawhi Leonard were a robot, Gregg Popovich and the San Antonio Spurs would simply download the most recent software to his hard drive and reboot the 2017-18 season. But that hasn’t happened because Kawhi Leonard may actually be trapped in a human body and feeling real human emotions.

Anyone familiar with this NBA season knows that for the San Antonio Spurs the entire season has been a matter of waiting for a robot’s return.

Kawhi Leonard has played a total of nine games, and although he played well in those games, he is not currently playing and may not play again. Every now and again news surfaces that his return, if not imminent, is at least still possible. And yet this possibility never materializes. His existence is a rumored intelligence, but his teammates, specifically Manu Ginobili, have quit believing such technology exists. Out of necessity, they have chosen not to believe in flying cars:

“For me, he’s not coming back because it’s not helping [to think Leonard is returning]. We fell for it a week ago again. I guess you guys made us fall for it. But we have to think that he’s not coming back, that we are who we are, and that we got to fight without him.”

Such statements probably are not Ginobili or any other Spur suggesting they would not welcome Leonard back into the fold. Athletes are easy to forgive their prodigal brothers when results and talent are in play. But how does one prepare for what might not occur, especially when doing so causes one to lose focus on what is already happening? The Spurs are likely to qualify for the playoffs, but even if Kawhi Leonard were to return, LaMarcus Aldridge’s knee is now ailing. Perhaps a deep playoff run is too much to ask regardless, and as Andrew Sharp writes, the team is now a “ghost ship.”

On May 14, Golden State’s Zaza Pachulia injured Kawhi Leonard in the Western Conference Finals. The nature of Pachulia’s close out on Leonard invited intrigue and suspicion. And, if ever a player looked the part of a neo-Noir hitman, it was poor, hapless Zaza and his meat locker scowl.

The injury was to Leonard’s ankle, but his time on the court this season has been swept away by a faulty quadriceps. His physical and metaphorical foundations are under attack — perhaps his sense of self, too — and the awkwardness surrounding the whole affair is nibbling at his perceived toughness, commitment, and integrity. These questions also emanate from both without and within the San Antonio organization and so the famed Spurs mythos also appears to be crumbling in ego and old age, or at least it’s something for the always mysterious sources to report.

Eleven days prior to Zaza’s demolition of 2017 Playoff Kawhi, the best Leonard model to date, longtime San Antonio Spurs point guard Tony Parker suffered a similar injury against the Houston Rockets. The fog of recovery surrounding Kawhi’s injury has both nothing and everything to do with Parker. The injury is the same, but the bodies are not.

Earlier in the season, Gregg Popovich even observed the weirdness that the older Parker had already recovered, while the younger Leonard still struggled to regain both form and confidence. Consider the quandary of the timelines long enough, and reality starts to slip like a San Francisco skyline from the hands of Jimmy Stewart.

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Parker is now on record that his injury was “a hundred times worse” than Leonard’s. And then there is also the report of a team meeting where the active Spurs players confronted Leonard about his playing prospects this season. Not difficult to imagine is such a meeting taking place in low key lighting amidst a constellation of cigarette smoke.

The focal point of this San Antonio season is a labyrinth of interviews and timelines; the effect of which has been an ever creeping sense of cynicism about the relationship between Kawhi Leonard and the franchise. Death is in the air. People can smell it like blood from a wood chipper.