The Kawhi-ary: Kawhi’s trip from the Planet Wyh

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

This is a true story.

During the 2017-18 postseason, Kawhi Leonard appeared on the verge of transcendence. His play in the first two rounds and the little he played in the Western Conference Finals conjured up comparisons with LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jordan. Then he sat for the final three games of San Antonio’s postseason. The injury snuffed out a chance at history, but given Leonard’s age of 25 at the time, it was easy to believe he would pick up this season where he left off. That certainty, however, is now history of a different sort.

The fact that team doctors have cleared him to play but his own medical team has voiced hesitations has prevented his absence from being simply that, an absence, and in the absence of suitable answers from either the organization or Leonard’s camp, the media and fans have strung conspiracy theories across a continental-sized corkboard about Leonard’s current predicament and his possible future. But perhaps the best conclusion was offered in February by Seerat Sohi:

“I can’t tell you what the future is going to look like. I can tell you I have more faith in the Spurs to figure it out than I would in anyone else. I can also tell you that faith is about to be tested. The Spurs have always piqued curiosity. Over the next few months, they’re going to provide some revealing answers.”

What’s occurring here is that an organization not well understood from the outside has collided with an individual who is also perhaps not well understood from inside the organization.

Read More: The Kawhi-ary Part 1 — A year without a Kawhi Leonard

A couple days prior to Parker’s injury, one of the strangest episodes of the television show Fargo aired. In this episode, titled “The Law of Non-Contradiction,” Police Chief Gloria Burgle takes a trip to old Hollywood in always sunny California. She’s investigating the murder of her stepfather. What she does not realize, and what the episode demonstrates is the randomness of life. Not all dots connect. Sometimes tangents exist, or the pathways between the past and present are not linear. That is the frustrating beauty of existence in the Upper Midwest, the City of Angels, or even southern Texas.

Throughout Fargo’s third season, simple machines such as hand dryers fail to recognize Police Chief Gloria Burgle’s presence. At first, she seems too cold, as if she were a machine herself, or maybe that’s just the residue from Carrie Coon’s stint on The Leftovers. But, as the season unfolds, the audience starts to realize she’s actually too human to interact with the modern mechanics of daily life.

In “The Law of Non-Contradiction,” she meets an LA police officer at a bar. He asks if she’s on Facebook. She tells him, no. He tells jokes. She doesn’t understand the jokes. Turns out she lacks the robotic nature to socialize with humans. Again, she’s too human. Or maybe she’s too robotic. The distinction is up for interpretation.

This episode also features animated interludes about a robot named Model MNSKY. Model MNSKY only speaks one line in all four of these interludes: “I can help.” For most of his career, those three words could have easily been Kawhi Leonard’s one line, which also made it difficult to discern him from most of the other San Antonio superstars, as if he and the Spurs’ Big Three were all part and principle of Model MNSKY.

In the first interlude featuring the robot MNSKY, a dying space captain issues the following command as his final act:

“Get word back. Let them know it wasn’t all for nothing.”

As San Antonio’s other superstars faded and, in the case of Tim Duncan, disappeared, Kawhi Leonard always responded in typical MNSKY fashion: “I can help.”

Next: Following the New Orleans Pelicans through five games in six days

That episode of Fargo is a tangent that fails to move the investigation forward. On investigative crime shows, hunches are supposed to lead somewhere. If a show adopts a single investigative arc for a season, then each episode should legitimately be a step in the right direction, toward arrests and verdicts and closure.

Sports are also plot driven affairs, but they are played out by characters. This season has not really moved the plot for San Antonio, but Kawhi Leonard’s character is more complex than ever. He needs more lines.