The Kawhi-ary: The sound of Kawhilence

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

This is a true story.

Without his large hands deflecting passes and dunking the basketball, sightings of Leonard this season have been less than animated. He often sits courtside, wearing a blazer over a t-shirt. His hand cupping his chin as if he were both a braided Yorick and a contemplative prince, he watches the action unfold with downcast eyes and a perpetual frown. Sometimes I wonder if he’s secretly reading The Planet Wyh and not watching basketball at all.

This San Antonio season feels like an existential crisis of some kind, or at least the moment before the big crack-up.

While the team qualified for the playoffs, the streak of 50-win seasons is over. Everything feels less than what could have been.

Read More: A year without a Kawhi Leonard

Manu Ginobili flirted with retirement in the offseason. He kept playing because not playing might kill him, but he also wanted a chance to upend the Golden State Warriors, defer LeBron James another crown, and to stop James Harden cold. Kawhi Leonard was the best conduit for all these goals. LaMarcus Aldridge has been great, but Aldridge is earthbound. Leonard is not.

Or maybe winning less than 50 games feels like less because that’s just how numbers work.

Tony Parker rehabbed for less. Pau Gasol and Rudy Gay carried their aging bodies for less. Dejounte Murray started and rebounded for less. The parts were interesting, but their sum was less.

A lot of years, traditions, and expectations waited on Kawhi Leonard to play this season, and Kawhi Leonard did not play. I doubt the reason is because he did not want to play, although the possibility exists that maybe he doesn’t love basketball to the same degree as Manu Ginobili. Then again, who does?

But Kawhi Leonard is a difficult read, and being a difficult read allows others to seize the narrative. The Kawhi Leonard of this season doesn’t jive with the Kawhi Leonard of past seasons. The Kawhi Leonard from past seasons was a basketball player. The Kawhi Leonard of this season is source reporting.

Kawhi Leonard has always been the personification of a cliché: Actions speak louder than words. But now there are no actions, and Leonard’s never been good with words. What’s left is his quiet demeanor, without all the actions that once gave it a confidence in purpose. His face is the same as it ever was, but the expression is now morose where once it was mysterious.

An inability to fully smile or fully celebrate after a spectacular display of athleticism is unnerving—world’s most listless android picks apart opponents and doesn’t care one bit in the slightest. A gladiator might ask: Are you not entertained? But this droid asks: what are you, and what is entertainment? He registers the world in thermal ratings. He is a heat-seeking predator.

When inactive, though, such existential questions turn inward—world’s most depressed human being picks apart himself and his surroundings. The on court gladiators turn to him for a thumb’s up or a thumb’s down, and he fails to acknowledge the world around him. He could also be thinking none of this and is simply making the face one makes when recharging a battery.

Next: Kawhi Leonard and the Breaks of the Game

Either way, Leonard isn’t saying much. And, while he’s never said much, now nothing is juxtaposed with nothing.

Even when he plays, a void exists around Kawhi Leonard; whomever he guards inherits his silences in the box score, and his contributions on offense are greeted with shirks and shrugs. He is not unlike a past San Antonio great in this way.

Despite a Finals MVP, a Defensive Player of the Year Award, and an ever-expanding offensive game, the word enigmatic is omnipresent in his trajectory. While capable of drawing comparisons to such unsinkable ships as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, his demeanor also cools such talk, anchoring him to the ice berg in the lane, Tim Duncan.