The Kawhi-ary: An end to exceptionalism is only a deal away

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

At some point the Los Angeles Lakers will be rebuilt, and it will be awful. What’s worse, however, is the role San Antonio could play in the revival, in delivering the first cornerstone to this new golden dynasty or whatever the Lakers end up being once a thousand tweets will them back to life.

The rift between the San Antonio Spurs and Kawhi Leonard is easy to write in the language of high drama, as film noir espionage and back room betrayals. The silences allow for this. The imagination transcribes what it already knows, especially when the imagination knows nothing. So the story becomes old men encroaching on a young individual. Robber barons and Peckinpah protagonists. Corrupt politicians and spies left out in the cold. American narratives are fairly limiting. Los Angeles is always a suitable destination for the hero’s journey.

The Kawhi Leonard screenplay is a work in progress. He could spend a year in Phoenix or New York or God knows where before finding a way to the Pacific. He could also spend forever in any of those places. Who knows?

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The only facts creative can agree on are: Kawhi Leonard is a great basketball player. He played great basketball for the Spurs. Then he was injured and missed a great deal of time to injury. He was medically cleared to play. He played some games. He did not play in more games. The team and his team could not agree to the conditions and timeframe for his return. The Spurs continued playing solid, if not stellar, basketball. Kawhi was sighted in other places, like New York and war torn Vienna. A coach’s wife died. Grievances were supposedly pushed aside. Danny Green remained optimistic. (Danny Green is always optimistic.) Rumors as recent as last week suggested a reunion of sorts between the coach and the prodigal, and then less than 48 hours after those rumors surfaced a counter arrived: Kawhi wants out. Kawhi has said nothing. He is lost in the underground. But the once obedient silence is now damning.

Even if fragile in body or mind or however franchise players are not supposed to be, great organizations discover ways to deal with or mask such pressure points and fault lines. To not do so is to no longer be great. Michael Jordan played a career’s worth of basketball suspicious of management, brooding against management, sharpening his game against management. Kawhi wants out, and it’s still not clear what exactly management did or did not do on his behalf, because, you know, silence.

This, or some variation of this, is the timeline and the narrative. The story is not unique. This deflation of the San Antonio mystique, the failing of a franchise to remain relevant after being so good and rock solid at doing just that, is not extraordinary. What is, however, is that it did not happen sooner, because it happens almost everywhere else with such frequency. Teams and relationships fall apart often in the NBA and in life. The parting of the ways is actually incredibly, incredibly ordinary.

While such a realization is perhaps cynical and heartbreaking, such a realization is also necessary for moving forward, if moving on is what needs to happen. Such acceptance of the situation as it appears to be also allows for the realization that the Spurs’ decades-long relevancy and Kawhi’s ascendency in the league were never steel rails running inevitably into the future, but rather two forces that were fortunate to intersect at all.

The caveat being, of course, that if Kawhi were to stay, then perhaps the trains could keep running on time.

A draft day trade began Kawhi’s tenure in San Antonio, and there is hint of irony if he were somehow to arrive on a roster with Paul George in the future, because the trade that brought Kawhi in San Antonio prevented him from landing in Indiana, where one can imagine he and George would have potentially rivaled and dethroned LeBron James. And that adds another layer of irony to all this. Kawhi and George are two players on a very short list to legitimately challenge and impress the King over the course of a seven game series in the postseason. When LeBron erected a super team in Miami, anyone against the idea found comfort in the heroics and daring, at least for a time, in the play of Kawhi and George and the mythical right ways to play. Then again, that’s all ages ago, but history always holds tightly to the present.

In those long gone days, Tim Duncan was already ancient, while Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili were rumored to have each lost a step. The San Antonio decline was happening even then, in 2011, when Kawhi Leonard was a rookie and worth no more than a George Hill. Oklahoma City and its young core of super stars to be had already displaced San Antonio, and yet Kawhi’s emergence would power San Antonio’s resurgence, culminating with a trip to the Finals in 2013 and a championship in 2014.

The intersection of these generations, for a time, resulted in some of the most beautiful basketball ever played, but it should also be noted each year the cupboard was depleted and now the cupboard is almost bare.

LaMarcus Aldridge is good, even very good, but he is 32 and will soon be taking up a quarter of the salary cap. Pau Gasol is 37 and closer in age to Tim Duncan than to Kawhi Leonard. Tony Parker is to be a free agent in a number of days. Manu Ginobili is 40 and playing for peanuts, possibly until his limbs literally fall from his body. Patty Mills will be around for a while, but he’s just Patty Mills, no more and no less. Danny Green and Rudy Gay both hold player options for the upcoming season and could be gone this summer. And, if Gregg Popovich really isn’t going to be around beyond 2020, then maybe San Antonio is no longer the basketball sanctum it once was.

A franchise can’t keep winning and replenish forever, eventually you’re not drafting Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili with late round picks but Kyle Anderson and Derrick White. How long did David Robinson wait for the Spurs to draft Tim Duncan? Also, think about the luck involved in receiving that pick. How long would Kawhi Leonard have to wait for history to repeat?

Kawhi must see that. And that’s not on Pop or RC — that’s basketball and contracts.

So, while many want this breakup to be full of hurt feelings and blame and intrigue, the parting could actually be a matter of basketball pragmatism, at least for Kawhi Leonard and his party of prime movers, who looked around the locker room in San Antonio and panicked at the lack of young talent. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s one of many possibilities in a script still being written.

Kawhi could stay in San Antonio out of loyalty (or money), but loyalty is an abstract, especially when one considers he really didn’t come of age with anyone else in the organization. He has no proverbial running mate or partner in crime. Everyone else was old upon his arrival. Perhaps Danny Green fits the bill, but the weight of responsibility on each of their shoulders is so disparate that such dynamics couldn’t possibly be how their relationship functions.

Maybe the issue for Kawhi really is a matter of young existentialism, but without a true antagonist, because it’s difficult to imagine the coaching staff that extended Duncan’s career shortening Kawhi’s.

Maybe what Kawhi sees in San Antonio isn’t what happened, except, because he believes it to be so, it’s exactly what happened.

In San Antonio, he cannot be anything other than the young gun who must respond to the organization as those before him did and perhaps he wants to go somewhere that might allow him to actually age and have a seat at the table. He may actually have a seat at the table, but if these thoughts and sentiments are already in his head, how do you convince him otherwise? How do you tell someone what they’re seeing isn’t what’s happening without asking them to betray their own thoughts and feelings? While this might sound interesting on some psychological level, this is all rather boring. It’s what happens to soldiers experiencing the moral betrayals that accompany post-traumatic stress disorders, but without the war and only basketball.

On the other hand, even as Kawhi and his support team attempt to seize control of his career and playing future, San Antonio need not heed his wishes. He may very well end up in Los Angeles (or wherever he desires), but he may have to wait another season before his arrival. If a player need not be loyal to organizations, organizations need not be loyal to a player they now probably perceive as a lone wolf. Because, as stated earlier, the moral imperative here is really just about fielding the best possible basketball team year in and year out as often as possible.

From a basketball standpoint, the best option would probably  be to keep Kawhi, but Kawhi seems more willing to torch the place — his career included — than to play another minute for San Antonio — and that fact alone is the reason to suspect Pop and the organization did commit some wrongdoing (whatever it may be) in regards to Leonard.

And, because Kawhi has proven he’s already willing to sit for the equivalent of an entire season, San Antonio will and should do what assures its basketball livelihood, which no longer means holding onto Kawhi (and by default Tony and Manu and Timmy and David).

So where do the Spurs go next?

An optimist would point to the rebuilds in Philadelphia or Boston as the best paths toward contention, and many teams have found it easier to tank than to stockpile assets without tanking. Philadelphia transformed mediocre playoff berths into a horrid nadir before finding even a crack of light at the end of the tunnel. Meanwhile, Boston transformed out of breath Hall-of-Famers into an unending stream of draft picks, astute signings, and sound trades. Having Brad Stevens also helped.

The Boston model appears to be a more likely analog for San Antonio, at least while Pop’s still around. Still, such a comparison is strange because the Boston model in some ways mimics the old San Antonio model. In signing Stevens, Danny Ainge found his Popovich, an architect of stability rooted in flexibility. And, potentially, trading Kawhi could lead to the equivalent of Brooklyn’s draft picks and a bevy of young talent.

And yet the genius to be found in both Philadelphia and Boston’s rebuilding efforts is simple: increase the franchise’s chances of landing young talent as often as possible and in any way available. Whether by trade or by losing, both teams increased their chances for selecting talent as early in the draft as possible, with one exception: Boston traded Philadelphia the number one pick in last year’s draft, allowing Philadelphia to mistakenly select Markelle Fultz instead of Jayson Tatum.

In basketball, genius is not a lone arbiter. Genius relies on the choices others make, as well as its own intuitions. A franchise selects Fultz over Tatum, Greg Oden over Kevin Durant, Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan. San Antonio’s last three decades of genius rests as much with the diamonds in the rough as it does with David Robinson and Tim Duncan at the top of the draft.

The future for San Antonio without Kawhi Leonard is uncertain because the only certainty in sports is the talent on the roster and even that can be shaken, stymied, worn away, and altered by the bounce of a ping pong ball or a fragment of bone. In the end, even a contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on if even one party perceives it a work of fiction.

Read the rest of The Kawhi-ary: A year without a Kawhi Leonard, Kawhi’s trip from the Planet Wyh, Kawhi Leonard and the Breaks of the Game, The sound of Kawhilence, Kawhi Leonard will drink your milkshake all up, Call me Kawhi.