NBA Playoffs 2020: 5 reasons the Los Angeles Clippers can win it all

5. Kawhi Leonard

Before I go any further, let me say I love Kawhi Leonard, but he gives off the aura of an inanimate object. He hops onto the scene with all the charisma of a desk lamp, stares you in the eye, and as you blink, you are forced to wonder, is this what enlightenment feels like? The answer is yes. He has reduced the pomp and circumstance of Michael Jordan and the advanced mimicry of Kobe Bryant to a minimalist science. He is Occam’s Razor. He is at the strip club in a New Balance sweatshirt and maybe a medical mask, and if he reacts, he does so as if he is squinting at a basketball in the dark, a desk lamp in need of a new light bulb, some other inanimate object posing an inanimate riddle.

He is the best player in the league too, I think. I could be wrong, and if I am, I am not wrong by much. Basketball is obsessed with naming alphas, with proclaiming dominance, but the sport could take a lesson from the last decade or so of tennis and promote a Big Four (or Big Three) as opposed to a singularity. Since 2012, LeBron James has been the best player on three championship teams. Steph Curry, despite not having ever been named a Finals MVP, has also been the best player on three championship teams. And Kawhi Leonard has been the best player on two championship teams.

The sports are not exactly the same and for fairly obvious reasons, but credit LeBron for six Finals trips in addition to those three titles: he is the Federer of the group. Play around with whether Kawhi or Steph is Nadal or Djokovic. It doesn’t really matter, and despite his potential, it still seems premature to declare Giannis Antetokounmpo anything more than an Andy Murray or Stan Wawrinka and even that may be pushing it. Anyway, the point is as much as LeBron is chasing the ring counts of Jordan and Kobe and Duncan and whomever else you want to name, he is still fending off his peers who are a few years younger — the legacies are still very much up in the air.

Kawhi seems to sense this the way he tracks a ball traveling through what appeared to everyone else as an open passing lane. He is poised to steal crowns while everyone watches Giannis engage in a game of charades. He is also the reigning king, and he is far from an upstart learning what it takes to win. Head-to-head in the postseason he and LeBron are dead even, and his Clippers appeared to have the edge over the Lakers in the teams’ matchups from this regular season. Giannis has yet to defeat him. And yet the narrative is never quite attracted to him for longer than a game’s duration, the revolution of a basketball rising and falling and rising and falling and rising and falling.

There is no gravity to Kawhi and therefore he is weightless. That is his advantage. No one sees him coming. No one ever has. They have always been blinded by the lights of other stars, and he is horny as a desk lamp.