Kawhi Leonard is a Toronto Raptor again?! Whoaaa, eight years after he delivered the championship that shut Oracle Arena’s lights off forever, he’s headed back north for what could be the final chapter of his career.
It’s rather Shakespearean about the way his current chapter with the Warriors dynasty decided to end. Not with another Finals matchup or one last signature series, but with Draymond Green stealing the ball right out of his hands in the closing seconds of a Play-In game, sending him into the offseason and ultimately back to Toronto.
The Warriors have a strange habit of outlasting every villain in their story. Eventually, somehow, they get the last word. Kawhi Leonard was never supposed to be one of them.
Go back to the 73-win season. San Antonio was the respectability test for the dynasty, the team that made everyone who doubted the Warriors sharpen their pencils and reconsider. Kawhi Leonard was already becoming something dangerous, a two-way freight train who moved with mechanical patience and struck with violence. Then there was that February showdown, the kind that felt more like a Western Conference Finals preview than a Tuesday night in the regular season. Steph Curry hit a stepback that blew the roof off Oracle and made you feel the weight of what Golden State was becoming in real time. You could feel both franchises circling each other, understanding exactly what the other represented. The Warriors were ascending. The Spurs were the last empire standing between them and permanent dynasty status.
The rivalry never got its full resolution on the court. The injury to Kawhi in the 2017 Western Conference Finals derailed the Spurs’ best chance at contesting the Warriors on a level playing field, and it denied us the chess match we deserved. Depending on who you ask and how you feel about the circumstances, that moment either leveled the dynasty’s path or exposed the dynasty’s luck. Either way, the conversation never got finished.
Kawhi came back for his revenge as a Toronto Raptor. And he delivered one of the coldest postseason performances in NBA history against these Warriors, who were already broken and bleeding through an injury crisis unraveling in real time. Game Six was in Oracle Arena aka the house that built the dynasty, the most intimidating building in basketball. And with the Warriors set to move to San Francisco the next season, this was the last dance for Oakland.
Alas, Kawhi and the Raptors walked in and turned the lights off forever. Kevin Durant’s Achilles and Klay Thompson’s ACL were afterthoughts as the Raptors celebrated in front of a devastated Dub Nation. The last image Golden State’s faithful had of Oracle wasn’t the Splash Bros high fiving and pouring champagne. Instead it was Kawhi Leonard’s stone face unbothered, watching their dream die. As Finals MVP he ended the Oracle era, the threepeat, and the Oakland chapter of the Warriors dynasty.
The rivarly between Kawhi and the Dubs continued across the Bay. Chase Center opened and on opening night, the Los Angeles Clippers arrived as a superteam with Kawhi Paul George, and the specific energy of an organization that believed its moment had finally arrived. They walked into that building and won by 19, cruising to the finish over a proud but mortally wounded Golden State squad. Afterwards Patrick Beverley told Curry that the next five years belonged to him. Insane hyperbole? Absolutely. But that’s the confidence Kawhi’s presence against the Warriors warranted. The Clippers genuinely believed they were coming for the throne with “The Klaw” as their instrument of conquest. He had already buried Oracle. Now he had christened Chase with a victory and planted a flag in the new era.
Fast forward seven years to this year in the springtime where, in a Play-In game in Los Angeles the Warriors had no business winning, Draymond Green put Kawhi in handcuffs. Leonard finished with 21 points on 17 shots, committed 5 turnovers, and left that game with his own postgame assessment as the most revealing verdict of all: that Draymond was a Hall of Fame defender and it was hard to even get shots up against him.
With 49 seconds left and the Warriors clinging to a three-point lead, Green stole the inbound pass intended for Leonard, immediately found Brandin Podziemski streaking to the basket for an and-1 that crippled the Clippers for good, then ripped Leonard’s dribble in the final moments to seal it. The Klaw, who had haunted this franchise across two uniforms and a decade of history, got his cookies taken in the most consequential game of the Clippers’ season, on his home floor, with everything on the line.
I’m loving the symmetry. Kawhi stole the final championship game ever played inside Oracle Arena. And then he won the first regular season game ever played inside Chase Center. And the final possession of his Clippers career ended with Draymond snatching the ball away from him.
Nearly a decade after Toronto borrowed him to end the Warriors’ first act, Golden State sent him back to Toronto having written the ending to his L.A. story.
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