Well, Kawhi Leonard, you’ve really done it now.
You’ve gone ahead and won the Toronto Raptors their first NBA championship.
You were so, so great, the Finals MVP. You’re the quiet stranger who changed basketball in Canada. Now you’re about to be a free agent, with the chance to leave and chart your own course.
We’re going to respectfully ask you to stay. It’s your call, of course, but it’s the correct call. Please, Kawhi.
Run it back with Canada. Don’t abandon the happy dinosaurs, still floating after knocking off the Golden State Warriors Thursday night.
If you were hoping to slip out the back door without anyone noticing, that’s not possible now. The Raptors traded for you last summer, after things got ugly in San Antonio, and you didn’t get a say in that deal. The presumption was you would endure a season up in the frozen north, then wind your way to where you really wanted to go—perhaps a warm destination in Southern California, where you are from.
But you know the correct destination, Kawhi. You’re already there.
This is a perfect marriage, between a low-key superstar and a franchise and city that understands him. The Raptors didn’t just embrace you. They became you. The whole outfit is modest, mellow, hard-working, all business. The Raptors may not have been a popular preseason pick to win this title, but they believed.
.. We love that you’re chill. That you don’t say much. This is a hyper-verbal society. We’ve all got too much to say, to the point all the words and syllables grind into a dull, meaningless noise. That’s not your deal. When you speak, it means something. It matters. You’re old-school that way.
But it isn’t just your silent mien. Your whole style is understated. Your game is electric, but you’ve never been about the sizzle. You’re sponsored by New Balance, for crying out loud. The Yeezys of dentists. It’s perfect.
They Regret Their Defense on Stephen Curry. Will the Raptors?
Brian Rudolph still remembers the raspy voice instructing him to do something that sounded so extreme, so preposterous, so insanely radical that he was almost positive he would never see it again.
Loyola University Maryland was done with its morning shootaround before a November 2008 game against Davidson College when coach Jimmy Patsos realized the strategy that he’d devised for that night wasn’t going to work. Loyola was about to play the leading scorer in college basketball. Stephen Curry was already a problem without a solution. Patsos decided to scrap the game plan. Instead he wanted Loyola’s players to double-team Curry for the entire game.
“Huh?” Rudolph thought. “We just spent an hour at shootaround and didn’t work on this one time. But all right then. I guess that’s what we’re going to do.”
It backfired in spectacular fashion. Curry stood in the corner perfectly content to let his teammates play 4-on-3. Curry scored zero points. Davidson won by 30 points. Loyola’s players have regrets.
“I would’ve rather taken my shot against him and lost than play the way we did and lose by 30,” said Brett Harvey, a commercial real-estate broker in New York. “Now I wish I had that game back more than ever.”
That game more than 10 years ago would be the last time any team dared to get so crazy guarding Curry. At least until the NBA Finals.
Down by nine points with about five minutes left in a supremely weird Game 2 on Sunday night, the Toronto Raptors were as desperate as Loyola.
What happened next was one of the oddest strategic choices that you will ever see in the NBA. Raptors coach Nick Nurse called for a box-and-one: a rarely used gimmick in which four defenders play a zone (the box) while Fred VanVleet hounded Curry (the one). Nurse was putting himself at risk to be ridiculed. But it was also not that big of a gamble. The Raptors had nothing to lose since they were going to lose anyway.
“I was just trying to come up with something to stop them,” Nurse said.
It helped that Kevin Durant was out, Klay Thompson was injured and Golden State had about as many shooters surrounding Curry as that Davidson team. Curry called it “some janky defense” on Sunday night. He’d changed his mind by Tuesday afternoon and called it “innovative and unexpected.”
But the results suggest this strategy that could have easily been embarrassing was actually brilliant.