PHILADELPHIA — Kawhi Leonard is a throwback player. No gimmicks. He would have been a star in the 50s, 60s, 70s – name your era. Silent, solid, simple.
He’s like watching a piece of machinery, with gears well-oiled, roll along. Get in the way and you might lose a finger or worse. His off-switch is tough to find.
No one in this post-season has yet, and the bodies are piling up.
The Toronto Raptors came to Philadelphia looking for at least one win on a business trip they took so seriously that Philly native Kyle Lowry didn’t even go visit his mom. But they failed to bring it in Game 3 and found themselves desperate in Game 4 on a rainy Sunday afternoon in front of a loud, hostile crowd.
It was no exaggeration to say that it felt like their season was slipping away on them, that their one guaranteed year with the pending-free-agent Leonard in the lineup would go to waste. Teams don’t come back from 3-1 in the NBA. It was win or go home and lose eventually.
And to their ever-lasting credit, they played like it all mattered so very, very much.
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“It was one of those nights where we didn’t try to make it look pretty,” said Serge Ibaka, who was one of six Raptors head coach Nick Nurse trusted with any significant minutes and who banged and crashed and did just enough to make a difference while Leonard was moving mountains. “We had to try to grind, man … we tried to grind on the defensive end and on offence just play basketball.”
Everyone dug deep, except for Leonard, who played like he always does – like an advancing tank battalion. He scored 39 points on 20 shots (pause and let that math sink in for a moment) while grabbing 14 rebounds. He is now averaging 38 points on 62-per-cent shooting for the series. He’s in Michael Jordan and LeBron James territory and it can’t be taken for granted.
Fittingly in a game that would have looked perfectly in place in the Eastern Conference of the 80s or 90s, when paint battles were fierce and the wood considered an additional defender, Leonard found one moment for some game-defining artistry. With the shot clock winding down and the Raptors scrapping and clawing to hang on to a one-point lead with 61 seconds to play, he calmly strung out a double-team before rising to knock down a deep, fading triple over Sixers centre Joel Embiid to put the Raptors up by four.
For the first time in the afternoon, the crowd was silenced. What could they say?
Meanwhile the voice inside Leonard’s head was a calm as you might expect.
“I came off the pick-and-roll and they tried to stagger us,” he said. “[Embiid] is a good defender, really long. At the time I looked up at the shot clock and tried to create as much space as possible. I just took a shot and believed it would go in, and it did.”
Even in that moment he was calculating and cool in the chaos. You need to be if you’re working on a live physics equation with 20,000 people roaring your ear:
“There were times in the past, playing in the regular season, I had times when I took those shots and they came up short,” he said. “So I guess I was thinking as well at the time to make sure I put it up high and get to the back rim, and that’s what I did … I had a shot like that versus Houston. At that time I was thinking, as well, try to get it to the back rim too and it still came up short. So just remembering moments like that, and practicing, and telling myself ‘try and get it to the back rim.’”
Back rim and down.
Some clutch free-throw shooting by Danny Green and the dagger was in and twisted, as the Raptors’ 101-96 win allowed them to head home with their second-round best-of-seven series tied 2-2 with Game 5 scheduled for Tuesday night.
It was a taut game. The Raptors led by as much as 11 early in the first quarter but only by three at the end of it and by three again at half. It was tied 75-75 heading into the fourth. The game had the feel of two rats wrestling in a sack.
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For the Raptors, Leonard is their security blanket – the big, tough buddy that suddenly shows up when things are getting out of hand and need to be cooled down, and everyone on the block knows it.
“The stuff that he can do to create his own shot is Kobe-like for me. He’s just so gifted in relation to doing that,” said Sixers head coach Brett Brown, who has tried all variety of schemes only to have Leonard shrug them off, although his seven turnovers suggest he struggled somewhat with the Sixers’ help defence, even if it didn’t affect his shooting – somehow Leonard is shooting 54.5 per cent from deep after going 5-of-7 on Sunday. “But at the end of the day he’s a hell of a player. Thirty-nine points and you felt all of them.”
It’s the Raptors who felt them most of all. They still have a ways to go – all they’ve done with five days in Philly is come back to Toronto in the same position they were when they left. But, after trying to win playoff series against LeBron James all these years, the Raptors are the team that has the all-world player performing at peak levels of efficiency.
Their goal? Don’t screw this up.
As well as Leonard is playing, he can’t win a series or even a game on his own – the Raptors saw that first-hand in Game 3 when they laid down on defence, no one besides Leonard came ready to contribute on offence and they got blown out.
The Raptors needed lots of things to go right given they were already starting the game with Siakam not at full speed with a bruised right calf. They needed someone else to step up offensively, they needed to play with the kind of passion missing in Game 3 and they needed to hope that all of that would be enough to bottle an emerging Sixers energy.
Leonard they could count on. He was playoff Kawhi.
But there was enough help around the margins this time.
Toronto held Philadelphia to 40.2-per-cent shooting and limited Game 3-hero Joel Embiid to 11 points on seven shots – although the word out of the Sixers was that he was fighting a virus and it was uncertain he was even going to play.
The team needed the rest of its main contributors to pick up, and they did, as three other starters were in double figures, Siakam chipped in with nine points – although his 2-of-10 shooting line suggests his calf was a problem. Lowry scored seven of his 14 points in the first half of the first quarter as he tried to assert himself.
“I know what my team needs and I haven’t given it to them,” said Lowry who also had seven assists, six rebounds and one turnover. “In Game 3 I didn’t give it to them and tonight was more assertive me, more of an effort to go out there and try to go be more aggressive … And Game 5 will be the same way, coming out and being aggressive, not worrying about anything, just go hoop and whatever it takes for my team to win. The aggressive me is what we need.”
Fellow facilitator Marc Gasol took the hint and put up more shots (13) and made more field goals (seven) than in any previous game as a Raptor on his way to 16 points while helping limit Embiid.
Nurse gave only the briefest moments to anyone outside of top six. Norman Powell and Fred VanVleet played just 11 minutes combined and gave him no reason to play them more. Nurse gave Patrick McCaw a brief stint to see if he could spark something, but then just rolled with what he had. Leonard played more minutes than he has all season in regulation and Gasol, Lowry and Green were all at or around the 40-minute mark.
It wasn’t pretty as Nurse used Gasol and Ibaka together for long stretches and the offence looked lost at times, but the rebounding — the team had 43 overall, which is a win for Toronto — made up for it.
“It was a gutty performance and that’s what was needed regardless of who was there or not. It even becomes a bit more gutty when you’re not down a guy, but he obviously wasn’t himself, right?” said Nurse. “We weren’t in great rhythm, right?
But we were good enough tonight and we were fighting and figuring some things out on the fly … We did just enough.”
It was more than enough because Leonard did what he always does.
No one knows Leonard better than his friend Green, who came over from San Antonio in the mid-summer, franchise-shaking trade.
He’s seen a lot. They won a championship together. Leonard was a Finals MVP. But this is different.
“It’s hard [to rank], because his last couple games he’s having a hell of a playoff series. It’s pretty high up there,” said Green. “He’s been carrying a huge load for us, and doing it on both ends of the floor. We’re going to need him to continue to do that, especially next game.”
The beauty of the Leonard machine is that there’s every chance it will keep on running and keep on grinding up whatever is in his path. The Raptors just need to keep up.
