Lawsuit against Clippers opens old wound for Raptors fans

TORONTO — The only acceptable remedy would be to turn back time.

Sadly for Toronto Raptors fans, that’s not happening. And so, the details of the lawsuit filed Thursday by a former Los Angeles Clippers employee who — among other claims — alleges the Clippers engaged in a methodical long-term tampering campaign to ensure themselves the best possible chance to acquire Kawhi Leonard only serve to reopen an old wound.

The scars run deep. Leonard leaving Toronto in free agency, practically before the empty champagne bottles from the championship celebration could be taken out for recycling, almost certainly cost the Raptors a legitimate shot at a second-straight NBA title. The Kawhi-less Raptors played at a 60-win pace in 2019-20 and pushed the Boston Celtics to Game 7 in the second round as the pandemic-shortened season played out in the NBA bubble. Had either Pascal Siakam or Marc Gasol played even close to their career norms, the Raptors would have at least advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals. With Leonard still on board? Come on.

The what-could-have-beens are perhaps a little more poignant as the Raptors start a challenging rebuilding season with no free-agent saviour in sight. In the years since the championship, hopes have been based mainly on fanciful trades inspired by the Leonard template: Maybe Giannis Antetokounmpo? Hey, what about Kevin Durant? Or can we interest you in Damian Lillard?

In reality, though, what remained of the championship core was disassembled piece by piece, for questionable returns.

And for just a hint of salt in the wound, how about the lawsuit coming out — first reported by NBA insider Chris Haynes — as former Raptors star Kyle Lowry and then head coach Nick Nurse are in Toronto with the Philadelphia 76ers? But not all of this was in their control. Forces were acting against their interests.

In the lawsuit, Randy Shelton — a long-time friend and personal trainer of Leonard's — claims he was wrongfully dismissed by the Clippers last summer for raising concerns about the team’s management of Leonard’s health and injuries.

The Clippers say otherwise in a statement: "Mr. Shelton's claims were investigated and found to be without merit. We honored Mr. Shelton's employment contract and paid him in full," the team said. "This lawsuit is a belated attempt to shake down the Clippers based on accusations that Mr. Shelton should know are false."

Regardless of the motivations behind it, the suit is relevant from the Raptors’ point of view because it also includes allegations that the Clippers broke a number of promises made to Shelton as they manoeuvred to acquire Leonard, a process Shelton alleges "leapt well beyond the bounds of the NBA constitution" and began when Leonard was still playing for San Antonio, as far back as the 2016-17 season, and continued when he was playing for the Raptors.

When contacted by Sportsnet, the Raptors did not provide a comment. An NBA spokesperson told Haynes that they are reviewing the court filings.

The Clippers’ pursuit of Leonard was hardly a secret. He arrived in Toronto by trade in the summer of 2018 with one year remaining on his contract, the Spurs deciding to move on after a fallout over the diagnosis and treatment of Leonard’s right thigh and/or knee drove a wedge between him and the organization for which he had finished in the top three of the MVP voting twice and was named Finals MVP when the Spurs won the championship in 2014.

The Raptors made the trade with the knowledge that Leonard’s health would be a looming question mark. Beyond that, his desire to play in Southern California — to be closer to his family in San Diego once he hit free agency — was also well known. But they hoped Leonard would help get them over the hump in the Eastern Conference, and that a full season in Toronto would convince him to consider staying long-term.

In Los Angeles, after missing out on trading for Leonard — with some holding the view that the Spurs were intentional about not trading Leonard to the Clippers, his preferred destination — the Clippers made signing him as a free agent their mission. And just to drive home the fact they wanted to be the team that brought Leonard back to California, they sent Mark Hughes — at the time, their assistant general manager — to nearly every game Leonard played for the Raptors.

Which is perfectly legal. Other teams attend games and scout opposing players all the time. But the persistence was unusual. Having the same team executive fly across three time zones to watch an opposing player in roughly 75 per cent of the games he played stood out. Hughes became part of the fabric at Scotiabank Arena, and the Clippers’ interest in Leonard was a running theme throughout the season, common knowledge and widely discussed at the time.

The Clippers turned it up another notch when owner Steve Ballmer took in a game, courtside, at Scotiabank Arena in early February of that year.

If the plan was to impress Leonard, it didn’t quite pan out. “I didn’t see [Ballmer] tonight. I don’t really pay attention to who’s at the game or anything like that unless I’m sitting on the bench or there’s a dead ball or something like that and they make an announcement,” Leonard said, after the Raptors coasted to an easy win that night. “That’s pretty much the times when I know someone’s here.”

Naturally, when the Clippers signed Leonard in the summer of 2019, the team denied it had done anything to land him outside the NBA’s rules for tampering, which preclude teams from "directly or indirectly" attempting to entice players under contract with one team to join a different team.

“We never had a conversation with Kawhi or with any of his people,” Clippers president Lawrence Frank said at Leonard’s introductory media conference in July 2019. “We always felt by doing it out in front that we were being very, very transparent. We know the rules. We follow the rules. With how [Ballmer] does business, his integrity is No. 1. We are always going to be above the line."

The lawsuit claims otherwise, as Shelton lays out the extent of the behind-the-scenes efforts the Clippers allegedly took to position themselves to acquire Leonard.

Shelton alleges he “spoke with Hughes on the phone approximately 15 times and had at least seven meetings” with him while Shelton was still the strength and conditioning coach for San Diego State University and Leonard was still under contract with the Spurs. In these conversations, Hughes stressed the need for discretion while he “repeatedly pressed for information regarding Leonard’s needs and emphasized the Clippers’ desire to sign Leonard before Leonard would enter free agency after bringing a Championship to the Toronto Raptors.”

The suit also alleges that “Hughes discussed bringing Shelton into the Clippers organization as a strength and conditioning coach given the personal relationship and trust that Leonard had in Shelton.”

Shelton alleges that even as Leonard was leading the Raptors to their championship, he was meeting with Clippers director of medical staff John Meyer and Lee Jenkins, the team’s director of research and identity.

As we know now, Leonard did sign with the Clippers and Shelton was hired.

So, did the Raptors ever have a real chance of keeping the 2019 NBA Finals MVP?

No team could have done more on behalf of a player’s well-being than Toronto did for Leonard — and those efforts worked, almost magically.

Sadly for Leonard, the Clippers, and the rest of the NBA, his one year in Toronto was his last healthy season. Under the watchful eye of Alex McKechnie, the Raptors’ vice-president of health and performance, Toronto popularized the term "load management" to describe an approach that saw Leonard sit out games to make sure the demands on his knee were kept to a level that didn’t require longer-term interventions. Leonard played 60 games for Toronto that year during the regular season and, crucially, all 24 playoff games. He led the post-season in minutes played.

He's hasn't had a comparably healthy season since, and so far this season, has been ruled out by the Clippers indefinitely while he again rehabilitates his surgically repaired knee.

The Raptors believed they were in the running to re-sign Leonard until the final hour, but they couldn’t compete with the fact the Clippers were building what seemed to be a super team, with the addition of both Leonard and Paul George, and that they were located in Los Angeles.

Did Leonard make the right decision, in retrospect?

Shelton’s lawsuit suggests otherwise, laying out a litany of instances where he alleges the Clippers pushed Leonard beyond previously agreed-upon limits “because the Clippers place revenue and winning above all else, even the health and safety of their ‘franchise’ player in Leonard.”

Those issues, the courts will decide. But for the Raptors and their fans, the lawsuit is another painful reminder that the best moments the team ever had were over far too soon.