TORONTO — The news about Kawhi Leonard missing two weeks and likely more due to an issue with his left knee was both predictable and encouraging. Predictable because injury updates are as much part of the Leonard experience as steals, tough twos and pull-up threes.
Going back to the 2017-18 season, Leonard has missed 44 per cent of his team’s scheduled games. Even in his healthier years, playing more than three quarters of the season is relatively rare. In the last nine years, he’s played 68 games once, 65 games once and 60 games another year. One season he missed entirely, another he played just 37 games and the other three he was in the fifties.
With Leonard, you set the over-under for games played at 60 and hope for the best.
So that’s the predictable part about Leonard playing 28 minutes against Washington on Friday night, practising as normal on Saturday and then going through his standard 15-minute pre-game warm-up routine in Minnesota on Sunday before pulling the plug after — per team sources — he noticed swelling in his left knee.
You just never know when something will crop up. Was his knee an issue in his slow start so far (Leonard is shooting just 12-of-37 from the floor)? Or was it completely random?
With Leonard, you can plan and prepare all you want, but sometimes his body says 'not today,' and Leonard has learned to listen to it.
As for the encouraging part? Well, the MRI Leonard had on Monday was clean in that it showed no injury or structural damage. This wasn’t a case where there was a collision or a pop or the joint buckled on him.
This is Leonard and the Raptors' reality: his knees have been through a lot, and sometimes they swell. It’s wear-and-tear — perhaps you’re familiar with the concept if you are a certain age and if you’re not, you will be — and it typically clears up with rest and treatment, which is what Leonard will be doing for the next week or so until he’s reevaluated.
Optimistically, it means that the earliest the Raptors will have Leonard back in uniform will be in two weeks' time — a week off followed by a week of reconditioning — but it could be more given he was going through a gradual reconditioning process when his knee acted up in the first place.
If he returns in two weeks, he’ll have missed seven games and could conceivably be back in the lineup when the Raptors host the Celtics on Nov. 11. If it’s three weeks, he would be back on Nov. 17 against the New York Knicks at Scotiabank Arena, having missed 11 games.
We’ll see. In Leonard’s world, everything is subject to change.
The ripple effects are considerable, but the biggest issue is that the remaining Raptors need to play significantly better than they did when they got blown out by the Timberwolves if hopes for the current season don’t begin to waver before it’s a month old.
It’s been an underplayed element of the whole Leonard saga, lost somewhat in the understandable excitement about him returning to the franchise he led to a championship in 2019 and what this group might look like with the addition of one of the NBA’s best-ever two-way players.
The prospect of Leonard teaming with Scottie Barnes and Collin Murray-Boyles as the foundation of one of the NBA’s best defensive trios has been fun to think about and — in small sample sizes — fun to watch.
But the looming question is not what they would look like with Leonard in the lineup, but what they would look like without him, given that even optimistic projections would suggest that there would be 20 or more games like that.
Would the Leonard-less Raptors be able to hold their own against good teams, something they couldn’t do last season? Would they be able to dominate weaker opposition, which was so essential to their run to the playoffs and fifth-place finish in the East?
We get to find out, but the early return against Minnesota was not encouraging as the Raptors fell behind by double digits in the first quarter, and after showing some signs of life going into halftime, started the fourth quarter trailing 90-62.
“Until he gets back, we got to figure it out,” said RJ Barrett, who leads the Raptors in scoring (21 points per game) and will likely have a bigger load to carry offensively when Leonard sits. “We can’t just let go of the rope. We can’t have games like we did in Minnesota.”
Job No. 1: Barnes needs to play significantly better than he did against the Timberwolves, where the Raptors' best player had the worst offensive game of his career: 0 points on 0/12 shooting.
“Obviously I missed a lot of open shots,” said Barnes. “My threes were wide open (Barnes shot 0-of-5 from deep and is now 2-of-14 from the season). They’re helping (in the paint), so my threes are wide open, and obviously my middies (mid-range shots) wasn’t falling, and they had help in the paint so I couldn’t get all the way to the rim, and I missed some easy ones as well, but defensively I felt like I still had a great impact (Barnes had four steals but was a team-worst minus-27).”
But it can’t just be Barnes or Barrett to fill all the gaps.
Two of the Raptors' lineup stalwarts last season were Brandon Ingram (traded to the Clippers in the Leonard trade) and Sandro Mamukelashvili (signed by the Los Angeles Lakers in free agency), who missed just seven games between them with the Raptors and each had career years or close to it.
They weren’t perfect players, but they averaged 32.7 points per game combined on good efficiency.
Trading for Leonard meant losing some depth, with the bet being the Raptors had enough internally that they could manage the portions of the season when Leonard was inevitably going to miss games.
Ja’Kobe Walter, who led the Raptors with 22 points against Minnesota, will likely start in Leonard’s place and second-year big man Murray-Boyles will need to add some offensive punch to the high-level defence he’s playing already.
But others will have to find ways to contribute as well. Three games is barely a sample size, but it’s worth noting that back-up point guard Jamal Shead has been mired in a deep slump since pre-season and is shooting just 23 per cent from the floor in three regular-season games, while centre Jakob Poeltl has yet to crack double figures for the season — cumulatively — despite starting all three games and averaging 22 minutes.
Neither Shead nor Poeltl are generally counted on to provide offence in large quantities, but if they could manage 20 points a game combined, rather than the 6.7 they’re providing through three games, doubtless head coach Darko Rajakovic would appreciate it.
There was never any question that the Raptors would be in this situation. It’s mildly concerning that it’s happened before the season is a week old and before Leonard was even playing at top capacity. But now that it’s here, the rest of the lineup has to prove that they can play well enough to justify acquiring Leonard in the first place.
Three-point Grange:
1. Raptors are not alone: While Leonard being out is not ideal, and his history always gives cause for concern, a lot of players a lot younger than Leonard are missing time, too. The Orlando Magic (1-2) will be in Toronto for two games Wednesday and Friday and will be without star forward Paulo Banchero and point guard Jalen Suggs. It’s more of the same for the Magic, who have been plagued by injuries throughout their starting lineup since they first broke through as a playoff team in 2023-24. The Oklahoma City Thunder had two starters — Jalen Williams (leg/ankle) and Cason Wallace (shoulder) — go down in the same game Sunday, with both expected to miss extended time recovering from their respective surgeries. The Utah Jazz had stars Jaren Jackson Jr. and Lauri Markkanen leave with injuries in a loss to Memphis on Monday. The Detroit Pistons are without all-NBA centre Jalen Duren, while Charlotte is missing sharpshooter Kon Knueppel.
No advice necessary: Walter is only at the start of his third season, but he’s already earned the respect of the Raptors veterans in the sense that they don’t feel the need to impart their wisdom as he gets ready to take over the starter’s minutes vacated by Leonard: “I don’t think he needs any help,” said Barrett as the Raptors were practicing at OVO Athletic Centre on Tuesday. “He didn’t look like he needed any help to me. He’s got it. We’ve been through this before, next man up mentality. He started a lot of games for me when I was out last year, started for Quick (Immanuel Quickley). Guys are ready for this moment.”
More Jak, not less: Rajakovic acknowledged that having his starting centre average three points per game as Poeltl has through three games is less than ideal. Getting him more involved was one of the things they are focusing on. Even last season, Poeltl averaged 10.7 points per game while hampered by a back issue, and he’s only two years removed from averaging a career-best 14.5 points per game.
"We need to play through him more. I think there are opportunities in transition, in early offence for us to play through him," Rajakovic said. "Is that him setting screens and looking for early pocket (passes)? Is that playing through him as a connector? I do think there are more opportunities there."
