Taking a deep dive into the mystery that is the Kawhi Leonard injury and what we could expect next from both the San Antonio Spurs and the former all-star
The Kawhi Leonard situation has been a mystery all year. How hurt is he really? Will he come back for the playoffs? Could they beat a Steph Curry-less Warriors team if he did? Was he misdiagnosed? Are his teammates mad because he’s sitting out for the super max contract extension? Does he want out? Would Gregg Popovich actually trade him?
There are tons of unknowns here, but also some clues that are not being addressed fully in most of what you’ve heard so far. Let’s take a deep dive and see if we can infer what’s going on and what will happen.
It might be tempting to take a reductive approach and speculate that maybe he’s actually pretty healthy and simply keeping himself out to lock in an imminent super max extension. After all, it’s expected the club will offer him a max extension worth around $219 million over the summer.
On the flipside, it might be naïve to insist we should not question the extent of his injury at all because he’s played through them in the past or because he’s dealt with quadriceps issues before.
The truth may be somewhere in between these extreme perspectives.
As Lester Freeman says in “The Wire” “…you start to follow the money and you don’t know where the f–k it’s gonna take you.” So let’s start there first…