Watching Kawhi Leonard, Who Is Still Growing

This past offseason was the first in recent memory when consensus didn't predict a drop-off for the San Antonio Spurs. The NBA's steadiest ideologues have long been declared obsolete each summer only to rebut those forecasts by the spring. They have tended to sit out free-agency periods, doing little more than re-signing Tim Duncan or Manu Ginobili at rates that seemingly owe more to the handshake customs of some idyllic midcentury farming town than the cutthroat cap-considering mores of pro basketball. They have offered nothing by way of a blueprint for improvement beyond an unspoken, Well, let's try it again. They are something like a dynasty, and probably the best team of their generation.

This summer, though, they broke with custom. They paid up for LaMarcus Aldridge, the preeminent available free agent, and added indelible frontcourt tough David West at a bargain price. This, the NBA's assorted chatterers could understand. Aldridge fulfilled the dual purposes of easing the burden of the aging Duncan-Ginobili-Tony Parker trio and providing a feasible next step for the franchise; West fortified an already able bench. Those claiming foresight foresaw great things.

So far this young season, though, the Spurs' most optimistic signs have not come from their big-name additions but, rather, their tradition of less conspicuous self-improvement. Namely, Kawhi Leonard—2014 Finals MVP and 2015 Defensive Player of the Year, complementary player turned essential contributor turned franchise linchpin—somehow seems to have gotten better.

In San Antonio's first game of the season—a six-point loss to the Thunder in Oklahoma City whose result, in the way of October games, mattered less than the fashion in which it was played—the Spurs offered a smattering of the cooperative style that has defined them in recent years. Parker and Duncan ran pick-and-rolls. Boris Diaw backed jellyfishily into the lane, where he tossed up loopy half-hooks or spun one-handed bounce passes to the opposite corner. Ginobili found space and took 17-footers.

Alternating with this characteristic San Antonio style, though, there was a clear emphasis on playing through Leonard. He brought his lanky and immaculately balanced frame off ball-screens and pin-downs, worked in isolation, and, repeatedly, posted up Kevin Durant, who is some three inches taller. Leonard took ten more shots than the next closest Spur and scored a career-high 32 points. All the while, he played the defense that originally brought him notoriety, slipping into passing lanes, marking Durant in a manner that called to mind either a more serene Tony Allen or a fishing net. He blocked Durant's shot twice, the height difference again collapsed by a combination of technique and timing.

One play in particular, though, stood out. Midway through the fourth quarter, the Spurs isolated Leonard on the right wing against Durant. Leonard looked, of course, just as he has for every moment of his professional career, and probably for every moment of his life: like he was at the tail end of a perfectly pleasant day, a day of sunset-gazing and iced tea and heels on ottomans, and now he was just about ready to turn in after playing a little basketball. His eyes a quarter lidded and his face all ease, Leonard drove left, spun right, dropped a shoulder into Durant's stomach, stepped back, and hit a dewy fadeaway. It was lovely in its own right, but it also had an almost evolutionary significance. Watching it was like watching a fish sprout legs.

Much of the joy of tracing Leonard's career has come from its linear progression. The story of most young NBA stars is one of expansive but erratic talent eventually honed into a reliable approach. From the start, though, Leonard was a dependable player, a heady defender as well as an offensive opportunist who added far more than he subtracted. The yearly additions to his game arrived in a straightforward manner. His defense became more sophisticated and adventurous; his shooting and ballhandling improved. Over the past couple seasons, Leonard emerged as a player capable of resolving the opportunities the San Antonio offense created in whatever forms they presented themselves, serving as the spot-up shooter at the end of their strings of passes, the cutter Duncan found from the high post, and the rangy rebounder wrangling extra possessions.

If this pattern of piecemeal improvement kept Leonard from creating the sorts of headaches many young players generate, though, it also seemed to cap his potential. He was fundamentally adaptive, not encompassing in the way of the Durants and the Anthony Davises of the league. Basketball history has taught us that this type of talent is a different strain, one that is not built toward but innate, and one that presents in the early stages not as studiousness but as precocity. In this understanding, greatness is the derring-do required to try ill-advised double-pump jumpers or dunks over rim-protecting behemoths, some of which work out and all of which tantalize the league's futurists.

Look, though, at Leonard's spin-and-score over Durant—which borrowed from the single-mindedness of Kobe Bryant and the deliberation and eye for pattern of, like, Frank Lloyd Wright or some shit—and you can see the contours of a distinct type of star-making. Having improved everything usually considered improvable, Leonard now seems to have set about engineering the kind of excellence generally thought to be intrinsic. There is not supposed to be a step-by-step path to transcendence, but Leonard is walking it.

It thrills and puzzles to see him pull up for an open jumper at one moment, straight up and down, the final line of that particular twenty-second proof of a San Antonio possession, and to see him pivot into a guarded fadeaway at another. He makes each shot with the same granite countenance, the two methodologies coexisting with apparent ease.

The question is as unfair to Leonard as it is impossible not to ask: Would he be this player were he not a Spur? Earlier in his career, this question meant to investigate whether or not he'd be as capable a scorer and as staunch a defender plucked out of the impeccable San Antonio ecosystem and dropped into a dysfunction-dump like New York or Orlando. In recent years, though, as he has become more individually assertive and more clearly a top-level player, it has taken on different meaning. Would Leonard have developed those talents elsewhere, or would he have settled into a lesser NBA destiny of spot-ups and close-outs, the usual three-and-D routine?

Anyway, we'll never know. The present Leonard, basketball's most assiduous superstar, is the only one we have. In lieu of plumbing alternate pasts, we'll have to make do with keeping tabs on his future. It promises to be sound and brilliant. It is happening now.