Kawhi Leonard's Pure Reason

For the most part, the San Antonio Spurs don't make trades. As with most of the things the Spurs do, this is based in a simple, reasonable calculation. The Spurs know they'd need to give up something valuable in trade to get something valuable in exchange, and why bother giving up a useful player when you already win championships with a roster made up mostly of once-neglected deep-bench obscurities and teenagers drafted from a somehow yet-undiscovered corner of Europe?

The Spurs did have to swing a trade in order to acquire the player who has emerged as their most important, reigning NBA Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard. Leonard was too good a prospect to fall to the Spurs in their typical station at the quiet end of the first round in June of 2011, and the Spurs knew it. And so—after the selection of talents such as Derrick Williams (can't quite crack the starting lineup on the asylum-esque Sacramento Kings), Jimmer Fredette (on his third team in four seasons), and the wonderful Jan Vesely, (averaging 10.8 points per game, in Turkey)—the Spurs made their move. The Indiana Pacers chose Leonard with the 15th pick, and immediately flipped him to the Spurs for point guard George Hill, straight-up.

The Spurs do not win the 2014 NBA Championship if they don't make this trade. Instead of cackling maniacally at his latest masterpiece, though, General Manager R.C. Buford walked into that night's press conference with an emotional heaviness and oversized undereye bags usually reserved for all-night bedside vigils. His first words didn't address the arrival of Leonard, but the departure of Hill: "I'd first like to say that tonight might have been one of the more difficult nights in Spurs history." You always have to give up somebody valuable.

In return, the Spurs got a player who is and has been unlike any other in NBA history, and whose future is dizzying and without an apparent ceiling. There is nobody else who has been both so young and so great in the crucible of the playoffs. Consider this: Leonard has already started more playoff games (58) than retired greats Tim Hardaway, or Tracy McGrady, or Dominique Wilkins ever played in. Also: Leonard is still younger than some rookies who have spent this season tepidly trying to learn the ropes, players like Adreian Payne, or Cleanthony Early, or Tarik Black. It is possible that Kawhi has only just acclimated to the professional game, and already his mere presence dismays opposing stars:

As much as the ego-free Spurs commune is designed to hinge on no one individual, San Antonio has been a different team this season in the 61 games Leonard has played than it was in the 18 he missed due to injury. The Leonard-less Spurs were a sorry 9-9, only producing double-digit wins over the New York Knicks and Minnesota Timberwolves, and how much do those really count? With Kawhi, the Spurs have gone 44-17, which includes going 17-3 since the start of March, a stretch of uninterrupted Kawhi health. The Spurs have won their last nine games by at least ten points.

If that sounds like a lot, it is: the longest streak in NBA history is ten straight double-digit victories, a record the Spurs will have an opportunity to tie tonight in Houston, and perhaps break on Sunday against the Phoenix Suns.

While Kawhi's influence on and importance to the Spurs is obvious over the span of a season, it can be deceptively easy to miss from night to night, when he merely as important as any other of San Antonio's toolbox of (infuriatingly) useful role players. There are none of the reliable indications that a star player is present when Leonard is on the floor. Leonard's four teammates never clear out to the other side of the court. There is no head-down scream/flail through a defender's arms. There are no glares in demand for the ball in high-leverage minutes.

In place of the usual signifiers, Kawhi Leonard gives us only an endless string of correct decisions—calculated with the actuarial efficiency of a fundamentals-preaching coach, executed with all the muscularity, imagination, and focused passion of the true greats. Even after a five-minute highlight tape of nothing but Kawhi dunks, the only aftertaste is Puritan self-discipline. Even when coiling back for a dunk—one of the very coolest activities a human can possibly partake in—there is still the sense of an abacus at work in Kawhi's head, shifting beads back and forth until the very last moment in solving the equation of whether or not a banked lay-up would in fact be more appropriate on this particular possession.

The reason you haven't seen any Kawhi highlight tapes before is because he is the rare player—the rest of them are also on the Spurs—who does not adjust his game for the crowd, for the stage. His only job is to win games, and appears to feel no obligation as an entertainer. This is, naturally, precisely what makes him so entertaining.

The Spurs know what they have in Leonard, and that he's bound for the throne of their long dynasty. "It's going to be Kawhi's team anyway," Tony Parker told the San Antonio Express-News' Dan McCarney. "Like Timmy transitioned to Manu, Manu transitioned to me, now it's going to be transitioned to Kawhi."

But if Leonard's place in the succession is clear, there is also the sense that we don't yet know all that Leonard can do. His growth is so subtle and shaded and contextualized that, unlike other players with cathedral-high ceilings, we might not even notice Kawhi's brightest days. They are happening now, and I recommend watching.