During the 2018-19 regular season, Kawhi Leonard played only 60 games for the Toronto Raptors. Except for last season, when he spent nearly the whole year on the shelf with a quad injury, this season marked the fewest games he played in a season since 2012-13, his second year in the NBA, when he was 21 years old.
Perhaps Leonard fell under the radar during the regular season MVP race because he only played three-fourths of the season, generally due to "load management." His name was hardly mentioned in the MVP conversation, despite the fact that the Raptors were one-two with the Milwaukee Bucks at the top of the Eastern Conference all season, and that Leonard scored a career-high 26.6 points per game and pulled down a career-high 7.3 rebounds per game. He also played his typically stellar defense, even if it wasn't quite as dominant as years past.
The phrase "load management," as silly as it sounds – can we just go back to calling it rest? – may have limited Leonard's chance at being considered one of the top regular season players in the NBA. But it also was a metaphor for the Raptors' approach to this season. The entire team's load was managed all season. This season was never about getting the one-seed for the Raptors, or winning a franchise record number of games. They ended up winning 58 games, one short of last year's franchise record, and finished in second place in the East, two games behind the Bucks. You could easily envision a scenario where the Raptors won 60-plus games and got the one-seed, but that was never the point of this season. When Masai Ujiri traded for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green in the offseason, that was an overt commitment to going all in on this season. Going all in meant approaching the entire season intentionally, from the moment Leonard became a Raptor on July 18 until the playoffs began and the games really mattered.
So: Rest Leonard. Experiment with different lineups, testing team chemistry and plotting for matchup challenges come the playoffs. And make a big move at the trade deadline, grabbing Marc Gasol from the Memphis Grizzlies, a forward-thinking move that only started to come to fruition on Saturday night, when Gasol helped hold the Philadelphia 76ers' Joel Embiid to 16 points on 18 shots in the Raptors 108-95 smackdown in Game 1 of the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs.
Gasol dazzled. Before Saturday night, two of Embiid's five worst shooting performances this season came when he was matched up against Gasol. Saturday night against Gasol marked Embiid's third; in three games against Gasol's teams this season, Embiid has averaged only 15 points. Pascal Siakam, the likely winner of this season's Most Improved Player award, dazzled as well, scoring 29 points (on only 15 shots) and contributing to the Raptors lockdown defense – a defensive unit that ranked as the third-best defense in the NBA after the All-Star break.
But make no mistake: The story of the Raptors' Saturday night smackdown was Kawhi, Kawhi, Kawhi. Leonard looked like an MVP in Game 1, the superstar the Raptors held on a bit of a leash all season before fully unleashing him on Saturday night, when things really started to matter. Leonard scored from all over the court for his 45 points, which tied his season high and set a career high for a playoff game. He got to the hoop. He poured in mid-rangers. He attacked the rim, and he got to the free throw line 11 times, making 10 of them. And he made three of his seven 3-point attempts. Leonard is now 14-0 in his career against the Sixers.
One point of context with Leonard's regular season: His best games generally came against the best teams. He scorer 36 or more points nine times this season, including Saturday night; seven of those came against playoff teams. The Raptors didn't waste him when they didn't need him. When they did need him, he was a killer. (A side note: Eight of his nine highest-scoring games came at home. Maybe he is committed to Toronto after all?)
I don't need to tell you that drawing any final conclusions from the first game of an NBA playoff series is folly. But the storyline of Game 1 underscored what plenty of folks, myself included, expected from this series. The question going in was whether Philadelphia's starting five could be so dominant in their minutes together that they could effectively neutralize Toronto's greatest strengths – their depth and their versatility and their defense that's been cresting toward becoming the NBA's best. The answer from Game 1 was a resounding no. The additional answer from Game 1 – perhaps an unexpected one, or perhaps not, if you looked at this Raptors regular season as 82 games planned to build to a playoff crescendo – is that it's the Raptors who have the biggest superstar player in this series, not the Sixers and Joel Embiid. Kawhi Leonard didn't just look like the best version of Kawhi Leonard from his years with the San Antonio Spurs; he looked like an even better version.
This was the plan all season from a Raptors team that's all in on right now: Pace themselves for when it matters. Who knows where Leonard will be next season? A run to the Finals with the Raptors could convince him that Toronto's his place. Or maybe a return to Southern California is all but written in stone, no matter what happens in the next couple months, even an NBA title. For the Raptors right now, the regular season doesn't matter, and frankly, neither does this offseason. All that matters is the now.
And if Game 1 was any indication, the Raptors of now are a team that can win the whole damn thing.
