Alas, Kawhi, We Hardly Knew Ye

Not There Yet

The blessing and the curse of capturing lightning in a bottle.

The news landed with an apocalyptic shudder on an otherwise beautiful Saturday morning. Just 23 days after the Raptors handily dispatched the Golden State Warriors in six games, the enigmatic Kawhi Leonard announced he had signed a four year, $142 million deal with the Los Angeles Clippers. Predictably, the interstitial period became #KawhiWatch for fans of NBA basketball around the world. Nowhere more so than in Canada. Over the course of a single season, for Canadians, Leonard went from ‘say who?’ to being the leading candidate for pope if the position suddenly came available. We just couldn’t get enough of Kawhi which included, embarrassingly, chasing a lookalike in a black SUV through the streets of Toronto with a news helicopter. We were collectively transformed from diffident admirer to deranged stalker over the course of a little more than a week...

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Listen to the rest by clicking the play button, above. The text version of this essay can be found on Medium where it was published contemporaneously. They key image for this episode is Pascal Siakam and Kyle Lowry double team Tim Frazier, then of the Washington Wizards, on March 2, 2018. (image: Keith Allison via Wikimedia)