The strangest interaction I’ve ever had with Kawhi Leonard was also the only one. In Toronto, the season after he’d left, his first time back was an Event. The Clippers had won and postgame, Paul George, then Leonard, gave their availabilities in a supplemental treatment room down one of the many narrow corridors off Scotiabank Arena’s main underground and echoing hallway, to keep the visitors locker room from being overrun by all the extra media.
Those situations all feel a little too close to being stuck on a packed train at rush hour that stalls in the tunnel, where you suddenly lose the illusion of being in your own bubble as it bumps through the world. You feel bodies press around you, mostly polite. You feel other people’s breath on your face. You examine very closely the back of the head of a person in front of you. Someone inevitably cracks a joke. Then jokes start up in a relieved but impatient call and response. On the train, you maybe have a book or your headphones, in close scrum quarters you have neither, because your job is to be alert and ready for the first echo of steps coming down the hall.
Leonard arrived in no particular hurry, which is his natural mode in his obligations to media as much as it is out on the floor. He got to the front of the semi-circle shaped crush and looked up but not at anyone. He didn’t immediately say anything. I’d been wedged into a position close enough that I could study the interlocking jacquard Fs on Leonard’s black Fendi sweater uninhibited, but had my sightline to his face blocked so I had to lean around the head in front of me to see it, invariably causing the person behind me the same grief, then the person behind them, and on forever.
There was maybe a half-beat lull in that specific kind of considered quiet I’ve come to understand that Leonard carries with him, around him, before the questions started. He was unhurried through all of his answers, too. He made a joke to something Seerat asked, that nobody knew was a joke just then (I still don’t know if it was or not), and when he was done he was taken away through another door, presumably out of there for the night.
Between waiting for George and Leonard, the Clippers had cleared out, and so media did too. The hallway that feels electric and alive from an hour before tip-off to an hour after went quiet, my imagination’s cinematic default wants me to add that lights were being turned out, but arena safety protocols wouldn’t allow that so I know it can’t be true.
I don’t know why I waited there, in the part of the big hallway shaped like a T, between the visitors locker room, the designated section of wall where a visiting team’s comms person unfurls their vinyl step-and-repeat for their coach to answer questions in front of, and where, in my experience, the most interesting run-ins, opportunities and candid moments happen, but I did. I was probably texting Dylan about when I’d be home, and was there any dinner. There’s something like a blood sugar crash I get after games, but with stimulation. The five or six hours from leaving the house to setting foot in the area, the mental preparations, the silent bargains I make with myself (speak to X number of people, get in front of X, ask X about X, or else all this will be for nothing), the huddled coach’s pregame room, locker rooms, media room, the actual game, then everything flowing in a timed and rushing reverse postgame, like a wave pulling back out to sea. All of it sits on my shoulders, settles like a tired and happy weight, even my eyelids droop in cartoon satiation, but usually I’m alone on the train, or walking home in the quiet dark of the streets, not entering into that half-conscious fugue state as my brain tries to wrestle me back to the present, where Kawhi Leonard is suddenly standing so close beside me it is the familiar pattern on his sweater that triggers some sensory alarm bells.
It’s cruel, what happened to the Clippers this season. First Covid, then the just as eerily endemic soft tissue injuries that snuck in. But it isn’t in any way out of the ordinary, requisite vileness of this season that we, this collective basketball brain trust of fans and writers and media and people, decided we were fine with. But I don’t really want to point out how the Clippers are unique, this season or the last one, because it’s been their banality, their lack of exception not in skill but in pointing it toward something, their total lack of any defining character traits, that is their problem.
Who are the Clippers? You know their names well enough, a very solid collection of pros! But what are the Clippers? What kind of team are they? Can you glance any clues from their chemistry? Is there any chemistry to sample from? Do you have a better sense of them as a team than you did two seasons ago? You don’t, you can’t, we have no familiar shorthand for them beyond knocking playoff jokes about George, or lingering doubts about Leonard’s desire to lead. Even our jabs are dated, holdovers from last season.
I would be prepared to cut them some slack if I thought it was a coaching thing. That the departure of Doc Rivers and the arrival of Tyronn Lue worked as a deficit to the team’s quest for character. But if anything, those two should have allowed for a clearer sense of collective self. I can’t put this at Leonard’s feet, either, because contrary to the strange and popular belief, he isn’t some inversion point for identity, his or the team’s, isn’t the black hole his personality gets described as. Like, he’s just extremely, extremely quiet, and private, and exists on a separate mental plane when he plays, which happens to be the state of mind we see him the most in — out on either side of a game.
It’s the Clippers, the nebulous entity Steve Ballmer made, that are the yawning void.
How else do you explain someone as positively charged with personality as Serge Ibaka arriving and going flat? Ballmer has assembled a team on blueprints he pilfered from Toronto in plain sight and in the classic trope of a robot (or a Frankenstein’s monster, but to their credit the Clippers run a little less ragged) brought to life, they walk and talk and do the things they’re supposed to, but are awkwardly or violently off, too austere, entirely devoid of spirit.
And if it’s true that Leonard was misdiagnosed by the team’s medical staff, that a knee sprain turned out to be shorthand for an ACL tear, then I question the lack of moral spirit and overall accountability needed to turn the bland doppelgänger that Ballmer built into the better, legitimately talented (they are, and George just proved it as best he could hope to) and desperately needed version of what the Clippers, without a hastily scrawled crib sheet, actually are.
That Ballmer has no imagination shouldn’t be the franchise’s defining problem — I’d argue many, maybe all, billionaires self-lobotomize that part of themselves for profit eventually — it’s that he’s made a team in that exact, uninspiring and uninspired image. What are the Clippers? No one can tell you, because they don’t exist yet.
When I looked up (and up) at Kawhi, he wasn’t looking at me. I don’t even think he clocked me as there. Not rudely, like I didn’t register, but in the same way I’d tuned him out, my emotional response gone tunnel vision. I regret, a little, not saying something as simple as, “Hi, Kawhi”. Not to ask him any questions, but to identify us both in our separate bubbles briefly overlapping one night in December. I can’t stress enough how there was literally no one else there.
His eyes were locked down the hall. He looked, for a second or two, worried. His mouth pulled into a frown and his eyebrows bunched down. There was a sudden shout, a chorus of joyful hellos and heys as a small band of people, his family, came out from around the corner of another narrow corridor. His face relaxed, he smiled, he was completely enveloped by them as they all started to move together down the hall in a happy wash.
I think of that, selfishly, when I miss being in arenas, but I think of it more when I think about Leonard wanting to go home. To live where he didn’t have to look for people.