Kawhi Leonard walked into Toronto Raptors media day on Monday as the least complicated version of himself in years. He is 35, he is back in the city where he won a championship in 2019, and after ten weeks of league investigators picking through his finances, he finally got to talk about basketball.
“Excited to be back,” Leonard said. Then came the line that actually tells you something: “I need pressure. I need a winning situation.”
That is a bold sentence from a man who just joined a team that went 46-36 and lost a seven-game first-round series to Cleveland. It is also the most useful thing he has said publicly in a long time.
The trade that sat frozen for two months
Toronto and the Clippers agreed to this deal on June 30, then watched it stall while the NBA finished investigating Los Angeles for circumventing the salary cap. The Clippers eventually received Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, first-round picks in 2031 and 2033, second-rounders in 2030 and 2033, and swap rights on a 2027 first.
The league announced its findings on September 2, and they were brutal. The Clippers forfeit five first-round picks across 2029 through 2033, pay a $30 million fine, and submit to five years of compliance monitoring. Steve Ballmer was suspended for a year, team president Gillian Zucker for a year without pay, and basketball operations boss Lawrence Frank for six months without pay.
Leonard’s share of the damage was a $700,000 payment to the league. His former business manager, Dennis Robertson, was banned for five years from dealing with NBA teams on behalf of players. Leonard called himself “a distraction for the past 70 days” and steered reporters away from the details on Monday.
He is allowed to do that. The franchise that arranged the off-court money absorbed the real punishment, and Leonard’s bill came out to roughly one game check.
Toronto overpaid, and Toronto was right
The Raptors then handed him a two-year, $115 million extension with a player option for 2028-29. That sits slightly under his true max, because a recently traded player can only take a 20 percent raise in year one. Had he waited six months, the number was closer to $128 million.
He took the discount and the option instead, which puts him in line to become the eighth player in NBA history to clear $500 million in career earnings. Toronto decided the fastest route back to relevance was buying the best available two-way wing, and I do not blame them for a second.
Is that a lot of money for a 35-year-old with Leonard’s medical history? Obviously. The alternative was another 46-win season and another first-round exit, which is the worst address in professional basketball.
Sixty-five is the number that decides this
Leonard played 65 games last season and averaged 27.9 points, 3.6 assists and 1.86 steals. He said Monday that he wants to beat that total and to be on the floor in the playoffs, which is the entire premise of the deal Toronto just signed.
The supporting cast is real. Scottie Barnes made an All-Star team while averaging 18.1 points and 7.5 rebounds, Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett can both create, and Darko Rajakovic has quietly turned into one of the better coaches in the conference.
Leonard says he will be “leading, trying to help guys get better.” Nobody in Toronto needs a speech from him. They need him upright in late April, and if they get that, the East is soft enough that this ends well.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.