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Kawhi Leonard is a Toronto Raptor again?! Whoaaa, eight years after he delivered the championship that shut Oracle Arena’s lights off forever, he’s headed back north for what could be the final chapter of his career.
It’s rather Shakespearean about the way his current chapter with the Warriors dynasty decided to end. Not with another Finals matchup or one last signature series, but with Draymond Green stealing the ball right out of his hands in the closing seconds of a Play-In game, sending him into the offseason and ultimately back to Toronto.
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The Warriors have a strange habit of outlasting every villain in their story. Eventually, somehow, they get the last word. Kawhi Leonard was never supposed to be one of them.
Go back to the 73-win season. San Antonio was the respectability test for the dynasty, the team that made everyone who doubted the Warriors sharpen their pencils and reconsider. Kawhi Leonard was already becoming something dangerous, a two-way freight train who moved with mechanical patience and struck with violence. Then there was that February showdown, the kind that felt more like a Western Conference Finals preview than a Tuesday night in the regular season. Steph Curry hit a stepback that blew the roof off Oracle and made you feel the weight of what Golden State was becoming in real time. You could feel both franchises circling each other, understanding exactly what the other represented. The Warriors were ascending. The Spurs were the last empire standing between them and permanent dynasty status.
The rivalry never got its full resolution on the court. The injury to Kawhi in the 2017 Western Conference Finals derailed the Spurs’ best chance at contesting the Warriors on a level playing field, and it denied us the chess match we deserved. Depending on who you ask and how you feel about the circumstances, that moment either leveled the dynasty’s path or exposed the dynasty’s luck. Either way, the conversation never got finished.
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Kawhi came back for his revenge as a Toronto Raptor. And he delivered one of the coldest postseason performances in NBA history against these…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/warriors-ended-kawhi-leonard-clippers-040054632.html
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Publish date : 2026-07-01 04:00:00
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