Kawhi Leonard Gets Honest About Spurs Fans
While San Antonio Spurs fans have been booing Kawhi Leonard since he was traded to the Toronto Raptors, the situation gained a bigger spotlight on Wednesday night when Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich grabbed the public address microphone while Leonard was at the free throw line, and told fans to stop booing. When asked about this moment during his on-court interview after the game, Leonard said, “I was focused. I didn’t know if it was him or not.
I was at the free throw line, but they’re a very classy organization, and I’m pretty sure he wants to keep it that way.” Leonard was asked about Spurs fans again in the locker room after the game, and said, “If I don’t have a Spurs jersey on they’re probably gonna boo me for the rest of my career, but it is what it is. Like I said, they’re one of the best fans in the league. They’re very competitive. Once I step on this basketball court out here they’re gonna show that they’re going for the other side. When I’m on the streets or going into restaurants they show love, so it is what it is.”
Understanding the dynamic at play, Leonard doesn’t seem to mind the booing in San Antonio, and appreciates the love he receives from Spurs fans outside of the arena
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Well, it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving if we weren’t all a little annoyed with dad, right?
Let’s talk about it. Look, I love Gregg Popovich. I think he has a largely infallible basketball mind and is an indelible fixture in the game. He’s a legend. He’s the best San Antonio Spurs coach of all time. He’s one of the best coaches in all of sports! I love Coach Pop and, frankly, I think it’s sort of blasphemous not to. All of that being said, his words were a bit tone deaf last night.
The most annoying part is that I mostly agree with him! We probably should stop booing Kawhi. It’s beneath us, it happened a long time ago, and it’s time to let it go. Shoot, I’ve even flirted with whispering the concept of maybe bringing him back into the fold once this Clippers thing inevitably blows up! (I’m thinking about whispering about it, don’t yell at me yet.) If Pop had gotten up in a press conference after the game and simply said, “Hey, I wish the fans would stop booing Kawhi. He was am important part of the orginization and we’ve moved on” then I’m probably sitting here and applauding him for, once again, being the most mature person in the room. The voice of reason. The wise conscious of the Spurs.
This wasn’t mature though, was it? This was brazen. This was didactic. This was something else entirely. It felt…wrong. It just did. It was like there was some intangible line out there that I couldn’t possibly even conceive of existing and he just ever so slightly stepped across it. I didn’t like it when it was happening and the taste has only grown more sour the further we get away from it.
In some ways, it felt like a taste of how he treats his players. All the stuff about how he was never afraid to yell at Tim Duncan even though he was the best player on the floor. How he held everyone to the same standard and it raised the level of the team to an even higher plane of existence. We love that stuff, right? That’s part of what makes him great and it’s part of the DNA of why the Spurs have been such a great franchise over the years.
So why did it not sit right when he turned that particular gaze on us last night? Well, for one, we don’t play for him. That should seem obvious, but I feel like it’s a very important distinction to make. We are not his players and he is not our coach. That’s now how this relationship works at all. We have to respect that he has authority over basketballing decisions and he has to respect that we have authority of fan decisions. If he wants to play Jeremy Sochan at point guard, well, then he gets to do that. If we want to be pissed off about Kawhi Leonard leaving us in the lurch six years ago then we get to do that. They might both be bad ideas, but they are our bad ideas and we get to make them.
I think Gregg Popovich feels a certain amount of ownership of this franchise that he has been a part of for the last three decades. I’m sure he feels entitled to those feelings because of everything he’s done for it and, look, I don’t need to spell out that legacy for you because I’m sure everyone reading this is well aware. He’s done a lot. So much. More than we probably know. But at the end of the day, he is still just a steward for this basketball team. A brilliant, kind, amazing and wonderful steward, but a steward nonetheless.
Being a fan is different. It’s special and it’s important because without us, none of it matters. It’s just some guys, a ball and a hoop. The fans make it important. We make it matter. We give the game its soul. We don’t get the big contracts and we don’t get to live in the massive houses. We don’t have books written about us and no one is interviewing us on TV. We don’t get any of that.
What we get is the team. We get to share it with our families and we get to live and die with it. We get to make it a part of our lives and our culture. We get to make it a part of us. Long after Gregg Popovich retires, we’re still going to be here giving life to this franchise.
Gregg Popovich matters a whole lot to us, but for a moment there, he forgot what this relationship is. He doesn’t get to decide that. We do. He might be in charge of the players, but we’re in charge of ourselves.
