Kawhi Leonard doesn’t need to be defined

At least we know that Kawhi Leonard is still good at playing basketball.

Last Wednesday, he scored 35 points in 35 minutes against the Timberwolves to keep the Raptors undefeated. In the five games he has played this season, he is averaging 26.6 points while shooting 50 percent from the field, including 45.5 percent from three. The mysterious hamstring injury that kept him off the court for most of last season and catalyzed his exit from the Spurs doesn’t seem to have hindered him in any way.

After the game against Minnesota, Jimmy Butler praised Leonard’s dominance on the court:

“He does so many things well. They feature him in a lot of things and he plays both sides of the ball. When you have a team like they have and a player of his caliber, the game gets really easy for himself and for everybody else.”

Who Leonard is as a player is well-known, and if he can work his way back to the level he was at before the injury, he could become an MVP candidate again. His separation from the Spurs proves what had become evident in his last few years in San Antonio: Leonard had become the system of the team, rather than simply one of the cogs.

The separation also shatters a myth about Leonard that he tried hard to debunk in his first press conference with the Raptors. The infamous clip from that presser is of him laughing, but what he said before the laugh was more important than the meme that came afterwards. Asked by a reporter what he wanted people to know about him now, because Leonard was notoriously quiet with the Spurs, Leonard said:

“That I’m a fun guy. Obviously I love the game of basketball, I mean, it’s just more questions you have to ask me in order for me to tell you about myself. I just can’t give you the whole spill.”

It doesn’t matter if Leonard is actually a fun person or not. The important thing is he wants to be seen as such, which is in opposition to the idea of Leonard that existed during his time with the Spurs. Leonard had been built up as the perfect Spurs player: quiet, selfless, humble, obedient. Because he never seemed to show too much emotion or talk about who he was as a person, he was seen as robotic. He was supposed to be the next superstar to lead the Spurs, the natural heir, in both talent and personality, to David Robinson and Tim Duncan. He was Gregg Popovich’s perfect project. A player who worked himself from a role player into a superstar.

Leonard wasn’t just any superstar though, he was a Spurs star. That naturally meant he was a basketball automaton who shunned individualism for the sake of team success. He was someone who “really, truly, honestly understands basketball as a sport where the individual is rendered nearly moot.”

And because Leonard himself said nothing, his silence was transformed into a narrative premise about who he supposedly was. Leonard was an emotionless robot, and anything he did confirmed that.

Leonard was a robot because he fell and got back up quicker that any human should have. He was a robot because he was quiet on the court and didn’t trash talk. When he began to smile more last season, it was because he got a software update. David Fizdale said Leonard bled antifreeze, and supposedly wasn’t breathing when the two of them stood next to each other.

Even when it was reported that Leonard had been so nervous during draft night he sweated through his suit — a very human response to stress and anxiety — that truth was repackaged into the robot myth. It proved “he’s more of a bionic hybrid, upgraded by San Antonio’s basketball labs, than a true organic robot.”

Leonard’s departure from the Spurs and the manner in which he left exposed a big problem in the myth-making of athletes: Every great player needs a story. The stories of athletes are often just as important to us as their accomplishments.

There’s no Kobe Bryant without the story of the tireless, almost-sociopathic chase for greatness. No Michael Jordan without the six championships, the ease of his dominance, and stories of his vengeful nature. No LeBron James without “Just A Kid From Akron” and now “More Than An Athlete”. No Stephen Curry without the humble, self-sacrificial superstar, who no one thought would succeed in the league. The arena is a theater and the stories add depth to the characters. As human beings who love stories, it’s what attracts us, as much or more than the actions of the individuals.

Most times the athletes actively participate in making these stories, because they can be beneficial to them, as well. But Leonard chose not to participate. When the story of who he was as a person was written, it was told through other people because he refused to provide any quotes. He chose to be silent.

To be silent is Leonard’s right. It’s an understandable choice in a world where comments are frequently misconstrued, but he doesn’t need a particular reason to be quiet. It’s a simple, rational choice. Yet that silence was taken as proof he was yet another Spurs robot. And when his relationship with the Spurs deteriorated, the silence that never changed then morphed into a sign of petulance and selfishness. The humble superstar became the player who thought he was bigger than the team — through no fault of his own, but because of what people projected onto his silence.

Leonard’s insistence he is a fun guy was bizarre because it was one of the only times he has tried to express something about his inner life. It was also at odds with the story of him that had been created and reinforced for so long. He tried to be open and was mocked for it because what he said didn’t fit into an accepted idea of him. And it was that declaration about who he was that made his laughter afterwards more uncomfortable.

He had laughed like that before, while he was with the Spurs, and no one paid attention to it because he was a robot then. But after claiming he is fun, the laugh was a perfect opportunity to bury him back into a box. He couldn’t be fun or human, because he didn’t know how to laugh. He was a robot mimicking a human laugh.

It might be too much to ask, but what Leonard deserves is patience. Being away from the Spurs grants him a chance to control his own story, and as he had a right to his silence, he also has a right to be more than what the NBA world thinks he is.

We all need to be comfortable with the fact we don’t know who he is. That the person who we think he is might not be based on any reality. And that it’s fine if at the end of his career, we never actually know anything more about him other than he was really good at basketball. We need to see beyond the myth of Leonard and give him the space to determine who he wants to be.