Kawhi Leonard is reportedly prepared to return next week, but questions remain

Kawhi Leonard is expected to return to the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday barring any further setbacks, according to ESPN’s Lisa Salters and Adrian Wojnarowski. This would be Leonard’s first game since Jan. 13, as he has missed 20 straight games.

The Leonard injury situation has been the strangest San Antonio story in a decade, or at least it feels like it. The situation really is two pronged: there’s the mysterious injury that sidelined for Leonard most the season, barring a nine-game comeback halfway through the year, and there are reports about Leonard’s unhappiness with the team.

Leonard returned on Dec. 12 this season and played about every other game — nine times in 17 chances — until being shut back down in mid-January. In late February, Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich said he would be “surprised” if the San Antonio star returned this season. Not long after, it was reported that Leonard was not only still targeting a comeback, but planning on a mid-March return.

The injury has been right quadriceps tendinopathy — an unusual, rare basketball injury that bizarrely afflicted both Leonard and Tony Parker this offseason. Notably, Parker returned much sooner and has remained on the court ever since, even as Leonard has gone through these strange cycles.

Last season, Leonard finished third in MVP voting. San Antonio has survived admirably even without their best player for most the season, but they are in legitimate trouble. They have the toughest schedule left in the regular season, and the Western Conference standings are bunched up with just a few games separating the third seed from the 10th. (San Antonio is 1.5 games up on the current No. 10 seed, the Utah Jazz.)

The other wrinkle to this Leonard saga — as mentioned above — are reports that Leonard is unhappy with San Antonio. There has reportedly been friction between Leonard’s camp and Spurs team doctors about his injury, though we don’t know exactly how serious or accurate those reports are. (Leonard and his camp has denied any unhappiness, for what it’s worth.)

As SB Nation’s Tom Ziller points out, whether Leonard is all the way in matters enormously:

All discourses on the short- and long-term future of the Spurs are wrapped up tightly in the cloth of Kawhi. This is the biggest difference between this current period of San Antonio basketball and the team’s last period just outside the league’s upper echelon: there is a scent of doubt around the centerpiece.

If Leonard returns successfully next week, and if the Spurs hang onto their narrow postseason advantage, and if San Antonio reemerges as a real postseason threat in some manner, maybe this story all goes away and we’ll forget it ever happened by the time next October rolls around. (OK, we won’t, but it will be a side story rather than the main drama.) But this is still a strange situation, and even Leonard’s return isn’t a guarantee that everything will be solved.