NBA: The mystery of The Claw

There is simply no veteran player in the NBA who is as unknown a quantity as new Raptors superstar Kawhi Leonard. On the surface, this seems sacrilegious: Leonard is a 2-time Defensive Player of the Year and won Finals MVP with the Spurs in 2014. He is the closest thing the NBA has to a "LeBron stopper", an ideal player whose particular skill set must be giving James as hard a time on the court as possible. (Lance, you don't count)

Leonard is the best two way player in this league, which in my opinion should mean that he is also the best player in the league, and he's that dying breed of superstar who makes their bones in the NBA on the one thing players don't get paid to do: defend. Then he had his shot remade and ended up being a prolific 3-point shooter as well as capable of averaging 22 ppg over the course of a season.

But other than that, the superstar is a mystery. He's extremely quiet, for one, much like Tim Duncan, the other transcendent talent on the Spurs this side of the 21st century. But Duncan was thrust into the spotlight early in his NBA career, and by all accounts is a hilarious person when he's not talking to the media. (Leonard, though, posted career highs in a game, and in the postgame interview, when asked how he felt about the achievement, replied: "I feel good". Tell us how you really feel, Kawhi.)

Leaving aside his personality and the few tidbits of trivia we know (like his frugal nature, childhood tragedy and his fondness for Wingstop), Leonard has an injury-prone history, which is significantly more troubling if you're just a fan who wants his team to win.

There's his quad injury, which has troubled him multiple times over the course of his 8-year career, most notably when he skipped the entire last season to rehab and get over the hump. The man is an MVP candidate when healthy and a complete liability on the injury list (like Anthony Davis), which is probably something most general managers would have had lost a great deal of sleep over.

It's all the same with the Raptors. He just poured 31 points and 10 rebounds on the Celtics in his second game back in the NBA. The man has no rust, and he's healthy. (By the way, what I just said in the previous sentence is the answer to a question that's been plaguing NBA analysts for months). His first game back, and he gets a 20/10 double. It's all too much.

Leonard looks dominant in the Raptors' uniform

It's this same mystery that spills over on the court. His unimaginably long arms and huge paws give him a long reach (Leonard has a longer wingspan than Joakim Noah, who is 3 inches taller than him) and he's capable of stealing the ball and deflecting passes that most players can't.

Leonard is so utterly dominant on the defensive end that he gets opposing players benched. He's so good coach Gregg Popovich gave him LeBron James as his defensive assignment during two consecutive Finals in 2013 and 2014 at the age of 22. He's like a mute Kobe Bryant when he's locked in. His 14-second 3-and-D sequence against Harden's Rockets in 2017 had people going off their rocker. He's a game changer, a person who doesn't really need teammates to be good.

And through all this, he's noncommittal. He's not said anything about re-signing with the Raptors, and though he did say that he wanted to play there, he's also been just as hell-bent on playing in his hometown Los Angeles.

This mystery of his privacy is what puts him at a different level: we know LeBron is going to be dominant forever, and we know Durant has insecurities, but Leonard is a robot with no cracks and the ability to change the NBA's power structure wherever he goes. If he went to the Nets, they'd become a playoff team. He's that good.

The world is waiting for him: the fans to see if he moves elsewhere, the Raptors front office to see if he re-signs, the Eastern Conference to see where the Raptors land in the playoff bracket and the rest of the NBA to find any chinks in the robot that Kawhi is.