“It felt normal to me . . . Basketball is two hoops, two teams trying to win.”
That’s how Kawhi Leonard, consummate literalist, described his return to San Antonio last month, a statement that tracks with the way he spoke on the day, looked on the night and, well, how he behaved in the 7 and a half years leading up to it.
There’s objective and subjective meaning to everything in sports, and the latter will vary intensely again going into tonight’s rematch between the Spurs and Raptors. Expect the animus that the AT&T Center crowd exhibited in January to be replaced with warmer emotions for the returning DeMar DeRozan and Jakob Poeltl, both playing in Toronto for the first time since the Leonard trade.