Kawhi Leonard’s return was ideal. The Toronto Raptors threw him into a low-pressure situation against a New York Knicks team that was resting all five of its usual starters because of a back-to-back. Leonard stayed in that mode for all 17 minutes he played, finishing with 21 points, five rebounds, and two steals. But the most important part of his stat line for this Raptors team was his three-point shooting.
Leonard shot 4-of-8 from beyond the arc, but the 50 percent shooting mark isn’t what mattered—it was the fact that he took eight threes in 17 minutes of action. Obviously, we can’t expect that to be the norm because if he shot threes at that pace over 34 minutes, he would’ve attempted 16
That being said, for a Raptors team that keeps getting questioned about its floor spacing and ability to generate perimeter shots, seeing Leonard shoot threes at that volume is massive.
Leonard needed 17 minutes to show how valuable his outside shot is
Through the Raptors' previous two Leonard-less preseason games, they attempted 41 threes against the Miami Heat and 29 against the Los Angeles Clippers. Tuesday night, they took 44. To put things in perspective, they only shot 32.1 threes per game last season, which was bad enough for the fifth-fewest in the league. But Leonard changes that.
For many Raptors fans, Leonard still brings back that 2019 championship-winning season, when he was killing teams inside and in the mid-range. But since then, he’s evolved in a major way. Leonard has slowly started to transition those long two-point attempts he loves into three-point attempts. Just last season, we saw Leonard shoot the most threes per game of his career, taking nearly seven attempts from beyond the arc per game, and he did so efficiently, shooting a 38.7 percent clip.
Leonard’s ability to be a sniper from deep off the dribble or in the catch-and-shoot role he mostly operated in last night doesn’t just make him better; it makes his teammates better too. We saw the gravity of his shooting even in an off-ball role. Any time he got ready to receive a pass or came off a screen, New York’s defense locked in on him. That space will help his teammates see open looks from the perimeter, and it will help Toronto become a better spacing team this season.
I wrote about it while the Leonard trade still wasn’t official and how his outside shot isn’t something you typically associate with his game. But it’s a real weapon, and his gravity as a shooter will open up the game a ton, on top of him already opening things up because of his natural scoring ability.
I’m not sure it’s realistic for fans to expect Leonard to have 66 percent of his total shots each game be threes, but even if he were in that 48–52 percent range nightly, it would be massive. Leonard has the track record to continue punishing defenses as a shooter with a career three-point percentage of 39.1 percent. And while I wasn’t a fan of how much he was playing off the ball last night, if the Raptors can get him clean looks like they did Tuesday, the majority of their spacing issues go out the window.
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