Kawhi Leonard, Chernobyl and analytics as a bulwark against weaponized narratives
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“If Toronto loses Game 5 it’s Warriors in 7”
Game 5 of the NBA Finals was a must-win for the Toronto Raptors. With the prospect of the injured Kevin Durant’s return to the Golden State Warriors looming, Toronto needed to take advantage of home court and ride the momentum of their two away wins in the series, which they led 3-1. A Toronto loss would motivate the Warriors to remember they’re one of the best teams in NBA history, to go home to Oakland and close out as winners at the last game at the Oracle, and then win a glorious game 7 in Toronto to remind the world the dynasty’s not done yet.
Or so the story went.
In a lot of punditry circles, this was conventional wisdom. It’s a story we’ve seen before, as when, in 2016, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers stormed back to beat the Warriors and win an NBA Championship after also trailing three games to one. It made a lot of sporting sense to everyone, including many rooting for the Raptors.
Everyone, that is, except Toronto’s all-star Kawhi Leonard.
When asked about whether the Raptors felt pressure to close out the series at game 5, he said, “It is pressure with every game, but there isn’t any added pressure to it. We still have to go out and play a basketball game…[we] just gotta go out and play. Play it and enjoy it and whatever happens, we’ll see the results.”
As any Raptors fan will tell you, this answer is typical of Kawhi Leonard. The Buddha of basketball, Leonard’s refrain is to “enjoy the moment” and “stay locked in” and “focus on our game.” And while it may be a line for the media, one gets the sense he is a true believer.
There is no better example of this than Kawhi’s presser after the Raptors lost game 5 at home to the Warriors after a 106-105 loss. In the final seconds of the game, the Raptors had possession. Two points would have clinched the Raptors their first ever NBA Championship win. Instead, the ball found its way to Kyle Lowry in the corner, who shot a hasty three that bounced off the backboard as the buzzer sounded.
When asked by a reporter why Kawhi didn’t just go for the two himself, the player pointed out the obvious. He was double-marked on the play; there simply was no option to shoot. Kawhi, in fact, laughed explaining this, and then gave a practically photographic description of how the play turned out of the kind only athletes can give—the kind who very much live in the present moment. If Kawhi was demoralized by the loss, he didn’t show it (though he rarely shows much of anything).
Leonardism and sports analytics
Though reporters have danced around it, it’s clear Leonard has a coherent view of what it means to be an elite athlete, what it means to win games, and what it means to win championships.
Like most elite basketball players, he was obsessed with practice in his youth. As his former San Diego State teammate LaBradford Franklin notes in this fantastic Athletic oral history, Kawhi’s work ethic in college was difficult to comprehend or to emulate.
To this day, I apply everything I learned from him. He was the hardest worker. While we were going to class, he would hold his couple papers for the class in his hand and in his backpack he had his sports gear: his shoes, the ball. He was always in the gym. At night, in the day. You could definitely learn from him. That work ethic can be applied to anything. That was the most craziest thing I saw
He was not a player who spoke much on the court, and when he did speak, it seemed it was mostly to himself. As fellow San Diego State guard DJ Gay recalls:
The most he talked was on the hard court, and Kawhi was not afraid to let you know that you weren’t going to score on him, that you couldn’t get past him or that he would score on you. Every time the ball went through the net, he just said, “Bucket. Bucket.” That was it.
Like a seasoned vipassana practitioner, Kawhi was detached, equanimous, passively noting his accomplishments in the same way a meditator notes their thoughts.
For Leonard, winning is not about overcoming adversity or ‘silencing the doubters’ or proving anyone wrong. It’s not a mindset or a hero’s journey. It’s not about destiny or spirit or grit.
Rather, winning is the result of being present and focuses in every play, of systematically making more good plays than bad ones, of hitting shots rather than missing them, of earning turnovers and grabbing rebounds and utilizing possessions, one after another after another, as a team. Winning is about focusing on what’s happening here and now, one play at a time. It’s about slow, grueling, deliberate practice and about focusing on what is in your control and ignoring what isn’t. For Kawhi, being an elite athlete simply means performing consistently above average over a course of the discrete events that in aggregate make up the NBA season.
This also happens to be the core message of the analytics movement, and it’s hard not to think Leonard might have made a very good analyst in an alternate life (Kawhi told his Raptors teammate Serge Ibaka that if he wasn’t a basketball player, he would be working in something involving numbers).
It also happens to insulate him and his team—who have embraced Leonardism since his arrival in Toronto and especially since the start of the playoffs—from the sometimes overbearing and toxic media narratives that rise to a boil at the business end of the playoffs. And in this, there is an instructive lesson here not just for players, but executives as well—Leonardism is for everyone.
Narrative poison
The creator of the recent HBO miniseries ‘Chernobyl’, Craig Mazin, has gone to lengths to explain how the show, which focuses on the infamous nuclear explosion at reactor 4 at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine in 1986 and the subsequent events, is an exploration of the dangers of what he calls ‘weaponized narratives.’
This is ironic, as some have accused Mazin himself of distorting the reality of Soviet politics for the sake of dramatic cliche, but his overall point, I think, holds.
Speaking with Vox, Mazin details just what this means.
And advertising figured out how to use narrative to sell you things you didn’t need. My favorite example is the engagement ring. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, there was an engagement ring, and it was a diamond. I heard that story and thought, well, that’s just the way it’s been. But no! The De Beers Company invented the diamond ring as part of an advertising campaign in the 1920s. Diamonds were kind of shitty and useless before then; nobody cared about them, and they’re not even rare.
That’s narrative at work. And it has taken over every aspect of our lives. We don’t get sold products anymore; we get sold stories. They walk out onstage and they give you a story about how this is going to change the world and blah, blah, blah. Everything is a narrative. And we’re suffering. We’re kind of drowning in narrative poison.
In the show, these toxic narratives take on different forms following the initial explosion. A plant overseer, Anatoly Dyatlov, along with his bureaucratic cronies, can’t bring themselves to accept something truly catastrophic has happened and cling to the belief that RBMK reactors are incapable of exploding even at the risk of exposing workers to lethal doses of radiation. The local Soviet government can’t tell the sleeping residents of Pripyat the truth and risk ‘alienating them from the fruits of their labour.’ Gorbachev can’t risk asking the West for help and undermining the Soviet Union image of glorious self-sufficiency. Throughout, facts must kowtow to the official story, even at the cost of human life.
And the facts of Chernobyl are quite straightforward and maybe even boring, involving things like xenon gas build-ups, positive void coefficients and graphite-tipped control rods.
Of course, if the toxic narratives of Chernobyl are as dangerous as exposure to 15,000 roentgen, then toxic narratives in sports are a mere sunburn. Media pundits are not sinister propagandists intent on a cover-up, and the ‘cost of lies’ in sports is pretty darn cheap indeed!
But the Mazin’s point about how we’re currently ‘drowning in narrative poison’ underlines the insulating power of embracing an analytics mindset in sport—not just by executives and coaches, but, as we can see in focused athletes like Leonard, by players themselves. Stories can motivate, they can illustrate, but they can distract, or worse, sow panic. Analytics and its focus on the discrete, atomized particulars of the game can offer a much-needed bulwark. Sometimes it really is better to ‘stay in the moment’ and let the rest sort itself out.