2014 western conference finals series#

In the 2014 Finals that number was just 20.5 per cent, the lowest of any Spurs starter, and even that was higher than the 18.9 per cent he posted throughout the whole playoffs. Leonard’s usage rate with the Raptors is sitting at a playoff career-high 32.7 per cent. Everything that’s there for him is out of the motion of the offence.” “I haven’t called a play for him the entire playoffs,” Popovich said after the series. Some of that discrepancy comes from Leonard morphing into the crux of Toronto’s offensive system as opposed to his role in San Antonio - where everything he did during the 2014 run came as a byproduct of the Spurs’ ball movement, but was never the objective of it. Those numbers exist in a different air space than what he did in 2014. Take your pick: there’s him joining Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon as the only players in post-season history to have at least 11 games of 30-plus points before the Finals there’s his seven 35-point games, which put him on a list of players who have done that before the Finals in the last 20 years that previously only had James there’s his 3.7 win shares - an estimate of how many wins a player adds to a team - which means that having Leonard is worth almost an entire playoff series’ worth of victories. But few players in NBA history have posted numbers like Leonard’s this post-season.

2014 western conference finals series#

In Game 3 Leonard scored 29 points on 76.9 per cent shooting from the floor and went on to finish the Finals with three consecutive 20-plus-point games - the first time he had done so in his career - while shooting over 68 per cent across the series to the tune of 23.7 points per game.Īn impressive stretch, to be sure. In the first two games against the Heat, Leonard struggled, scoring just 18 points while picking up nine fouls and four rebounds in 54 minutes on the court. Reduce that 2014 sample down to just the Finals though, where Leonard took over as the Spurs’ most important player instead of being a tertiary option, and the chasm shrinks. Statistically speaking, Leonard’s 2019 post-season performance for the Raptors blows his 2014 Finals MVP numbers out of the water to the point that comparing the two side-by-side is a comical exercise. But what Leonard’s done in guiding the Toronto Raptors to the first NBA Finals in franchise history, freeing a city from the amber of playoffs past they were all but fossilized in, is his most stunning achievement yet. The hell with Tony, the hell with Timmy, the hell with Manu, you play the game. So I just talked to him about not being in that defer sort of stage. I mean, he’s there early, he’s there late. It was why Popovich said this after San Antonio clinched: It was why he won the Finals MVP as a 22-year-old - becoming the second-youngest player to ever do so, behind only Magic Johnson.

It was a career-shaping series in which he out-duelled James. For long stretches of those Finals against the Miami Heat he was the best overall player on a court that featured LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Ray Allen, Duncan, Parker and Ginobili.