Kawhi Leonard leaves the Raptors in a better place than he found them

This was always part of the bargain.

When the Toronto Raptors' front office decided a year ago that good was no longer good enough, when they opted to trade a beloved franchise icon for a disgruntled superstar on an expiring contract, this was part of the bargain. Toronto was never the plan for Kawhi Leonard, and the Raptors knew it would take something extraordinary for him to consider staying beyond the one year left on his deal. Turns out, even the extraordinary wasn't enough. Leonard came, conquered, and left, relocating to Los Angeles just as he'd hoped to do last summer.

But those intervening 12 months meant everything and more to the Raptors organization and their fans, and his impact will linger after he's gone. This isn't just about flags flying forever, though the flag is certainly a hell of a feather in Toronto's cap. This year awakened the sleeping giant that was the Canadian basketball fan base, sparked the imagination of a generation of future hoops heads and players north of the border, validated Masai Ujiri's unshakeable belief, and proved to all the jaded, long-time supporters of a perpetually aspirational franchise that things could, in fact, work out the way they dreamed.

There were murmurs when Leonard was traded that he wouldn't be invested, wouldn't put his body on the line for a team he planned to bolt from at the first opportunity. Some even suggested he wouldn't show up at all. A lot of the speculation was absurd, but for a team that had been jilted and humiliated so many times before, you'd forgive people for finding it believable.

In the end, Leonard not only showed up but produced the best scoring season of his career, earned the first All-Defensive team selection in Raptors history, developed a crucial synergy with Kyle Lowry over the course of the year, and became the soft-spoken leader of a 58-win team. Then he ground through the playoffs on a bum knee, averaged 30.5 points, 9.1 rebounds, 3.9 assists, and 1.7 steals while leading the league in postseason minutes (939), hit one of the greatest shots in NBA history, thoroughly outplayed the regular-season MVP in the conference finals, and still had enough left in the tank to take home Finals MVP for his role in downing the two-time defending champs. He'd had no desire to play in Toronto. He owed nothing, but he gave everything.

After Ujiri and Bobby Webster pulled the trigger on the deal, Raptors fans took to repeating the phrase "Kawhi Leonard is a Toronto Raptor," an incantation of pinch-me giddiness that reflected the fan base's incredulity at claiming such an extraordinary talent. Even deep into the season, long after the novelty of seeing Leonard in a Raptors uniform ought to have worn off, that statement was still parroted in ubiquity.

Now, it wasn't just the on-court exploits that made Leonard's brief, glorious Raptors tenure so meaningful. It was how he seemed to change over the course of the year; how he softened, opened up, and started to let people really see him; how he leaned into all the branding that played on his dry humor and awkwardness and disaffected statements of fact. His mimicking of his own much-ridiculed laugh at the championship parade in Toronto was the perfect capstone to a season that saw him grow increasingly comfortable in his surroundings and increasingly attuned to what he meant to the city and country. He'd seemed so reluctant at first to reach out and connect. Seeing him do so was almost as thrilling as anything that happened between the lines.

That doesn't mean it isn't a vicious collapse from the high of the championship to the empty feeling of knowing Leonard is gone, and that it might be decades before the team employs a player of his ilk again. The Raptors did everything they possibly could have done to convince him to stay. They put a deep and balanced and defensively dominant supporting cast around him, put a successful plan in place to keep him healthy, earned his trust, and put him in position to succeed on his own terms. In spite of all that, he became the first star to leave a team immediately after leading it to a championship. Ultimately, he yearned for home. His leaving shouldn't have to be a referendum on the viability of Toronto as an NBA market or a destination for star players - he wanted what he wanted, and chose what he chose. That's all.

The Raptors will not be title contenders next season, but they will still be in a far better place than they were before Leonard arrived. They will have the cachet that comes with hanging a banner, the iconography of a legendary playoff run, the memory of all the attention it captured, and the civic pride it inspired. The experience guys like Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet gained will be invaluable as they look to take up the reins of the franchise and move it forward. Same goes for head coach Nick Nurse. The rings Kyle Lowry and Marc Gasol won will cement them as legends and bolster their Hall of Fame cases. And Ujiri, who has earned himself and his team all the credibility he always believed possible, can now plop a Larry O'Brien replica in front of free agents and tell them they'll be joining a championship organization.

Leonard should (and almost certainly will) be greeted like a king upon his return to Toronto next season. Most Raptors fans, one can assume, will continue to root for him from afar. One thing this season has made clear is that there's enough room for all of it. When the Spurs came to Toronto in February, DeMar DeRozan received multiple standing ovations, each one more effusive than the last, but Leonard also got some of the loudest ovations he'd gotten as a Raptor - a perceptive gesture from the fans to signal that their love for DeRozan did not preclude their love for the man he was traded for. This may be a zero-sum game when it comes to results, but when it comes to emotion, there's no limit to how much you can feel.

The DeRozan-Leonard trade was a loss of innocence for the franchise, and in a way, so is Leonard's departure. It's a reminder that getting attached to anything is painful, because everything ends. But, human nature being what it is, that lesson is as pointless as it is obvious. Raptors fans couldn't help growing attached to Leonard, knowing how much pain might be lurking around the corner.

And so, here they are. Hurting. After all the #HeStay memes, the overtures from Serge Ibaka on "How Hungry are You?", the rarely seen explosions of euphoria when he hit the shot against Philly and when the Raptors closed out the championship in Oracle, the overwhelming scope of the parade, and the free-agent mania, he left. But all of that was part of the journey, part of his legacy, part of the unforgettable year he spent wearing red and white.

There's nothing else left to say at this point. Kawhi Leonard was a Toronto Raptor.