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Unraveling the Kawhi Leonard mystery

LAS VEGAS — There is perhaps no bigger mystery surrounding the Spurs’ roster-in-progress right now than Kawhi Leonard.

The Spurs acquired the former San Diego State star on draft night, using Gregg Popovich favorite George Hill as bait to lure the 15th pick away from Indiana. They had Leonard in town for a week, then bid goodbye to him July 1 when the league locked out the players. By executive order of commissioner David Stern, Spurs coaches and other team personnel have seen neither hide nor hair of their prized rookie since.

While Spurs fans (and, it is assumed, coaches) have been able to watch other pieces of that draft-day package play in international competition this summer — point guard Cory Joseph for Canada, big man Davis Bertans for Latvia and shooting guard Adam Hanga for Hungary — Leonard remains an off-the-grid enigma.

Leonard is the Spurs’ highest draft pick since taking Tim Duncan first overall in1997, and yet he remains something of an unknown.

For a scouting report on Leonard, how he is progressing and what he might contribute to the Spurs if and when the 2011-2012 season commences, we went to James Anderson, the second-year guard who has been training with his new teammate off and on since draft day.

Anderson’s take on Leonard, a the 6-foot-7 small forward: ”He’ll definitely add more energy and youth to our team. He has a lot of defensive skills. He can also get out and run the floor, and help us bring in more rebounds. He’ll help us out on both ends.”

Leonard’s offensive game remains a work in progress, according to those who have seen him this summer, but he did use a rebuilt shooting stroke to hit two of the four 3-pointers he attempted in a limited engagement at the Impact Basketball Competitive Training series in Las Vegas. Then, like Bigfoot, he disappeared into the mist (or home to San Diego) before most of the gathered media had descended on Sin City.

Joe Abunassar, a former college assistant coach turned trainer who has been working with Leonard at Impact Basketball since before the draft, says his protege is improving through playing.

“Kawhi’s an energy guy, very athletic,” Abunassar said. “His offensive game is constantly improving. He’s going to take some time to get used to the NBA system, but he’s going to be fine.”

Anderson says Leonard’s most readily recognizable NBA skill might be his rebounding. In two seasons at San Diego State, Leonard averaged 10.2 rebounds to go with 14.1 points, logged 40 double-doubles in 70 games, and had coach Steve Fisher calling him one of the most natural rebounding talents he’s ever had.

“He has a knack for the ball, you can already see it,” Anderson said. “His defensive tools will help us out. His youth, getting out and running the floor, it will bring us more firepower.”

What Leonard could use now is a training camp. By all accounts, Leonard has done well keeping in shape and improving individually during the lockout. None of that, however, is any substitute for the one-on-one indoctrination he could be receiving from Spurs coaches, if not for the labor impasse.

“We can teach him the general principles, but we’re not the Spurs’ coaching staff,” Abunassar said. “I think he can develop individually and get more confidence, but it’s going to take team practices to get him mentally ready to play.”

Eventually, the lockout will end and the Spurs’ prized draft pick will be allowed into the team’s training facility. Only then will Spurs coaches be able to judge for themselves how far Leonard has come.

Spurs assistant Brown leads Australia to an Olympic berth

Congratulations are in order to Spurs assistant Brett Brown who directed Australia to an the Olympic berth in the FIBA Oceania tournament.

Australia finished fourth in the Olympics in 1988, 1996 and 2000 and should have a good shot to surprise some teams next year in London.

They won the Oceania tournament without Milwaukee center Andrew Bogut, who didn’t play for the Boomers as he served as an assistant coach while recovering from an elbow injury.

“I think it’s relief, satisfaction, pride, a sense of accomplishment with the group,” Brown said. “It’s a fantastic group. It’s a fantastic accomplishment, there’s been a lot of work put into this by these guys. I look forward to moving forward with the group I think it’s got a lot of potential.”

Brown’s team did it in a way that mentor Gregg Popovich would have approved of.

“We did it with our defense, we take a lot of pride in being a defensive program first,” Brown said. “In games like that if you don’t guard you have no chance.”

It seems like I’ve heard that comment a time or two from Popovich …

But Brown’s team did as expected by beating New Zealand with a strong effort from Kirk Penney, who was in the Spurs training camp last fall. Penney produced 17 points, five rebounds and four assists to lead the victory.

“Since I took the job I knew we had to beat New Zealand,” Brown said. “What they do on the world stage, they are very well organized, they get the most out of their talent, they play hard, I have a lot of time for them. I think our depth did ultimately wear them down.”

Sides in NBA labor dispute tout unity

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

LAS VEGAS — National Basketball Players Association president Derek Fisher and executive director Billy Hunter took the podium in a hotel meeting room here Thursday, backed by 33 other players wearing matching gray T-shirts emblazoned in gold with one word:

“STAND.”

Though the players’ kumbaya moment was scripted and largely symbolic, their message was unmistakable. There would be no union mutiny in Sin City. At least not today.

“There is not the fracture and the separation amongst our group that in some ways has been reported,” said Fisher, the Los Angeles Lakers guard. “We just want to continue to reiterate that point.”

Hunter, in Las Vegas along with Fisher to update players on the latest round of collective bargaining talks with NBA owners, arrived in the desert under fire as the lockout hit the 11-week mark.

With a collection of heavy-hitting agents pushing for union decertification, a move that would take negotiating power out of Hunter’s hands and shift the process to the long slog of the legal system, there was a sense Thursday’s meeting might have turned contentious.

Based on accounts of eyewitnesses in the room for a confab Fisher called “colorful and engaging,” it did not.

About 40 players attended the informational meeting, the first the first among NBPA membership since talks broke down Tuesday over the owners’ insistence on a hard salary cap. Most of those players were already in Las Vegas to participate in the Impact Competitive Basketball series, an informal pick-up league.

Second-year guard James Anderson was the only Spurs player to attend the briefing.

“I’m just waiting it out, preparing myself for when it ends,” Anderson said. “I’m trying to focus on working on getting better. Whenever it ends, I’ll be ready for it.”

Though player turnout Thursday represented about 10 percent of union membership, the buzzwords of the day were “togetherness” and “solidarity.”

“If the owners were waiting for some break in the ranks, that’s been put to bed,” Hunter said.

That’s not to say the dicey subject of decertification did not come up.

DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL’s players association two months removed from the end of that league’s lockout, addressed the NBPA as an invited guest of Fisher.

Part of Smith’s message, according to Hunter: Though NFL players did vote for decertification, the tactic was not a “silver bullet” for ending the NBA’s impasse.

Hunter refused to take the decertification off the table Thursday, but will wait until after a National Labor Relations Board ruling on the union’s complaint against the NBA, which he expects sometime before the end of the month.

“Any decisions made in the future will be made by the players standing behind me and their colleagues,” Hunter said in a not-so-veiled shot at pro-decertification agents.

As the players went to dramatic lengths to show solidarity in Las Vegas, the NBA Board of Governors — a group that included Spurs owner Peter Holt, head of the league’s labor committee — convened in Dallas to determine their next course of action.

League officials emerged trumpeting the owners’ own sense of unity.

In a letter sent to players before Thursday’s meeting and first made public by SI.com, Fisher blamed the breakdown in the latest spate of talks on “a fundamental divide between the owners internally.”

Twelve hundred miles away in Dallas, NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver bristled at that characterization.

“There is absolute agreement,” Silver said, “and it’s a complete fiction coming from somewhere that there isn’t.”

With the players seemingly willing to give on the split of basketball-related income, reportedly prepared to reduce their share to 53 percent or less from the current 57 percent, there is optimism among union leadership that the framework of a deal might be close.

The sticking point now appears to be the mechanism by which the players’ money is to be delivered.

Owners are bent on a hard salary cap to replace the current soft cap, though some — such as Phoenix’s Robert Sarver and Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert — are believed to be more vehement on the issue than others.

“Some people might say they want a hard cap with this wrinkle and someone says I want a hard cap with that wrinkle,” NBA commissioner David Stern said. “But I would say there is unanimity in favoring a hard cap, period.”

Fisher said he believes fewer than half of the NBA’s 30 owners were so stridently in favor of a hard salary cap that they would kill an entire season to get it. He reiterated Thursday any proposal that included a hard salary cap would be a non-starter for the players.

“We expressed a desire to make a fair level of concessions to get this deal done,” Fisher said. “We’ve been met with resistance. We’re going to continue to make the effort, but we’re not going to continue to concede.”

With training camps slated to start as early as Oct. 3, time is running out. On a day of solidarity, both sides were united in that belief.

“The clock is ticking, but it hasn’t struck midnight yet,” Stern said. “We have time to do what has to be done, and we’d like to do it.”