ESPN- The Toronto Raptors are hiring San Antonio Spurs staffer Jeremy Castleberry -- a close friend of Kawhi Leonard -- to a position on their coaching staff, league sources told ESPN.
Castleberry has worked with Leonard as a Spurs staffer and played with Leonard in high school and at San Diego State, where he was a walk-on. Leonard can test free agency in the summer of 2019, so Raptors president of basketball operations Masai Ujiri took significant risk with the transaction. Ujiri made the deal with a determination that he can convince Leonard to re-sign with the Raptors next summer in free agency, sources told ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski. Hiring Castleberry certainly won't hurt Toronto's chances of keeping Leonard. ---------- Not only am I not mad at this move, but I don't even really understand how you could be. Some might not appreciate what it says how much power star players have in the NBA. However, we're talking about a player who seemingly has the affability of a DMV employee, so when you're a team that needs to keep him at all costs, the price of one of the few people who crosses the right wires in fitting his description of "friend" is a relatively small cost of doing business. The addition of Jeremy Castleberry is far from the skeleton key to the smallest of emotional lockboxes that resides where Kawhi Leonard's heart is supposed to be, as he was just hired away from the same team with which no love, or something like it, was lost. That said, there's only many avenues you can explore when trying to appease someone who is about as outspoken (both verbally and nonverbally) as a stone sculpture of himself, and this was just about the most obvious road to go down. Now, as for how I feel about Kawhi Leonard getting people both fired (Bruce Bowen) and hired (Jeremy Castleberry) with his muted immaturity, I say only the following. He damn well better take the floor looking like the top-five player he was the last time he left it. Keeping multiple organizations on edge in the way that makes an angry girlfriend who repeatedly insists that she's "fine" seem candid by comparison is mildly acceptable behavior from someone who changes the entire landscape of the preeminent players' league when he's at his best. I just think there should rightfully be a little skepticism as to whether or not that's what the Raptors will be getting out of a guy who has had more occupational buckets kicked than those he's actually made over the last seven months. Whether the Spurs misdiagnosed his injury or not, his family-fueled frustration crossed over into what can only be described as a bratty display of bullshit months ago. If only because nothing silences the critics like winning, I hope he proves he was worth the hassle. He's already made some people forget exactly how good he was, and reminding them is jut about the only thing that will stop him from getting chastised for holding a significant portion of the league hostage with his hesitancy to so much as speak.
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