No offense to Kawhi Leonard, who has proved that he doesn't need to be under the watchful and trusted eye of Gregg Popovich to be the best player at both ends of the floor for a championship contender, but I'm not so sure it's his inactivity that got his leadership label erased as much as it was his invisibility. There's still a lot of fog hovering over a relationship that, according to the Spurs' medical staff, was more fractured than the belabored body part that caused it, and the player that made sure that separation held strong sure did a hell of a job of hiding in it. Therefore, even if you think the NBA's resident mute was done wrong by an organization that's gotten quite a bit right over the last couple decades, you'd still have to laugh at the idea that he's been some sort of leader. To be clear, you don't have to be the "rah rah" type to call yourself a captain. If you weren't already aware that leading by example is most certainly a thing then you need not look further than the leadership lineage of which the NBA's incomparable introvert seemed poised to join, as Tim Duncan wasn't exactly the Tony Robbins of team bonding. That said, while being vocal isn't a requirement to being influential in the locker room, actually being in the locker room and actually having a voice kind of are. It might be tougher to communicate your message to a team while in street clothes, but it's toughest to communicate your message to a team while in street clothes that are being worn in another state from which you refuse to talk. To put it bluntly, shit happens. Teams and players have irreconcilable differences all the time. It's the nature of the competitively cutthroat business that is pro sports. However, when you handle those differences with the maturity of a kindergartener packing up his piggy bank and running away from the home that helped fill it then a man of the house you are most certainly not. I don't know that Gregg Popovich was right in taking an unprovoked jab at a former player, but - word for word - I can't say he was wrong in doing so.
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