Kawhi Leonard Returns: Raptors Become a Damn Good Team Again
Fred VanVleet has seen Toronto at its peak. He helped build it. So when he says the Raptors just became “a damn good team” again with Kawhi Leonard’s return, the city listens.
The former Raptors guard, now with the Houston Rockets, was back in Toronto for Kyle Lowry’s block party when the subject inevitably came up: Kawhi, back in Canada, back in the jersey that once turned him into a basketball deity.
“I mean, listen, they didn’t get worse,” VanVleet said, cutting straight through any debate. “It didn’t get worse. I’m excited for the city. I’m excited for the organization. It’s good to see [Kawhi Leonard] back and yeah, they’ll be a damn good team, especially in the East. They’re going to be a tough out.”
No nostalgia tour. No ceremonial cameo. Leonard is returning as a two-time Finals MVP at 35, dropped into a younger, retooled Raptors core built around Scottie Barnes. And Toronto has paid a contender’s price to bring him home.
To pry Leonard from the Los Angeles Clippers, the Raptors sent Brandon Ingram, guard Gradey Dick, two unprotected first-round picks in 2031 and 2033, a 2027 pick swap, and two future second-rounders. That is not a sentimental trade. That is a franchise deciding its window is open again.
For VanVleet, the move hits on a different level. He and Leonard share the most important chapter in Raptors history: the 2019 title run. It was Leonard’s ruthless, almost clinical postseason that changed everything for the organization and for VanVleet personally, vaulting him from undrafted guard to one of the league’s most respected competitors and, eventually, a major contract earner.
He’s never pretended that Leonard was anything other than what he was in that moment: a superstar on a mission, but not a lifer in Toronto.
On the Hello and Welcome podcast, VanVleet laid bare what many suspected at the time.
“He said it from day one, I’m not staying here. So, from day one, he said, ‘I don’t know why they traded for me. I don’t want to be here. I’m not staying here.’ Now, Toronto put their best bid in, man,” VanVleet recalled.
“The city bowed down as we’ve never seen before, man. And so yes, as for us regular people, we can look at it and say, man, how could you leave that? But his mind was made up, man. Kawhi is Kawhi.”
That was the paradox of the 2019 season. Inside the locker room, they knew the star at the center of it all had one foot out the door. On the floor, he played like a man determined to leave a permanent mark. He did both.
Leonard delivered one of the most iconic playoff runs of the modern era, capped by Toronto’s first NBA championship. Then he walked, as promised, to Los Angeles. VanVleet never treated that as betrayal. He treated it as business — and as a turning point.
“Kawhi [Leonard] changed my view on a lot of shi*t,” VanVleet said, before sharing one story that stuck with him. He overheard a conversation after the championship run. Leonard didn’t say it directly to him, but the message was unmistakable.
“The sentiment of the conversation was when we won the championship about all that sh*t is like, ‘I’m better than Kobe.’”
VanVleet’s reaction was instinctive. Kobe Bryant is his basketball north star.
“Right? I had the same reaction because Kobe is my man. Kobe, that’s it for me. That’s as good as it gets for me as a little kid up into a man, my eyes, what I seen.”
The line wasn’t about disrespect. It was about self-belief at the very top of the sport. Leonard, with two titles and two Finals MVPs on two different franchises, had the résumé to even enter that kind of conversation, and the conviction to say it out loud in his own space.
That mindset is what Toronto is betting on again.
This time, the context is different. Leonard is older, the roster younger. Scottie Barnes is no longer a promising kid but the franchise cornerstone. The East is deeper, nastier, more unpredictable. Yet for someone like VanVleet, who lived through the first Kawhi era from inside that locker room, the equation is simple.
They added Kawhi Leonard.
“They didn’t get worse.”
