Before Kawhi Leonard even chose the Los Angeles Clippers in free agency, then-head coach Doc Rivers called the Toronto Raptors star the “closest thing we've seen to Michael Jordan.”

The Clippers were fined $50,000 by the NBA for the comments Rivers made as a guest on ESPN's NBA Finals special. The thing about his comments, however, is that he's not wrong. Kawhi Leonard's game has been Jordan-esque ever since he came into the league, dominating on both ends of the floor. Of course, Jordan had the far more polished offensive game, but the focus of Leonard's game has been the mid-range, just like His Airness.

“He’s the most like Jordan that we’ve seen,” Rivers said back in 2019. “There's a lot of great players. LeBron is phenomenal, KD is phenomenal. Not that he is Jordan or anything like that, but he's the most like him. Big hands, post game, can finish, great leaper, great defender, in-between game.”

While Leonard came into the league as a defender who could provide some offensive punch here and there, no one could've seen this kind of offensive development coming. Leonard has averaged over 21 points per game in five of the last six seasons, including a career-high 27.1 points per game for the 2019-20 season with the Clippers. He has also increased his assists average in all of those seasons, which included a career-high 5.1 assists per game for the 2020-21 season.

And, no, not even Gregg Popovich could've seen this type of offensive explosion coming.

“When we we made that trade for him and drafted him, we didn’t know he was gonna be Kawhi Leonard just like we didn’t know Manu [Ginobili] was gonna be Manu when we drafted him at, whatever, 57 or something like that,” Popovich said of Kawhi back in 2019. “People who tell you that are full of crap. You never know how a player is gonna develop, and whether he’s drafted fourth or 19th, you just don’t know.

“We saw everything from the beginning. He grew from Day 1 the entire time he was there. He grew into the Kawhi Leonard you see today. He did a lot of work. Our staff did a lot of work. He came a long way. He was fantastic.”

Capped off by an incredible playoff run in 2019 that resulted in an NBA championship, Kawhi Leonard become a bona fide scorer. The way he took command during his lone postseason with the Toronto Raptors drew a lot of comparisons to Michael Jordan. Whether it was post-ups, mid-range jumpers, turnaround jumpers, getting to the free-throw line, there's a reason the two players' games appeared similar.

According to The Athletic's Jayson Jenks, who conducted a number of fantastic interviews with members of the 2009-2011 San Diego State Aztecs, Kawhi Leonard studied Michael Jordan incessantly in college:

John Van Houten, team manager: He’d come over to my house and he’d watch Michael Jordan highlights. We called them “Mike highs” … I mean, like four or five hours at a time.

Assistant coach Dave Velasquez: We’d be done with the game and he’d be on his phone watching Jordan on YouTube. Right away. He wasn’t texting. He was watching Jordan on YouTube. He’d watch it all day, every day.

Coach Velasquez: Coach Fisher had a no-cellphone policy at team dinners, but Kawhi would have his phone on his lap watching Jordan highlights. He would really study his moves.

During his first season with the Clippers, Leonard confirmed he took to studying Jordan during a postgame interview.

“He’s for sure a guy I studied,” Kawhi Leonard said of studying Michael Jordan. “He’s one of the guys that everyone looks up to just from a competitive standpoint and how he approaches every game. You just try to nitpick what you can take from him and bring it into yourself.”

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