Note: Last in a three-part series on the making of Kawhi Leonard.

Kawhi Leonard’s basketball odyssey began, eight years ago, with a question.

How do I be good?

It was a question he initially asked as a teenager, of his first AAU coach in Southern California.

Now here he was in a strange gym in a strange city in South Texas, completely out of his element, and another coach was upping the ante on his original query from long ago.

“Do you want to be good,” the coach asked him, “or do you want to be great?”

Doing the asking was Spurs shooting coach Chip Engelland, a man Leonard had just met.

It was June 25, 2011. Two days earlier, the Spurs had pulled the trigger on the most daring draft-day move in club history, dealing well-liked backup guard George Hill to Indiana for the 15th overall pick, a lottery ticket just outside the lottery.

Now Leonard was stationed in his new team’s mostly empty practice gym, wondering what came next.

A few hours before, Leonard had taken a makeshift dais in the corner of the gym, introduced to local media for the first time since becoming San Antonio’s highest-drafted rookie since Tim Duncan.

The cameras had long since gone dark. The reporters had gone home.

Leonard had traded the black striped Polo shirt and jeans he had worn for his get-to-know-you session with the press for a set of standard-issue Spurs workout gear.

He was ready to get to work.

Engelland and Chad Forcier, the team’s player development coach, surveyed the 20-year-old small forward from San Diego State, a 6-foot-7 collection of promise and cornrows.

“A lot of players just want to put in enough work to be good, and that’s OK,” Engelland said. “Do you want to be good or great?’”

Leonard took a beat to carefully consider the question.

“I want to be great,” he said.

In time, Leonard would do more than tell Engelland. He would show him, too.

A dynamic duo

Now 24 and in the early throes of his fifth NBA season, Leonard — already with a Finals MVP and Defensive Player of the Year award on his mantle — has emerged as a viable All-Star candidate for the first time.

Through his first seven games, Leonard has averaged 22.1 points and 7.6 rebounds, while playing the sort of lockdown defense that has caused some of the league’s top scorers to stop and play dead.

Leonard readily admits he might not have gotten this far if not for two relatively anonymous assistant coaches who typically sit behind the Spurs’ bench.

“Those guys come in every day excited to work with me,” Leonard said of Engelland and Forcier. “They like to see me get better and they love their job.”

A 54-year-old from Pacific Palisades, California, Engelland finished his college career at Duke in 1983, just as Mike Krzyzewski was laying the foundations of a nascent NCAA dynasty.

Engelland played nine years professionally — first in the Philippines, then in fledgling leagues in Topeka, Kansas and Calgary, Canada — before opening a traveling shooting clinic he called “Chip Shots.”

In 1999, Engelland broke into the NBA as the shooting coach for the Detroit Pistons, where he gained his first high-profile pupil — another former Dukie named Grant Hill.

After a stint in Denver, Engelland arrived in San Antonio before the 2005-06 campaign. His first pet project was to remake Tony Parker’s jump shot, helping to transform the speedy-but-raw French point guard into a perennial All-Star.

Forcier, a 42-year-old native of Rainier, Washington, cut his NBA teeth as an intern on George Karl’s staff with the Seattle SuperSonics in 1992.

He worked as a junior varsity coach at Lake Washington High in Kirkland, Washington from 1994 to 1997 before moving on to the college ranks as an assistant at Oregon State and Portland University.

Forcier joined Rick Carlisle’s bench with the Detroit Pistons in 2001, and followed Carlisle to Indiana in 2003. He came to the Spurs’ staff as a player development coach in 2007.

Beginning the following season, Engelland and Forcier began to tutor George Hill, a relatively unknown rookie guard out of Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI).

The two succeeded to the extent that, by 2011, the Pacers so coveted Hill they were willing to swap the 15th pick for him.

Now, on this otherwise quiet June afternoon at the Spurs’ practice facility, it was time for Engelland and Forcier to start from scratch with the spoils of that trade.

It was up to them to help make the gamble work.

In Leonard, they found a soft lump of clay, eager to be molded.

“Not everybody wants to be a great player,” Leonard said. “They’re just planning to stay in their role. That’s not me. I’m trying to be the best player I can.”

It was Mozart to Leonard’s new coaches’ ears.

There was just one problem. The NBA was facing a labor crisis. A lockout was coming and once it made landfall, team officials would be prohibited from so much as exchanging text messages with players until it was over.

The Spurs’ development coaches were on the clock. They had four days with their new rookie, then would lose him to the whims of the NBA’s looming labor war.

Shot under construction

The most pressing order of business, it was decided, was to overhaul Leonard’s jump shot.

As such, Engelland — the team’s so-called “Shot Doctor” — would get first crack at him.

Engelland came armed with an idea of what Leonard’s form was like.

Before every draft, the Spurs front office hands Engelland a number of prospects to evaluate as shooters. In 2011, Leonard’s name was on Engelland’s list.

In the run-up to the draft, Engelland absorbed gigabytes upon gigabytes of video on Leonard and other potential draftees. He attended the NBA’s official pre-draft combine in Chicago in May.

Leonard wasn’t scheduled to shoot at the combine, but occasionally players do so informally.

“He happened to start taking shots literally right when I walked in the gym,” Engelland said. “I got to see it in person.”

In two seasons at San Diego State, Leonard made only 25 percent of his 3-point attempts — and that was at the shorter collegiate distance.

At the NBA level, Leonard projected as an immediate contributor as a defender and rebounder at small forward.

He would be of less use to the Spurs on offense if he could not at least knock down an occasional corner 3-pointer.

Based on his film study and in-person reconnaissance, Engelland took his report back to general manager R.C. Buford and the Spurs’ front-office group preparing for the draft.

“I felt his shot didn’t need a full makeover,” Engelland said. “With just a tune-up, he could become a very good shooter, if not a great shooter.”

Engelland’s recommendation carried heft in the Spurs’ draft room. Had the Shot Doctor pronounced Leonard’s form dead on arrival, the Spurs likely would have walked away.

Once Engelland had Leonard alone in the Spurs’ gym, the two got to work.

Through his pre-draft research, Engelland had diagnosed a hitch in Leonard’s jumper. Leonard naturally brought the ball back behind his head before letting it go.

Coincidentally, it was a form similar to what Richard Jefferson brought with him to San Antonio from Milwaukee in 2009.

With an Engelland-inspired tweak, Jefferson enjoyed his best 3-point shooting seasons with the Spurs, making a career-best 44 percent in 2010-11.

“Richard was 30 (years old) when he changed his shot,” Engelland said. “We thought Kawhi could change too.”

Engelland showed Leonard pictures of Jefferson’s jumper compared to his own.

Playing on Leonard’s Southern California connection, Engelland also used Kobe Bryant as a prototype.

“He grew up watching Kobe play,” Engelland said. “Kobe has a beautiful form, technically really sound. We used him as a model — that release point and shot.”

Leonard listened like an enraptured student at the feet of a shooting Socrates.

“Whatever he taught me, I just tried to write it down,” Leonard recalls. “We had a specific form we were working on. It was pretty easy, just keep going to the gym and working on the motion.”

Leonard practiced with Engelland for four days. At the end of the crash course, Leonard left San Antonio with a program to put in place on his own during the lockout.

The two shook hands and went their separate ways to await labor peace.

Back from the lockout

When the lockout was ultimately lifted in December, Leonard arrived for the first day of his first pro training camp with a new shooting form in tow.

Spurs coaches and front-office personnel were pleased with what they saw.

“He wasn’t a finished product,” Forcier said. “But you could tell he had put in time to give himself some traction.”

Leonard spent the six-month lockout that kicked off his rookie NBA season fine-tuning his new shot in gyms in San Diego and Las Vegas.

It didn’t exactly feel like work to him.

“I like going to the gym,” Leonard said. “It’s just second nature to me, since I was a kid. If I go in and shoot 200 shots, it feels like 20 minutes went by.”

Leonard’s self-made improvement during the lockout taught the Spurs’ coaches something about their new disciple that persists to this day.

“On a lot of drafts, you hear somebody is a gym rat, loves the gym,” Engelland said. “That’s in college or high school. Then they come to the pros and have a lot of different options in life.

“One of my great compliments to Kawhi is, even after four years, he still loves the gym. You’ve got to pull him out of the gym.”

Case in point: When Leonard dragged Engelland and Forcier to San Diego for the trio’s annual workout junket last summer — not long after he had signed a new five-year, $95 million contract with the Spurs — he made only one alteration to the daily itinerary.

“Instead of going to the gym three times a day this summer, I think he only went twice a day,” Engelland said. “That’s not a joke. He’s in San Diego, every day is perfect, and he goes to the gym twice.”

Leonard averaged 7.9 points as a rookie, hit a respectable 37.6 percent from 3-point range, and emerged as a full-time starter after the March trade that jettisoned Jefferson to Golden State.

He did it all without the benefit of a Summer League, or a full training camp or preseason, or the summertime open gyms that typically serve as a rookie’s first taste of NBA competition.

“Clearly, Kawhi took a few days’ worth of training between the draft and the lockout and put a ton of time in getting better,” Buford said.

Still, even after a rookie season judged a success by any measure, Leonard had jumps to make if he were to move from good to great.

“I’m not sure any of us thought he would be what he and our guys built him to be,” Buford said.

Creating the monster

By the time Leonard finished his rookie season, he was comfortable enough with his new shooting stroke.

Now it was Forcier’s turn to get a hold of him.

Visitors to the Spurs practice gym on any given day during Leonard’s second, third or fourth seasons might have caught him working late with Forcier on a bevy of new offensive moves.

A jab step. A post-up. A jump-hook. A fadeaway baseline jumper.

They were all bits of the arsenal Leonard had yet to unveil in an NBA game.

“The early phases of that were built around just giving him repetition and work, getting him some education,” Forcier said. “With the thought, this isn’t going to be part of your life for the time being.

“But we’re going to get you some early work on it, because one of these days — it might be after the All-Star break, it might be training camp, it might be two training camps from now — it’s going to be part of your game and part of our attack.”

That forward-thinking first began to manifest itself in Leonard’s game after the All-Star break last season.

Coach Gregg Popovich began calling Leonard’s number more, giving him increased one-on-one post-up opportunities.

He led the Spurs in scoring at 16.5 points per game — the first player not named Duncan, Parker or Manu Ginobili to accomplish that since Dominique Wilkins in 1996-97 — and starred over the first four games of the playoffs against the Los Angeles Clippers, averaging 24.8 points.

When Leonard faded in the final three games of the Spurs’ eventual ouster against L.A., shooting 18 of 44, it only gave him more fodder for his offseason workout regimen.

Early this season, Leonard has been the breakout star on a team that includes three future Hall of Famers and has added four-time All-Star LaMarcus Aldridge.

“He’s been a sponge,” Popovich said. “He’s picking it up pretty quickly. And he wants it. He’ll continue to get even better.”

Right team, right time

Asked to name the next step in Leonard’s evolution, Forcier gives an answer surprising when talking about the league’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year.

“I think there’s a challenge in front of him to be a more consistent defensive player, which means being engaged night in and night out, taking the challenge no matter who the matchup is,” Forcier said.

Offensively, Leonard is still learning.

It is a mental game for him now, deciphering when to use his pull-up, when to dust off the turnaround jumper, when to go with the jump-hook and when to make a play for someone else.

“It’s like a great pitcher — when do I throw the curve or the change-up?” Engelland said. “That takes years of honing it in games, because you have to do all that within your team game. You can’t just run roughshod over your teammates to try to do that. It’s tough because he’s testing things.”

Leonard’s coaches say they have been lucky to have him for a pupil.

“He has a great focus, beyond his years,” Engelland said.

Yet as much as Leonard was made for the Spurs, the Spurs were made for him too.

Leonard’s addition in 2011 and subsequent growth lit the fuse on a championship run in 2014, and now helps provide the Spurs a clear bridge to a bright post-Big Three future.

In exchange, the Spurs gave Leonard what he wanted most — the tools and the chance to be great.

Let Leonard’s agent, Brian Elfus, tell it.

“At the end of the day, the draft is about where you end up, what kind of situation you’re in,” Elfus said. “I’ve got a strange suspicion — no, I know for a fact — if Kawhi had ended up in a different place, he wouldn’t be nearly the player he is today.

“I think everybody counts their blessings every day he ended up in San Antonio.”

jmcdonald@express-news.net

Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN