San Antonio Spurs forward Kawhi Leonard scored a game-high 29 points in his team’s 111-92 win over the Miami Heat in Game 3 of the NBA Finals. For The Win looks at how the 22-year-old veteran made history.



1. He hadn’t scored that many points in a game since high school.

In the 243 games (regular season and playoff) Leonard has played during his first three seasons in the NBA, he scored 20 points or more in 12 of them. That’s less than 5% of his professional games. In his 71 college games at San Diego State, Leonard went 20+ in just 13, or 18% of the time. The highest total he ever reached was 26, once in the NBA and twice at SDSU. In all, Leonard had never scored more than 26 points in a college or NBA game and only scores 20 about 1 in 13 times on the court. Yet, in one of the biggest games of his young career, the springy forward from Los Angeles dropped 29 (and played excellent defense on LeBron James to boot).

2. His youth puts him in exclusive company.

In the past 35 years, only two other players younger than 23 years old have scored 29 or more points in an NBA Finals game: Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant. Both players won titles in the year they pulled the feat. (Magic dropped 42 in his epic series-clinching performance during his rookie year. Kobe went over 30 points twice in the Lakers’ 2001 Finals win over the Philadelphia 76ers.)

3. Leonard is also the youngest player to ever score so much while shooting so well.

The Elias Sports Bureau says Leonard (22 years, 346 days) passed James Worthy (23 years, 93 days) to become the youngest player in NBA Finals history to score at least 25 points on better than 75% shooting from the field.

4. When Tim Duncan won his first NBA title, Leonard was in second grade.

Keep in mind that Duncan played all four years in college (probably the last NBA superstar to ever do that), so he wasn’t exactly a spring chicken by the time he got to the NBA. When Duncan began his freshman year at Wake Forest, Leonard had just turned three years old.