Sukun Sen is sitting in the top row of section 115 in Scotiabank Arena, sharing a package of red licorice with his friends, watching his beloved Toronto Raptors below. He’s wearing a red No. 2 jersey, with LEONARD on the back.

Replica jerseys aren’t cheap. They cost $259 in Canadian dollars at the arena team store, about $190 U.S. at the current exchange rate.

It’s a financial moment of truth for sports fans: Do you pay that much for a jersey of a guy who might be wearing a different one next season? Everything has its price, loyalty included.

Sen didn’t hesitate.


“I researched him,” Sen says of Kawhi Leonard, the Raptors’ one-year rental before the All-NBA forward is eligible for unrestricted free agency. “He’s a humble guy and he has a historic past in college at San Diego State and then at San Antonio. He’s an NBA Finals MVP. He’s a defensive player of the year. And he’s here. He’s part of our city now.

“As a Torontonian, you have to welcome your new players. Maybe if he sees someone in the stands wearing his jersey, he’ll realize he has fans here and he’ll want to stay.”

The Raptors’ adopted slogan is “We the North,” emblazoned on giant flags, on a drum the dinosaur mascot bangs to rev up the crowd during timeouts, on T-shirts and ski caps, flashing in red and black on the scoreboard, echoing in chants throughout the arena.

But is he the North?


It is a $190, and $190 million, question hanging over this team, this arena, this city, this country like the slate gray December skies – reaching deeper into their collective psyche than whether just another snowbird will migrate to sunnier, southern climes.

The Raptors are Canada’s only NBA franchise in a sport that a Canadian, Dr. James Naismith, invented at a Massachusetts YMCA in 1891. Canada can’t win the Stanley Cup in its national pastime – it’s been a quarter-century since the Montreal Canadiens did it and 52 seasons since the Toronto Maple Leafs did. This is their only hope in basketball, a chance to shed an identity crisis fueled by the growing perception that they annually choke in the playoffs and high-profile free agents prefer the lower 48 to what resident rapper Drake has affectionately branded “The 6.”

“We have a whole country,” says Raptors guard Norman Powell, a Lincoln High and UCLA alum in his fourth season here. “Wherever you go – Saskatchewan, Quebec, Vancouver, Montreal, it doesn’t matter – everybody is supporting the Raptors and knows who you are. During the playoffs, Jurassic Park outside the arena is full and people are out there standing in the freezing cold, watching on big TV screens, cheering, chanting, rooting us on.

“It’s an amazing experience to see that and feel that. You just want to bring a championship to them.”


In some respects, then, it has become a race against time for Toronto and its rabid Raptors fans, trying to infect and inspire the stoic 27-year-old from Moreno Valley before NBA free agency opens on July 1.

They ripped apart a team that won 59 games and had the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs, firing NBA Coach of the Year Dwayne Casey and replacing him with a guy who had never been an NBA head coach, trading beloved All-Star guard DeMar DeRozan to San Antonio for a guy who played nine games last season due to a mysterious thigh injury, was eligible for unrestricted free agency next summer and had reportedly expressed a desire to be in Los Angeles.

Essentially, the Raptors are betting on themselves. Betting on their cosmopolitan, cultured, civilized, cordial metropolis of 5.9 million. Betting on the irresistible tug of the magnetic North.

“I mean, it’s definitely a little shock with the weather,” says Powell, the San Diegan who signed a four-year, $42 million contract extension last year. “We’re used to 75 and sunny, and the coldest it gets is 65. We don’t experience the negative temperatures, the snow, the wind chill. But the city is really amazing. When I first got here for my pre-draft workout, stepping out of the cab I just felt something about the city.


“It was just an amazing vibe. That’s something I really took to.”

Will the guy in the corner locker with enormous hands?

It’s hard to tell, and Leonard famously says little in public. About all you’ll get out of him is: “I’m not thinking about it. I’m just focused on the next game.”

The thing is, he’s not lying. The reason he is one of only three players ever to be named NBA Defensive Player of the Year and NBA Finals MVP (Hall of Famers Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon are the others) is because he doesn’t look past the next game, the next morning shootaround, the next practice, the next training-room appointment, the next film session, the next meeting. We’re talking about someone who, after most home games, rides an elevator up three floors from the locker room to lift weights at 10:30 p.m.


“If you’re looking into the future,” he said at his introductory news conference in Toronto last summer, “you’re going to trip over the present.”

It’s life in the NBA. Fans and media obsess over whether he’ll sign a five-year, $189.7 million contract with the Raptors in July. Players and coaches are worried about what time the bus leaves for the airport.

“These games come at you so fast, there’s not a whole lot of reflective time,” rookie head coach Nick Nurse says. “You don’t even hardly get to enjoy a win or get too disappointed about a loss because you’re usually on a plane. The ball goes up again (for the next game) before you know it. There’s not a whole lot of time where you’re sitting around, saying: ‘Hey, what are you going to do next summer?’ And in a way, that’s a good thing.

“What can I do to keep him? He wants to play well, be healthy, play on a really, really good team and be coached. That’s my job to do it, and let the chips fall where they may.”


The plan, Raptors president Masai Ujiri has said repeatedly, is not to woo Leonard by the hard sell of a Hawaiian timeshare condo, but “to be us … to be genuine, to be real.” And hope that is enough for the most unusual, unorthodox player in the NBA, who defines legacy less by individual accolades in a me-me-me era than the simple accumulation of championship rings.

What they are right now, with the regular season nearing its midpoint, is the best team in the league at 26-10, having already swept the season series against the defending champion Golden State Warriors and gone 4-0 on a Western Conference road trip for the first time in franchise history. On Wednesday, they came back from 17 down to win at Miami without injured All-Star guard Kyle Lowry, the third time this season they’ve turned a 17-point deficit into a W.

It is a deep, young, humble, hungry, egoless roster with a defensive mindset and an innovative coach who runs a free-wheeling, five-out offense that affords Leonard the kind of independence he sometimes lacked in San Antonio’s more regimented sets. He’s averaging 26.9 p0ints, 8.4 rebounds and 3.1 assists in 35 minutes – all career bests – and operating with the ball at the top more often, driving, dishing, dunking, pulling up, stepping back for 3s.

Also on the roster is veteran guard Danny Green, his closest teammate in San Antonio who was a key piece in the DeRozan trade. And player development coach Jeremy Castleberry, his best friend from high school and SDSU, was hired away from San Antonio for a job with more responsibility in Toronto.


He’s been given leadership responsibilities, too, something Spurs coach Gregg Popovich suggested wasn’t in his DNA (saying last month that “Kawhi is a great player, but he wasn’t a leader”).

“That’s probably the biggest surprise for me,” Nurse says. “He’s a very good, quiet leader – through work ethic, by example. He also goes out of his way in some very nice ways to help out not only the younger players but some of the older guys as well.”

Toronto native Drake is a courtside celebrity, store clerks can’t re-stock No. 2 jerseys fast enough, Scotiabank Arena has a longer sellout streak for the Raptors than the Maple Leafs, the roar Leonard received during player introductions on opening night was deafening ...

From Cali-for-ny-yay, they call him the Klaw, you know who, No. 2 … this … is … KAWHI LEONARD!


“I guess I would have thought there would be a few more bumps,” Nurse says, “and there really haven’t been.”

“He really feels at home,” Green recently told ESPN. “He really likes it here and is enjoying his time … I think he’s pretty happy and comfortable.”

“It’s been good,” Leonard says quietly.

The but:


It’s only December, and the average high temperature in January is 2.2 degrees above his scoring average (29.1 vs. 26.9). And the Raptors are 6-6 after a 20-4 start. And this franchise’s fortunes won’t be judged until May and June after being swept in the conference semifinals the last two years.

And the Clippers, expected to be his most aggressive suitor, have just started ramping up their free-agent recruitment, which already has included president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank or other front-office execs attending numerous Raptors games just to see and be seen.

When reports surfaced last summer that Leonard’s preferred destination was Los Angeles, there were two erroneous assumptions. One was that he grew up idolizing Kobe Bryant and the Lakers; his family liked the Lakers but he was an Allen “The Truth” Iverson devotee. The other was that he wanted to live in L.A.; if that was true, why does he spend offseasons in San Diego?

The weather might not be the factor some think, either, in a city where people go from underground garage to underground garage, which is how Raptors teammate OG Anunoby manages to show up at the arena in shorts and Crocs on snowy days. “You just get used to it,” Leonard says. “You just wear a jacket, you know what I mean? You just know you can’t go outside in a T-shirt.”


A Raptors employee notes that Leonard and his 2-year-old daughter both have “cozy jackets.”

The X-factor in all this, though, might not be the parka but the girl wearing it. The compass tug of the magnetic North vs. the tug of a 2-year-old on his pinky.

“She’s young, she doesn’t have too much say so,” Leonard says of Kaliyah, who turns 3 in July. “But I’m not just living for myself any more. I try to make the right decisions for her and for her future, thinking about when she’s 13 and I’m not playing any more: Did I make the right decision for myself and for her, or did I just make it for myself being selfish? That’s something different, thinking about her and what she needs in the long run.”

It complicates what for purely basketball reasons might be a slam dunk: a welcome, winning situation with an easier path to the NBA Finals than in a rugged Western Conference that includes the Warriors, LeBron James on the Lakers, Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City, James Harden in Houston, Damian Lillard in Portland, a rising Denver Nuggets team and whatever Popovich has brewing in San Antonio. Even the Sacramento Kings are decent.


Leonard’s family is from the Inland Empire. His girlfriend and Kaliyah’s mother, Kishele Shipley, also grew up in Southern California and attended San Diego State.

“Honestly, I don’t know what will happen,” Powell says. “I’m not worried about it, he’s not worried about it, the team’s not worried about it. Nobody has talked about it, questioned it, asked about it. We’re focused on each game, taking it one game at a time. All that other stuff will be sorted out in the offseason.”

In the meantime, Tom Lee, a 35-year-old man in a blue dress shirt and glasses, slides his credit card across a counter at the Scotiabank team store for a $259 replica jersey. The clerk asks if he needs a bag.

“No, thanks,” Lee says, pulling the red No. 2 jersey over his head and heading back into the arena for the second half. “I’ll wear it now.”


Aztecs × On Now Video: Aztecs make history with upset over No. 6 Nevada On Now Aztecs prepare for Fresno State On Now Aztecs beat New Mexico, 97-77 On Now Dutcher, Aztecs prepare for Air Force On Now Aztecs beat Wyoming, 84-54 On Now Aztecs prepare for conference game against Boise On Now Aztecs beat Texas Southern, 103-64 On Now Rocky Long: "This team has overachieved" On Now SDSU West bests SoccerCity as voters embrace a new vision for Mission Valley stadium site On Now Aztecs win season opener, 76-60


mark.zeigler@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @sdutzeigler