The first time Kawhi Leonard pushed a potential dynasty into the abyss, the deed was done in five games. And the NBA universe was only beginning to understand the vastness of the potential in Leonard’s all-round basketball mastery.

To say Leonard single-handedly ended the Miami Heat’s 2014 run at a championship three-peat would be wrong. Nobody wins anything without help. Teams win titles. And the Raptors find themselves a victory away from their first parade in franchise history thanks to Masai Ujiri’s uncompromising insistence on building a club worthy of a ring.

But when Leonard and the San Antonio Spurs defeated LeBron James and the two-time defending champion Heat five years ago, it wouldn’t be wrong to say it was Leonard who did the most to ensure James’ last game as a member of Miami’s NBA franchise ended in defeat. It was Leonard who scored 29 points in a pivotal Game 3 victory, hounding King James into seven turnovers. It was Leonard who scored at least 20 points in each of the Spurs’ final three victories. At age 22, in just his third season in the league, it was the kid who grew up in greater Los Angeles who became the youngest Finals MVP since Magic Johnson won it with the champion Lakers in 1980 at age 20.

If the Spurs’ all-for-one, ball-sharing offence didn’t always showcase the outer reaches of Leonard’s abilities as a getter of buckets — amazingly, he’d averaged a shade under 13 points a game during the regular season, when he wasn’t even named an all-star — Leonard made the most of his opportunities when it mattered the most. He shot 61% from the field and 58% from three-point range in those Finals.

“Very efficient. I mean, he’s very efficient,” James, himself a model of efficiency, said in his post-defeat deference to Leonard.

Said Miami’s Dwyane Wade: “He not only took what the defence gave him. He took what he wanted.”

On that biggest of basketball stages, a dominant force was born. Throughout that 2014 post-season, Gregg Popovich, the head coach of a Spurs team that based four previous championship runs around Tim Duncan, had been declaring Leonard the franchise’s future. But in the glow of that fifth title, with Duncan aged 38, Popovich recounted how he’d privately urged Leonard to regard himself as the franchise’s present, too. That Leonard responded with fearlessness and precision, even when matched against the game’s self-proclaimed king, told the world he was ready carry the load.

“I just talked to (Leonard) about not being in that deferment or that defer sort of stage,” Popovich said. “The hell with Tony (Parker), the hell with Timmy (Duncan), the hell with Manu (Ginobili), you play the game. You are the man.”

Five years later, nobody needs to tell Leonard he’s the man in Toronto. It’s been a given from the moment Ujiri brought him to town last summer in a franchise-changing trade. And with the Raptors holding a 3-1 Finals lead over the Golden State Warriors, Leonard appears to be deep into the process of dissolving a dynasty, interrupting another great team’s run at a three-peat with a performance for the ages.

Trace the arc of his influence and it’s worth pondering how Leonard’s emergence has toppled so many dominoes of consequence. His work in 2014, after all, coincided with the end of James’ time with the declining Heat, which led to James’s dramatic return to Cleveland, which saw him annually transform Toronto into LeBronto in three straight playoff manhandlings of the Raptors.

It was the nature of those losses, the most recent two by sweep, that drove Ujiri to drastically remake the Raptors, trading franchise stalwart DeMar DeRozan in the package that yielded Leonard.

And now, as Monday’s Game 5 looms and Leonard has rag-dolled a team that’s gone to five straight NBA Finals to within one false move of oblivion, the man they call The Claw doesn’t figure to relinquish his grip on the balance of power anytime soon. He’ll wield immeasurable influence off the floor in the coming weeks, too, when he decides where he’ll sign as an impending free agent. The Raptors can only hope a second championship, and the second finals MVP that would surely come with it, would help sway him to stay, even if a California homecoming will surely beckon.

The hobbled Warriors, of course, are proud champions. The series isn’t over until it is. Strange things can happen, as they do. But this is the 35th time a team has been down 3-1 in the NBA Finals. Only one of those previous 34 came back to win the championship. That’d be the Cleveland team that James led to three straight wins over the Warriors in 2016.

But James isn’t wearing a Warriors uniform. Kevin Durant, even if he were to arrive in a cape, hasn’t played in more than a month. And Golden State has no answer for Leonard, who barged out of the Toronto locker room after intermission in Friday’s Game 4 win and drilled two three-pointers that changed the tenor of the contest en route to Leonard’s finals career-high 36-point night.

“Two eff-you shots … two big-boy shots,” was how Raptors guard Fred VanVleet memorably described them.

Certainly Leonard’s stone-faced dominance has catapulted him into a rare stratosphere of legends. He’s now scored 30 points in 14 of Toronto’s 22 playoff games. Only three players have had more 30-point games in a single post-season. Their names are Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Hakeem Olajuwon — all of them multiple-time champions, all of them multiple-time Finals MVPs.

“He’s giving us everything,” Raptors forward Serge Ibaka said. “That’s what we need from him.”

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Back in 2014, even as that efficient 22-year-old called it “surreal” to see the Finals MVP trophy sitting on the bar of his video-game room in his San Antonio home, Leonard said he was still searching for something more from himself.

“Coming in, I wanted to be a great player, and right now at the beginning of my career, I’m showing some slight sunshine that I can be the player I want,” Leonard told USA Today in the wake of his first championship.

That slight sunshine has morphed into one of the megastars of the NBA galaxy, controlling the league’s very orbit now and in the days to come. Five years after Leonard torched the Heat, he’s got the Warriors a game removed from melting away three wins short of a three-peat. The Raptors can only thank Ujiri for making sure the common denominator, the fearless eliminator, is playing in their uniform in a season that figures never to be forgotten.

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