LOS ANGELES – The attractions are obvious. The weather forecast for southern California this time of year is numbingly perfect and seemingly never changing:

“Sunny and warm,” “sunny and warm,” “sunny and warm,” and on into infinity.

There are celebrity sightings, business opportunities, beaches, mountains, wealth.

It’s all here, just waiting for anyone with enough talent, brains, guts or dumb luck to leverage it.

The best, brightest, vainest and most gifted have been making pilgrimages to Southern California since the beginning of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” nearly a century ago.

It’s not just an NBA thing.

But for Kawhi Leonard – once a Spur, forever an icon in Toronto Raptors lore and now the cornerstone of the new-look Los Angeles Clippers – this part of the world means something else.

It is, simply, home.

Programming Alert Watch Toronto Raptors vs. Los Angeles Clippers on Monday, Nov. 11, on Sportsnet and Sportsnet ONE. Coverage begins at 9:30 p.m. ET/6:30 p.m. PT.

Strip away the circumstances of Leonard’s season-long free agent recruitment by the Clippers and look past his own maneuvering that rendered the Raptors a fallback, and it’s hard not to conclude what was the driving force behind his own move back west.

“I’ll say it like this,” Raptors president Masai Ujiri told Sportsnet recently. “I think there was something there about going home. It worked out for him, unlucky maybe for us, the way it lined up. [But] I always say it: If there was an NBA team in Lagos, Nigeria, or probably anywhere in Africa, I’d be doing the same thing, too. That’s just life.

“Everybody is intrigued about where they come from and home in some kind of way. This was his calling to go home. … I completely understood that, and I knew if there were any other circumstances maybe it would have worked out.”

The urge to head home is not something lost on Leonard’s former teammates or his peers around the NBA. That and the championship he helped bring to Canada means there won’t be any awkwardness when Leonard and the Clippers host the Raptors Monday night.

Kyle Lowry has played in three cities over his 14-year NBA career and comes from Philadelphia — never considered an NBA glamour spot.

But the thought of being able to play in the same city he was born? Where he still maintains a home?

His eyes grow big.

“It’s home,” he says, with emphasis. “Home. You get to be home. You live in your house, your crib that [you] probably paid a lot of money for. You get to see your family and friends whenever you want — whatever makes you happy. So when you get to choose where you want to go, you take advantage of it.”

And while the Los Angeles of our imaginations might seem like an endless, impersonal sprawl, it’s not like that for those that hail from here. In some ways it’s a small town, with clear loyalties. And like every community, Los Angeles recognizes its own.

“One thing about L.A.,” says Toronto Raptors forward Stanley Johnson, who was a high school star at Mater Dei, a traditional powerhouse on the Los Angeles sports scene. “If you’re a guy from L.A. and you’re a good player, and you played high school around L.A., you’re never going to feel unwelcome.”

Which doesn’t mean Leonard coming to Los Angeles to join the Clippers is without challenges.

It’s a Lakers town when it comes to basketball at least.

The Clippers are the working-class tenants at Staples Centre, the arena they share with their more glamorous cousins. This season the Lakers are led by LeBron James and Anthony Davis, who will vie with Leonard and Paul George for status as the NBA’s ultimate power couple.

Outside the arena there are five statues devoted to Lakers icons, none to Clippers. Inside the Lakers have 16 championship banners hanging from the rafters — second most in NBA history to the Boston Celtics. The Clippers have none to call their own and cover up the Lakers banners during their home games at Staples.

Leonard was reminded of the hierarchy in place on opening night of this NBA season. The Clippers were hosting their across-the-hall rivals, but he still got booed by Lakers fans. He and George were also booed when shown on the big screen when they attended a UFC event together.

It’s nothing personal — it’s a tradition. Former Clipper Chris Paul got booed at Dodgers stadium when he threw out the first pitch a few years ago. Having his then-toddler son by his side provided no cover.

“I think the booing is just fun. … People just are into the entertainment, and most people are into the Lakers because the gear looked cool, honestly,” says Johnson. “A guy like Kawhi, the booing is — I can’t see a good reason. No one’s going to give him a hard time at all. He’s well regarded in L.A., I know that. I live there.”

Still, there’s no argument that Leonard took the road less travelled. He could have teamed up with James and Davis and the Lakers, but chose a different path. And there’s arguably no one in the NBA better equipped to manage the expectations on him.

As any Raptors fan can likely attest, Leonard seems perfectly capable of blocking out any noise — from any source, on any subject.

“I think it’s just how I was brought up,” Leonard said on Saturday at the Clippers practice facility as his new team prepared to meet the Raptors. “[I] never really read the newspaper articles, just focused on my game. I came from not being ranked [in high school] to going to a D1 scholarship and then [being] drafted in the NBA.

“Outside noise doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s just about me, the group and team that I’m with, the organization that I’m with now and focusing on that goal.”

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He was certainly like that in Toronto. Even in his absence Leonard’s presence can be felt on the team he left behind — the residue of his championship habits remains.

“For me it was his demeanour, his mentality, the way he approaches the game,” says Pascal Siakam, who has stepped into Leonard’s shoes as the Raptors’ primary scorer and who trained with his former teammate in California in the off-season. “I’m a real emotional person so learning to be more steady and not showing my emotions too much and being that type of killer — not silent, because that’s not me — but having that same attitude whether you make 10 shots or miss 10 shots. He’s the perfect person to look at for that.”

But even if Leonard leaving may have left some Raptors fans feeling momentarily jilted, where he ended up makes his motivations plain.

“I’m able to see my family after the games,” Leonard said Saturday. “I’m in southern California, beautiful weather — I’m at my house. Everything’s been good.”

Playing at home can be a challenge in itself. It’s one thing to visit your hometown a couple of times a season as a returning hero, but playing the role every day can be wearing.

In recent years, there has been perhaps no player more closely identified with his hometown than Derrick Rose, the Detroit Pistons veteran who was the No. 1–overall pick of the Chicago Bulls as a 19-year-old in 2008 and saw his star rise and fall — mainly due to injuries — miles from where he grew up on Chicago’s South side.

“The good of it is that it’s like a family reunion every game,” Rose told Sportsnet. “You see everybody you went to school with in the past, teachers, old teammates. It’s really like a family reunion.”

The downside?

“I would have to say, in Chicago it was a big city, but small at the same time. L.A. might be a little bit different because of how big L.A. is and how fast it is. Other places, places like L.A., they’re used to celebrity, but Chicago, in the Midwest, we’re not used to that. It’s a blessing, but at the same time what comes along with the blessing is you really can’t go anywhere.

“With Kawhi, he seems like he knows who he is and has a routine and how he goes about his way of handling things, so his experience might be totally different than mine. But for me, in Chicago, living downtown, it felt very small.”

There is a time and place for everything. For Cory Joseph, Leonard’s old friend and teammate from their San Antonio days, returning to play in Toronto as a free agent was a dream come true, bringing his career full circle as the first Canadian to sign a multi-year deal with the Raptors as a free agent.

He says he loved his two seasons in Toronto with one exception: paying for playoff tickets.

“I was already in the league for four years before I came home, so that made it easier for me. I learned what the NBA was about,” he said while visiting Toronto with the Sacramento Kings recently. “Sleeping in my own bed every night, family at every game? Who wouldn’t love that?

“The only bad thing was tickets. There was a lot of tickets. That year [2016] we made the Eastern Conference Finals? And the tickets get more expensive every round? Whew.

“When I got my playoff cheque I was like, ‘I might as well give it all right back.’”

Lowry says a lot of NBA players don’t want to play at home early in their careers, himself among them.

“When you’re older it’s a lot more easier to handle,” he said. “When I first came in the league and people would say ‘Would you even want to play in Philly?’ I’d say no.

“When I was younger, I’m not sure I could handle it. Tickets, family, friends … just being home. You grew up there. People know who you are, where you are, and you don’t want to be rude or arrogant and you want to fulfill everyone’s needs.

“But now that I’m older, if the opportunity ever happened I would think, ‘OK, I can handle it.’

If there is a burden Leonard feels at being home, he’s certainly not showing it. He’s comfortably enjoying the weather, his two young children and — presumably — time at his $13.5-million mansion south of Los Angeles.

The taciturn Leonard is no one’s definition of a hound for the spotlight, but he’s taken advantage of the stage being in L.A. has provided. He’s already made some commercials, and he’s the centerpiece of New Balance’s efforts to break into the basketball market dominated by Nike and Adidas.

It’s all there if he wants it, presumably.

“To have that kind of exposure on a grand stage in one of the world’s most famous stadiums on a nightly basis, 40 times a year,” Johnson says, “there’s not much better you can do for yourself, publicity wise, than that.”

But those that know Leonard say all of those considerations are distant compared with the chance to win and the chance to do it in familiar surroundings.

For the rest of the world, L.A. represents a beacon, a destination. For Leonard, it’s where it all started — in the suburbs, hooping with friends and bowling with his buddies in nearby Riverside as a teenager.

“For Kawhi, [coming home] has been as good of a good thing as I’ve seen,” says Clippers coach Doc Rivers. “He’s not out at every place celebrating ‘I’m back home.’ He’s with his family, and he’s playing basketball.

“Very few [can] pull that off.”