It’s been a weird season for the San Antonio Spurs. The team’s superstar, Kawhi Leonard, has played all of nine games while dealing with a gnarly quadriceps injury. What’s worse is that there have been reports of friction between Leonard and the Spurs organization, and Gregg Popovich has let a bit of frustration with the situation shine through.

All of this spurred chatter around Kawhi’s looming 2019 free agency and the idea he might be the guy to leave the Spurs. Leonard denied having any dispute with the Spurs and reaffirmed his desire to stay with the franchise, but that won’t stop the chatter.

Meanwhile LaMarcus Aldridge, the star many Spurs fans and perhaps some in the organization gave up on last season, is having a rollicking campaign. He grabbed an All-Star nod and reminded us why the Spurs and so many other teams chased him hard two summers ago. After requesting a trade in the offseason, he and Popovich reconnected. It’s all worked out. (You wonder how much the absence of Kawhi has helped in terms of getting Aldridge the touches he requires to stay happy.)
The Spurs have stayed well above .500 without Leonard’s services, riding along in third place in the West until a fairly serious February swoon gave an opening to the other second-tier chasers in that conference. Winning streaks from Portland and New Orleans have San Antonio at No. 5 right now, but only two and a half games ahead of ninth. A playoff berth is actually not assured for the Spurs because the race is so darned tight.

This would be a thrilling place for most teams missing their superstar to find themselves: staying in the hunt with hopes of getting said superstar back before the playoffs. But this is the Spurs. It’s not surprising they’d survive such an injury, and because it’s not surprising, it’s not terribly reassuring for them to be in this position. When you do what is expected, you don’t often get the appropriate credit.
Of course, the weirdness around Kawhi is a real factor in knocking any shine off the success San Antonio has found in his absence. The Spurs believed they had another Tim Duncan in Leonard, but Kawhi is different in a few ways. We were taught this explicitly when Leonard was eligible for a contract extension the summer after winning NBA Finals MVP. Recall that the Spurs wouldn’t give him a maximum contract extension that summer. He’d just won Finals MVP defending LeBron James and putting 20 on him three straight games, and the Spurs didn’t give him the max. The following summer, after Kawhi raised his numbers across the board and won Defensive Player of the Year, the Spurs did hand over a max pronto and Leonard stayed.

There have been reports that the Spurs and Leonard’s camp had worked out an informal deal in that first summer to wait until the second summer so San Antonio could maintain flexibility. But the contemporary reports in 2014 suggested that the sides were actively working toward a deal when they couldn’t agree, delaying Kawhi’s payday.

Leonard didn’t take a cent less than the max. Tim Duncan usually did. Duncan never seemed to care about marketing income, either. Kawhi does, based on the latest reports about his stalled Jordan Brand contract negotiations. No two humans are quite the same, and despite some obvious comparison points (quietude, demeanor, defensive chops, anachronistic personal style, coachability, work ethic), Kawhi is not Tim Duncan. Remember that.

This is not a knock on Kawhi at all: there is no heroism in taking less money than you’re due for the benefit of a more wealthy person’s bank account. It’s a personal choice each star makes. Kawhi, who is young and early in his earnings career, really isn’t in a position to take a cent less than he can receive. The Spurs’ brain trust surely understands this and will approach free agency in 2019 appropriately.

In fact, given that Leonard this week said that he wants to remain a Spur forever, San Antonio’s front office would do well to pitch a huge extension this summer, provided that Kawhi is able to play on that quad in the coming weeks and through the playoffs. Whether Leonard accepts that offer remains to be seen. All discourses on the short- and long-term future of the Spurs are wrapped up tightly in the cloth of Kawhi. This is the biggest difference between this current period of San Antonio basketball and the team’s last period just outside the league’s upper echelon: there is a scent of doubt around the centerpiece.

From 2008 through 2012, the Spurs went five years without a trip to the NBA Finals while Tim Duncan was still TIM DUNCAN. San Antonio was really good in some of those years, but didn’t measure up to the Lakers or Celtics at the front end and Heat or Thunder at the back end. Those other teams just had an edge, through youth or scoring talent or whatever.

That is, until 2013, when the Spurs (with a young Kawhi and rebooted supporting cast) got back to the Finals and came one Jesus Shuttlesworth blessing from another title. San Antonio exacted revenge against Miami a year later. They haven’t been back since.

Many of us wrote off the Spurs’ dynasty in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. Duncan was aging, Tony Parker wasn’t picking up the mantle, Manu Ginobili was getting injured a little too frequently, and the Spurs weren’t finding new diamonds in the rough at the scale required to maintain their supreme excellence. Until they did, with Kawhi, with Danny Green, with Patty Mills. Duncan remained at the core through it all, seeing San Antonio through that dry spell — a dry spell during which the team kept winning 50 games a year, mind you — and into the next period of real title contention.

Similarly, many will write off the Spurs this spring when they fall to the Warriors or Rockets (or even — gasp! — someone else) in the West playoffs. Analysts will nitpick Aldridge’s anachronism, Dejounte Murray’s limitations, the front office’s odd free agent decisions (like that still-bizarre Pau Gasol contract), and the team’s inability to hang offensively with the Rockets or Warriors. Invariably, the Spurs will find more diamonds, Popovich will polish them right up, and San Antonio will be right back in the conversation, maybe even hosting another parade or two.

But Kawhi is the real variable to that regeneration effort. If all this smoke about his broken connection with the organization leads to fire, the whole program could go up in flames. Or, if this season is any indication, the Spurs could take a blow, keeping on ticking at a competitive but sub-elite level, and bide time until the next superstar comes along.

If this season is as bad as it gets for San Antonio, life is pretty good. But the Spurs and their fans know how much better it can be when titles are in their sights. Whether San Antonio gets back to that stage soon depends on whether Kawhi is in or out.

He says he’s in. We’ll see.