Kawhi Makes the Raptors SCARY! Walker Kessler Transforms Lakers

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Wes Goldberg (2:01)

Welcome in to RealGM Radio here on a Tuesday night, a live stream for you all, not something we do a ton of, doing something a little different here. We do have a bunch to get to tonight. We're reacting to a few of the preseason games tonight, including the debuts of Kawhi Leonard and Walker Kessler. We got our first look at them for the Raptors and for the Lakers. I also have some thoughts on the Pacers. I have a concern about the Sixers that I want to share. And then I'm gonna touch on the Payton Pritchard extension toward the end of the show when we get into our speed round. If you have any questions, by the way, drop them in the comment section in the live chat here while we go on this live stream here on YouTube on the RealGM Radio YouTube channel. We'll try to get to them at the end of the show. Let's jump in.

All right, let's start with Kawhi Leonard and his debut for the Toronto Raptors. The Raptors were playing the Knicks. The Knicks were resting most of their guys. None of their starters played, but Kawhi Leonard played, and so did the rest of the Raptors starters. So we got our first look at a very anticipated starting five, Kawhi Leonard, Scottie Barnes, Jaco Portal, RJ Barrett, and Emmanuel quickly. And the Raptors got out up on the backup Knicks quickly, and they didn't let up. They scored 80 something points in the first half, and that was what Kawhi did. And you could just see right away, this defense for Toronto is going to be terrifying. Terrifying. We did our RealGM Radio predictions for the top 10 defenses in the league next season by defensive rating. I had Toronto number three. I might not have gone high enough.

I mean, you just saw it right away in this game. Again, I know it wasn't Jalen Brunson and Carl Anthony Towns and OG and Anoby out there, but Kawhi Leonard, in his first game back at the Raptors in this preseason game, gets a steal on Jose Alvarado on the first Knicks possession.

You saw them again just over and over, afraid to go near Kawhi Leonard, afraid to go in the paint because Kawhi is so good at playing off of his guy at the exact right time. It's the thing that's super underrated about Kawhi defensively is his timing on things. We always talk about his hands and the big hands and his ability to knock balls away, get deflections and get steals, but he is an awesome off-ball defender. And I actually think that might be what he's actually best at at this stage of his career is the off-ball defense and the timing of when to play off of this guy, and then to get into the paint and cut off your driving lanes. And we saw that time after time again for this Raptors defense. There was one possession, we saw a couple of times actually where for whatever reason, the Knicks would end up on one side of the floor, Jose Alvarado, one possession I'm thinking of off the top of my head right now, on one side of the floor with Scottie Barnes and Kawhi Leonard right in front of him. You could just see, he's like, what am I supposed to do with this? And he passes out of it, a lot of U-turns and things like that, you could just see how good this Toronto Raptors defense is gonna be.