TORONTO — In the NBA, individual warm-up slots are typically determined by seniority. In general, it’s the younger players first. As the ranking veteran on the Toronto Raptors, 15-year man Kawhi Leonard could take the floor for his pre-game shooting routine right up to about 45 minutes before tip. 

But Leonard likes to get his work in early, so there he was more than two hours before the ball went up on the Raptors' season opener and the first game in his second tour with Toronto that everyone hopes will be a reasonable facsimile of his first, when he led the Raptors to the 2019 NBA championship.

And while some players use the warm-up to get all the way up to game speed, even looking for hard contact from the player development coaches working them out, Leonard’s warm-up is very much not that. 

It’s slow, deliberate and calculated. It’s a prelude to the real thing, not a substitute. 

To extend the analogy, Leonard’s very much anticipated return to Scotiabank Arena in his familiar No. 2 for the first time since Game 5 of the 2019 NBA Finals hit all the right notes, the proper feels, and presumably will serve him well when the competition starts for real. 

Because Game 1 of the 2026-27 season was definitely not that, though no one is quibbling with the process or the result: a 135-92 win that was never in doubt and set a record for the largest winning margin in a season opener ( 43 points) in franchise history. 

The Raptors jumped out to a 10-point lead midway through the first quarter, led by 29 early in the second quarter and by 39 when Ja’Kobe Walter stripped the ball from Bulls guard Josh Giddey before flipping it to Scottie Barnes for an emphatic and symbolic dunk late in the third quarter. 

But the star of the show, the one who got the massive roar when he was introduced and raised his massive right hand above his head, grabbing his wrist with his left in his own ‘Claw’ trademark? The one whose hand was superimposed on the white commemorative T-shirts laid out so neatly on all 19,800 seats? 

On an October Wednesday in 2026, Leonard was not the same player who scored 24 points and grabbed 12 rebounds in 37 minutes in his Raptors debut in 2018, or who averaged a career-high 29.1 points a game last year on his way to earning all-NBA honours. 

The current version of Leonard is — by his own admission — just getting warmed........

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