TORONTO — The news about Kawhi Leonard missing two weeks and likely more due to an issue with his left knee was both predictable and encouraging. Predictable because injury updates are as much part of the Kawhi Leonard experience as steals, tough twos and pull-up threes. 

Going back to the 2017-18 season, Leonard has missed 44 per cent of his team’s scheduled games. Even in his healthier years, playing more than three quarters of the season is relatively rare. In the last nine years, he’s played 68 games once, 65 games once and 60 games another year. One season he missed entirely, another he played just 37 games and the other three he was in the fifties. 

With Leonard, you set the over-under for games played at 60 and hope for the best. 

So that’s the predictable part about Leonard playing 28 minutes against Washington on Friday night, practising as normal on Saturday and then going through his standard 15-minute pre-game warm-up routine in Minnesota on Sunday before pulling the plug after — per team sources — he noticed swelling in his left knee. 

You just never know when something will crop up. Was his knee an issue in his slow start so far (Leonard is shooting just 12-of-37 from the floor)? Or was it completely random? 

With Leonard, you can plan and prepare all you want, but sometimes his body says ‘not today,’ and Leonard has learned to listen to it.

As for the encouraging part? Well, the MRI Leonard had on Monday was clean in that it showed no injury or structural damage. This wasn’t a case where there was a collision or a pop or the joint buckled on him. 

This is Leonard and the Raptors' reality: his knees have been through a lot, and sometimes they swell. It’s wear-and-tear — perhaps you’re familiar with the concept if you are a certain age and if you’re not, you will be — and it typically clears up with rest and treatment, which is what Leonard will be doing for the next week or so until he’s reevaluated. 

Optimistically, it means that the earliest the Raptors will have Leonard back in uniform will be in two weeks' time — a week off followed by a week of reconditioning — but it could be more given he was going through a gradual reconditioning process when his knee acted up in the first place. 

If he returns in two weeks, he’ll have missed seven games and could conceivably be back........

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