What's Cris Carter's Connection to Kawhi Leonard?
Former NFL player and current FS1 First Things First host Cris Carter believes Kawhi Leonard will make a free agency decision Friday.
"For Kawhi, this is about championships and which organization are going to support me and my quest to be the best player in the world and get as many championships as possible," Carter said on the show Friday. "To me, the only team that presents that are the Los Angeles Lakers. ... I believe there's going to be an announcement [Friday]."
Leonard helped win this year's NBA Finals with the Raptors over the Warriors, and his free agency decision has left fans hanging as he has held off an announcement. Along with the Raptors, the Lakers and Clippers are in the mix to sign the NBA Finals MVP.
So what's Carter's connection to Leonard? His former agent, Mitch Frankel, represents the Toronto star.
In January, Sports Illustrated's Jacob Feldman asked Carter how he thinks about the competition as he measures himself.
"I don't think about competition. I don't.
I measure myself based on the bosses and what are our objectives every day, and based on some of the other sports I can bring my sources in on—the stories I’ve been involved in.
Kawhi Leonard, was he going to leave San Antonio? I said, he was definitely going to leave. Or recently Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan fans—Harbaugh saying he never wants to leave Michigan. I don't believe that to be true, based on what my sources tell me. So I think that I have a different measuring stick.
You can't always appropriate being an athlete to everything that you do. As an athlete some of the things I learned were persevering, working with teammates, things like that, but I don't have an athletic mentality going about doing my job no more than you do."
The 15th overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft, Leonard spent seven seasons with the San Antonio Spurs before being traded to the Raptors prior to the 2018 season.
