You'll always be The Hand to me

Approximate size of sugar packet relative to The Hand

Okay, "Sugar K. Leonard" is indeed a good nickname.  But c'mon, Shaq.  Let's be frank.  We don't need a pretty good nickname for Kawhi.  We already have a freaking badass one.

Perhaps this is just a way to draw attention to just how amazing Kawhi Leonard is.  Kudos to Shaq for trying to give him some love.  And no one understands the power of such a move than Shaq.  He's "Shaq," after all.  He's remade himself several times over in ways similar to that. He just thinks that way.  And it's not the worst idea in the world to do so.

What's interesting about the new name though is that its many connotations provoke analysis of his game as much as sum it up.  It's a nickname that, like all nicknames, tries to define Kawhi's style.  But it also asks us to take apart that style, because it tries to bring out something in Kawhi's game that is really interesting to bring out.

It first tries to bring out something of Kawhi's potential.  The parallel to Sugar Ray Leonard isn't unapt, and to accomplish it by means of the simple abbreviation of Kawhi's first name is truly a stroke of genius.  The name was given to Ray Leonard in a similar way, with a gesture back to Sugar Ray Robinson, on on the basis of his promise as a boxer--and there are few players in the NBA who have a more promising career ahead of them than Kawhi.

But more than that, like with the original Sugar Ray Robinson, it is meant to bring out something about the athlete's finesse.  Like a boxer, his game involves as much touch and accuracy as fierceness and domination. Sweetness gets at the elements of precision in his game, in a way that "The Hand" may not, and it also stresses his offensive powers more than his defensive ones.

But "The Hand" is still so much more what Kawhi is.  No one hits the glass, paws rebounds away from bigger men, and then rockets down the court like him.  The "Sugar K." too implies something like smoothness, and that simply just isn't what Kawhi is.  He moves jerkily, aggressively along the court, and the impression one gets continually watching him is that he'll outwork you more than he'll outstyle you.  Behind each step is quiet intense effort, more than any sort of slickness, and the final result is more like silent domination and control--an invisible hand--than swagger.

But there is indeed sweetness in his game.  It is in the genuineness of this effort.  It's visible in everything he does.  There's something pure about Kawhi's work on the court, something which combined with his unprotesting willingness to do many of the less desirable tasks on the court, gives it a kind of innocence.  Combine with this his relative silence and directness--more exaggerated than real--off the court, and you get the near-adorable Kawhi we find in the great HEB commercials.

Perhaps there's no purer version of this Kawhi than in "Tough Talk" one.  Here everyone on the team promotes a protein after-workout drink in the typical manly way we'd expect of a protein-drink commercial.  But Kawhi is unable to engage in such aggressive rhetoric:

He can't but be honest.

In the "Laundry Sorting" commercial--

--when Kawhi is able to pick up an entire load of laundry and palm it in his hand, and the whole team looks in wonder, and Manu says the memorable phrase "It's like you are part bear!!" he's alluding to something almost utterly simple about Kawhi's game, something completely endearing about the essence of his skill as a player and how he uses it, and which is the other side of The Hand as a nickname.  It's an image of Kawhi that suggests he plays almost without any comprehension of the ways that others, given his talent, would artfully use it.  His big bearlike hands dominate--but they do so naturally, almost as if he didn't want them to do so so intensely, so thoroughly.

This image of this type of innocence is one we find often in sports.  It's a fantasy about athleticism in general: that it isn't acquired but in a way simply given naturally to some individuals.  It's a fantasy about how that athleticism is developed: purely by the cultivation of good intentions, rather than through grueling hard work and repetition and boring, but essential, training.  Ultimately it is a fantasy about the use of that talent: that utter dominance itself of a game of whatever sort (whether it be on the court or in life) is in truth a good thing, a natural thing.  And it isn't entirely wrong, just because it is a myth.

I find this a much more appealing image of Kawhi than the one that "Sugar K." conjures up, and a riskier and almost more daring one too.  What also comes with Shaq's nickname is the expectation that Kawhi will not just dominate through dedication, within a role or outside of it, but through star-player sort of fireworks.  People have been wondering whether Kawhi--undoubtedly the future leader of the Spurs franchise--should demonstrate something of this flash or simply stay where he is.

As The Hand, however, all we want from Kawhi is that he dominate as he usually does--The Hand is something like the effect as well as the cause, and we don't quite know how it came about except through the sheer athleticism of his body.  The Spurs play this up with his other nickname, "Whi," which conjures up its helpless homonym: players often refer to many of his plays as "Whi" plays, as in "Why did he do that!!?"  They don't know exactly why he did what he did, and he might not know himself, but they trust him to do it. With The Hand, similarly, we are about what he is, and about his own capabilities, we feel that uses them all the more genuinely--that he simply is them.  He simply has The Hand, is The Hand: he's a part of himself that he doesn't quite get.  As Sugar K., he may be taking on the identity of a person larger than who he is already--with the name comes a history, a legacy, of greatness, which isn't quite his like his hand is.  We have to remember that Shaq above all loves glory and fame.  It's not clear that this is what Kawhi would like.

At the same time, the capaciousness of however we decide to define the "sugar" also makes the name appealing.  And fundamentally expecting sweetness from a player, expecting a certain taste, isn't the same as expecting something like a show.  This might allow that ambivalent state Kawhi inhabits between role player and dominant third banana to develop.  For me though, he'll always be The Hand.