Spurs forward Kawhi Leonard is having a tremendous season, triggering MVP talk among basketball purists. The soft-spoken Leonard has without fanfare become the best player on an extremely talented Spurs team, even with the new addition of LaMarcus Aldridge. Refreshingly, neither Leonard, Aldridge nor anyone else on the Spurs cares who the team’s best player is. Even so, Leonard’s accomplishments are getting harder to ignore.
With being named an All-Star starter for the first time, Leonard joins a very elite threesome who’ve earned a particularly rare triple honor: Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon are the only other players in NBA history to be named Defensive Player of the Year, Finals MVP and an NBA All-Star. Of course, the NBA only began giving out the Defensive Player of the Year Award in 1983. Otherwise Bill Russell, for whom the NBA Finals MVP Award is named, would be the leader of this elite group.
