Star forward and Most Valuable Player (MVP) of past NBA Finals Kawhi Leonard has allowed his current Toronto Raptors team to make one last offer before he becomes an unrestricted free agent.
Next week, Leonard, at his residence in Los Angeles, has planned a series of interviews with the managers of the teams that are interested in obtaining his services for the next season and among them he has allowed the presence of the Raptors, to who gave them their first league title this month.
The Raptors will come to the interview with the best economic offer that can be received in the NBA, such as the maximum contract that his current team can give him of 190 million dollars for five seasons.
While the rest of the NBA teams that want to sign him can not offer him more than four seasons and 141 million dollars.
Leonard, 27, has yet to comment on future plans, aside from confirming that he will become an unrestricted free agent as of July 1.
Apart from the economic offer that the Raptors have prepared for Leonard, they will also arrive with the confirmation that the Spanish center Marc Gasol will continue one more season with the Toronto team after having exercised the player option for 25.6 million dollars and not enter the free agent market.
Leonard, who was traded by the San Antonio Spurs to the Raptors when he still had two years left on his contract, does not plan to follow Gasol’s path, in terms of keeping the player option he has, his entry into the market of unrestricted free agents is a given.
For his part, the president of the Raptors, Masai Ujiri, at the beginning of weeks reported that he had communicated via text messages with Leonard and also spoke with his personal adviser, his uncle Dennis Robertson.
The Raptors manager said he felt confident that in the end Leonard could decide to stay with the Toronto team and recalled that he was still their star player and therefore all they had to do was “wait.” EFE