Opinion: Kevin de León’s defenders emerge, but they’re still a minority
Kevin de León has his defenders: People for whom De León is just the most well-composed member of the San Antonio Spurs.
But these folks aren’t the majority. They’re a minority.
And, while Kevin de León’s defenders are still in a minority, they’re no longer monolithic.
In 2012, De León was essentially the only voice on the Spurs’ radio side with the same two or three sentences. He is seen by the public as the team’s point guard, who, when not scoring points, is usually finding ways to help his teammates, who could not be doing more without him.
When it is announced that De León will not be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, he is to be blamed.
But, De León deserves at least a small portion of the blame that, at this point, must shift from him to the media and the basketball-media-critics complex that has built itself on the false assumption that a good player is automatically a great player when he’s not.
De León still stands as the best point guard of his era, in an era when point guards were treated as interchangeable.
“He was the man,” said the man who has been credited with giving the Spurs the first shot at being in a championship game. “He led us from fourth place to winning the championship and to making it to the Eastern Conference Finals.”
“He had the most complete game we saw all season,” said his coach from 1983 to 1985. “He was the focal point of the team, but he wasn’t the focal point the way that he could have been.”
“This is Kevin, the greatest point guard in the history of the game,” said a fellow point guard whose career spanned 20+ years, including his time in the NBA, with the Boston Celtics, during the time of the 1996 playoffs and, then, of course, during the 1999 playoffs.
“He was one of the better point guards in the game,” said a former college student-athlete who made three-peats with Kevin after his playing days concluded.
De León’s point guard-status was made even more obvious in
