“You know, once I got together with my team and we put the pros and cons down, it was never about winning a championship,” Leonard said to Yahoo Sports. “It was about what the future has to hold. And for me, myself and my family, that's what type of decision I had to make. It’s no discredit to Toronto, I just wanted to play at home. I wanted to do that before I got traded.Like Paul said, our families are able to come to games. But just from my own thinking, it’s like we're in the NBA and I played eight years already. Eight years can fly by so fast, and we’re not able to do anything with [our families] eight or nine months of the season.
“So once the summer comes, you got three months to either go see family, train and do your other business obligations. There’s really no time to see them, to see your family. I love my family. Over the last five or six years, I’ll go back home and see my family, my nieces and nephews, and they’re talking, playing, shooting basketballs, and I’m like, ‘Dang, I missed all this. Y’all talking already. What? You’re doing this?’ So it’s like, ‘Man, where the hell have I been?’ It feels like you been in a matrix or something."
“For me, it was a family situation more so than a basketball decision. Basketball is going to be here long without me, so I feel like when we’re here, we just have to make sure we share it with our loved ones, and that’s one of the big reasons why I came to the Clippers.”
