TORONTO — The last time Kawhi Leonard wore a Toronto Raptors uniform, he made the shot that ended the Philadelphia 76ers’ season, won the championship over Golden State, and then left. He said very little. He gave no farewell. He disappeared into a free agency summer that ended in Los Angeles, and the Raptors spent the next seven years rebuilding around what he left behind.
Monday, September 14, his trade from the Los Angeles Clippers became official. Seventeen days before the Raptors open their 2026-27 preseason at Quebec City’s Videotron Centre, Kawhi Leonard is legally, contractually, factually a Raptor again.
What nobody can tell you yet is whether his knees will hold up long enough for him to play the first NBA game that city has ever hosted.
That is the unresolved question wrapped around the most anticipated moment of Toronto’s preseason calendar. On October 3, the Raptors and the Miami Heat will meet at Videotron Centre in the first NBA game ever held in Quebec City, part of the league’s 2026 Canada Games presented by Bell. Giannis Antetokounmpo, who left Milwaukee for Miami in June and spent last week working through unofficial training sessions with Bam Adebayo and Klay Thompson, will be on the other bench. The league chose a better opening act for Quebec’s NBA debut than anyone who designed the schedule could have reasonably hoped.
The trade that makes Kawhi a Raptor again cost the organization Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, two unprotected first-round picks, a first-round pick swap and two second-rounders. It is not a cheap roster reconstruction. What Toronto believes it bought is the possibility of competing seriously in the Eastern Conference with a player whose two-way impact, when he is available, still does not have a peer in the sport.
The problem is the phrase when he is available. Over the last five seasons with the Clippers, Leonard appeared in 185 games, an average of 37 per season. His knees have defined his career as much as his defense ever did, and the Raptors absorbed that reality as a condition of the deal. The NBA handed the Clippers a record punishment of five first-round picks and a $30 million fine for salary cap violations tied directly to Leonard’s time in Los Angeles, clearing the bureaucratic path for the trade to finalize. Leonard spent the final days of that investigation training alone in Miami, officially still a Clipper, close enough to his future teammates to watch but not yet cleared to practice with them.
“Every time we wear the Raptors jersey, we’re representing the entire country,” Scottie Barnes said in a statement released by the team. “It’s important to us that fans from coast to coast have the chance to experience Raptors basketball, and we can’t wait to share those moments together this preseason in Quebec City and Vancouver.”
Barnes did not mention Leonard. He did not need to.
Quebec City built Videotron Centre partly in anticipation of an NHL franchise that has not returned since the Nordiques left for Colorado in 1995. What it got instead is the NBA’s 21st Canada Game since the league began staging them in 2012, and the first ever in Quebec City, making it the seventh Canadian city to host, according to the NBA’s official announcement. A province that spent three decades building an arena for a sport that would not have it gets two days with the one that will.
On the opposite sideline, Antetokounmpo offers his own chapter. His first competitive appearance in a Heat uniform will come at Videotron Centre, in a city that has no particular emotional attachment to either him or his new franchise. What Quebec City wants is basketball. What the NBA is delivering is two of the sport’s most recognizable names, on opposing benches, in a game that will be remembered more for what it was than for what happened in it.
The Heat’s training camp opens September 29 in Miami before the team travels north. At last week’s Giannis and Klay Thompson minicamp sessions in Miami, the new Heat configuration was already trying to compress the timeline of cohesion that superteams typically need, working intensively with Bam Adebayo to find the spacing and rhythm that wins in April.
A second preseason game follows October 10 in Vancouver, where the Raptors face the Clippers at Rogers Arena, the franchise that traded Kawhi, now stripped of five first-round picks, meeting the organization that benefited most from their punishment.
The regular season remains more than a month away. What happens at Videotron Centre on October 3 will not determine whether the Raptors or the Heat contend for anything. It will not resolve the question of Kawhi Leonard’s durability, or whether Giannis’s Miami gamble leads somewhere real.
But it will be the first NBA game ever played in Quebec City. Whoever lines up for tip-off, whether Kawhi is cleared, whether Giannis logs full minutes, whether the building sells out in the first place, will be part of something that does not come with a second chance at being first.
