Nick Nurse found out that Kawhi Leonard was leaving for the Los Angeles Clippers while he was in Las Vegas, taking in a show featuring a Prince impersonator. As Nurse explained to Rachel Nichols of ESPN, he got the news mid-performance, and decided that there was no point in getting bummed out while he was at the show.
Thanks to a new piece by ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan, we now know exactly what happened that led to Nurse getting this news. Nurse, who was at the show with Raptors assistant Nate Bjorkgren, got a text from Leonard himself, one that left no room for interpretation on what was happening.
It was too loud to hear their phones as the song hit its crescendo, but both Nurse and Bjorkgren had their cells on vibrate. Instinctively, they reached for their pockets, as manufactured purple haze from the Vegas extravaganza swallowed them.
Nurse looked down. The text message simply read, “I’m going home.”
Kawhi Leonard was gone.
There is something hilariously appropriate, considering all we know about the soft-spoken Leonard, that Nurse got the news via a three-word text that was both simple and straightforward. It’s certainly not a bad way for Leonard to have gone about this, especially because it happened while the Prince impersonator was doing “Purple Rain,” so at least Nurse got to put his phone back in his pocket and enjoy an extremely good song.
