It is as I feared: almost all of these assists are to Serge Ibaka, and none of them are to Kawhi Leonard. Why does Fred VanVleet hate Kawhi? It may not seem like he does, because there are no locker-room reports of fights involving or not involving punching, there are no attacks through the media, there are no passive-aggressive tweets, nothing. But the stats do not lie. They are stats. They literally cannot be made to lie, and what they say is that out of 159 assists for VanVleet this year, only 12 of them are to Kawhi.
I shouldn’t have to remind you that Kawhi is the Raptors’ best player (sorry Siakam), and thus should be receiving approximately 50 percent of assists from all sources.
Meanwhile, VanVleet has assisted Ibaka 42 times already this season. That means, and remember, we’re looking only at the stats which only tell truth and never lies, that means that he likes Ibaka three times more than Kawhi. If not more. Now, there may be explanations like “Kawhi is more of a one-on-one scorer” or “Ibaka just shoots open midrange jumpers all the time”, but those explanations are insufficient to capture the pure hatred that VanVleet holds for Kawhi.