Kawhi Leonard is officially returning to the Toronto Raptors.

After a months-long delay, the NBA approved a trade between the Raptors and Los Angeles Clippers on Monday that sent Leonard back to Toronto where he won an NBA championship in 2019.

All-star forward Brandon Ingram, guard Gradey Dick, unprotected first-round picks in 2031 and 2033, a 2027 first-round pick swap and two second-round picks are going to L.A. in return.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Kawhi back to Toronto,” said Raptors general manager and executive vice-president Bobby Webster. “His impact on our organization, our city, and our country is undeniable, and he embodies the competitiveness and championship mindset that we value.

“We believe his leadership, experience and talent will help us as we continue building toward our next championship.”

The deal was paused while the NBA investigated Leonard and the Clippers for salary-cap circumvention.

The league completed its investigation on Sept. 2, fining Leonard US$700,000 but declined to suspend him or void his contract.

The NBA was much harder on the Clippers.

They were stripped of five first-round picks from 2029 through 2033 and the team was fined $30 million after an independent investigation found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and president of business operations Gillian Zucker were suspended for one year, while president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank was suspended for six months.

Leonard is expected to speak with reporters on Sept. 28 at Toronto’s media day.

Although the deal had not been officially submitted to the league while the investigation was underway, Leonard, Ingram and Dick tried to participate with their new teams as much as NBA rules allowed.

Leonard sat in the front row at Kyle Lowry’s July 7 news conference at Toronto’s OVO Athletic Centre, where Lowry announced he would retire as a member of the Raptors. Ingram attended a Clippers summer league game in Las Vegas on July 10.

The 35-year-old Leonard averaged 27.9 points, 6.3 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 1.9 steals and 0.4 blocks per game last season for the Clippers in 2025-26.

Leonard is a seven-time All-Star, seven-time All-NBA selection, a two-time NBA champion (with San Antonio in 2014 and Toronto in 2019) and is generally considered one of the game’s top defensive players. He joins a Raptors team that had the fifth-best defensive rating in the league last season.

Ingram averaged 21.5 points, 5.6 rebounds and 3.7 assists in his one season in Toronto, but was injured 11 minutes into Game 5 of the Raptors’ first-round playoff series against the Cleveland Cavaliers. He underwent right heel surgery on May 8.

Dick took a step back in his third NBA season, averaging 14 minutes per game in 2025-26, averaging six points, 1.9 rebounds and 0.7 assists, all career lows.

“We also want to thank Brandon and Gradey and appreciate their work ethic, character, and basketball excellence they brought to our team every day,” said Webster.

Leonard was the central player in the Raptors’ 2019 championship run, but spent just one season with the club before joining his hometown Clippers as a free agent.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 14, 2026.

TORONTO – Kawhi Leonard is officially returning to the Toronto Raptors.

After a months-long delay, the NBA approved a trade between the Raptors and Los Angeles Clippers on Monday that sent Leonard back to Toronto where he won an NBA championship in 2019.

All-star forward Brandon Ingram, guard Gradey Dick, unprotected first-round picks in 2031 and 2033, a 2027 first-round pick swap and two second-round picks are going to L.A. in return.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Kawhi back to Toronto,” said Raptors general manager and executive vice-president Bobby Webster. “His impact on our organization, our city, and our country is undeniable, and he embodies the competitiveness and championship mindset that we value.

“We believe his leadership, experience and talent will help us as we continue building toward our next championship.”

The deal was paused while the NBA investigated Leonard and the Clippers for salary-cap circumvention.

The league completed its investigation on Sept. 2, fining Leonard US$700,000 but declined to suspend him or void his contract.

The NBA was much harder on the Clippers.

They were stripped of five first-round picks from 2029 through 2033 and the team was fined $30 million after an independent investigation found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and president of business operations Gillian Zucker were suspended for one year, while president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank was suspended for six months.

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Leonard is expected to speak with reporters on Sept. 28 at Toronto’s media day.

Although the deal had not been officially submitted to the league while the investigation was underway, Leonard, Ingram and Dick tried to participate with their new teams as much as NBA rules allowed.

Leonard sat in the front row at Kyle Lowry’s July 7 news conference at Toronto’s OVO Athletic Centre, where Lowry announced he would retire as a member of the Raptors. Ingram attended a Clippers summer league game in Las Vegas on July 10.

The 35-year-old Leonard averaged 27.9 points, 6.3 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 1.9 steals and 0.4 blocks per game last season for the Clippers in 2025-26.

Leonard is a seven-time All-Star, seven-time All-NBA selection, a two-time NBA champion (with San Antonio in 2014 and Toronto in 2019) and is generally considered one of the game’s top defensive players. He joins a Raptors team that had the fifth-best defensive rating in the league last season.

Ingram averaged 21.5 points, 5.6 rebounds and 3.7 assists in his one season in Toronto, but was injured 11 minutes into Game 5 of the Raptors’ first-round playoff series against the Cleveland Cavaliers. He underwent right heel surgery on May 8.

Dick took a step back in his third NBA season, averaging 14 minutes per game in 2025-26, averaging six points, 1.9 rebounds and 0.7 assists, all career lows.

“We also want to thank Brandon and Gradey and appreciate their work ethic, character, and basketball excellence they brought to our team every day,” said Webster.

Leonard was the central player in the Raptors’ 2019 championship run, but spent just one season with the club before joining his hometown Clippers as a free agent, signing a three-year $103 million contract that off-season.

After opting out of the final year of that contract, Leonard re-signed with the Clippers in August 2021 to a max four-year, $176.3 million contract with the fourth year being a player option. He missed the entire 2021-22 season, however, with a partial ACL tear in his right knee.

That 2021 contract was the deal the NBA scrutinized after allegations emerged in September 2025 that Leonard signed a $28 million “no-show” endorsement deal with Aspiration, an environmental company that entered bankruptcy in March 2025 after co-founder Joe Sanberg was arrested and charged with fraud.

The alleged deal did not require any action on Leonard’s part, other than remaining with the Clippers.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 14, 2026.

Sully’s Boxing Gym in Toronto, where Chuvalo trained during his career, confirmed his death in a social media post Saturday. The gym said Chuvalo died on his 89th birthday.

“Today, Sully’s lost a piece of its history,” the gym said.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford also paid tribute to Chuvalo, calling him “a heavyweight boxing legend, a family friend and a Canadian icon.”

“My thoughts are with all of George’s family and loved ones as we mourn his passing,” Ford said in a social media post.

Chuvalo was a Canadian amateur champion at 17, held the national title as a pro for almost 20 years and was ranked as high as No. 2 in the world.

He was 73-18-2 as a pro with 64 knockouts in a pro career that stretched from 1956 to 1978.

His career was defined by two mega-bouts with Muhammad Ali, in 1966 at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens and 1972 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, in which Chuvalo drew kudos for standing toe-to-toe with the most gifted and charismatic boxer of the era.

“When people think of me, they think of me fighting Muhammad,” Chuvalo said. “But I had close to 100 fights.”

Known for having one of the best chins in boxing, Chuvalo pointed out that it took more than the ability to absorb punches to record 73 wins and rank in the top 10 in the world in an age of heavyweight greats like Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.

Chuvalo took pride in noting he had more knockouts than Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey, while also exceeding the total number of fights that Ali, Frazier, Rocky Marciano and Mike Tyson had.

Before retiring in 1978, Chuvalo wrote in his 2013 autobiography “Chuvalo: A Fighter’s Life: The Story of Boxing’s Last Gladiator, “I’ll be remembered as a guy who fought the best of his time, beat a lot of them and lost to some others.”

He was never knocked down as a pro.

“Not in the ring, anyway,” he says. “Outside the ropes has been a different story.”

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Chuvalo lost three sons and his first wife Lynne to drugs and suicide.

“If you added up every punch I ever took and then multiplied the total by 10,000, it wouldn’t begin to equal the pain of losing three sons and a wife to drugs and suicide,” he wrote.

As for his fights with Ali, the American legend made most opponents look slow and predictable, but he could not finish Chuvalo, even though the stocky fighter who liked to get in close and work the body had only 17 days’ notice to prepare.

“They had a contest between a bull and a bumblebee at Maple Leaf Gardens last night,” Toronto Star columnist Milt Dunnell wrote at the time. Dunnell would add, “The bull came out of it with his face looking like a bucket of balls at a golf driving range.”

Ali went a full 15 rounds for the first time and had to go to the hospital for internal bleeding, while Chuvalo said, “I went dancing with my wife.”

When it came to his payday, Chuvalo said he ended up with $12,500, as manager Irving Ungerman took the lion’s share of the $49,000 purse, after expenses.

Chuvalo would also lose a rematch to Ali six years later by 12-round decision.

Despite the defeats, the Ali fights made Chuvalo a star in Canada and in the boxing world as the tough, unrelenting underdog.

“Icon — that’s the only way I can describe George Chuvalo,” said Lennox Lewis, a Canadian boxing star of another generation.

“He gave as good as he got, and then some,” reads Chuvalo’s Canada Sports Hall of Fame bio. “George Chuvalo was an extraordinary fighter and competitor — inside and outside of the boxing ring.”

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Chuvalo was the son of Croat immigrants.

His mother worked in Toronto as a chicken plucker at Royce Poultry Packers, owned by Ungerman’s father, Chuvalo’s future manager. His father was a cattle skinner at Canada Packers.

George said he was drawn to boxing as a boy after seeing a copy of The Ring, a magazine known as “the Bible of boxing.” He egged his mother to get him boxing gloves, which she eventually bought at Eaton’s department store.

He found a local church that offered boxing training and had his first organized fight at age 10, an exhibition bout declared a draw. He eventually joined a boxing club and by 15 was a 198-pound heavyweight.

He fought 19 times as an amateur, losing just once. In May 1995, he knocked out Peter Piper in Regina to win the Canadian amateur title.

Chuvalo was chosen to represent Canada at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne but turned pro instead.

He went on to become a five-time Canadian heavyweight champion, back when that title still counted, and held it for most of his 20-year pro career.

He lost a World Boxing Association championship bout to Ernie Terrell in 1965, a fight he always felt was fixed by mobsters.

A frequent fighter at Madison Square Garden during that time, going 3-6 against top pugilists like Frazier, Foreman, Floyd Patterson and Buster Mathis. The Ring named his bloody 1965 encounter with Patterson fight of the year.

2:36 Long-forgotten film of Muhammad Ali in B.C.

He hoped to challenge for the Commonwealth title, but could not convince English champion Henry Cooper to fight him. He felt the Canadian Boxing Federation also let him down by not insisting that Cooper face him.

His last bout was a TKO win over George Jerome, a logging camp cook from Vancouver, who was the No. 1 contender in Canada, in December 1978 at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market to retain the Canadian title. Chuvalo was 41 and made just $7,500 for the bout.

A bloody Jerome lasted two rounds before the ring doctor stepped in.

Out of the ring, Chuvalo was a big, friendly man who loved telling stories and making jokes. But his painful moments were almost beyond imagination.

In 1985, his son Jesse, who began using painkillers after an accident and developed an addiction, committed suicide. In 1993, another son, Georgie Lee, died of a drug overdose. Four days later, his wife was found dead with a suicide note.

Then, in 1996, his son Steven was found dead in a hotel room with a needle in his arm.

“After Steven died, I was barely able to function,” Chuvalo wrote in Toronto Life in 2013. “I felt like I was suffocating every time I went to sleep in the dark.

“I blamed myself for my sons’ deaths — for letting them quit high school, for not putting them in rehab earlier.”

He remarried to Joanne O’Hara and began visiting schools across Canada to deliver an anti-drug message. He had two remaining children and said he turned to “mush” whenever he saw his grandchildren.

Chuvalo, inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1990 and the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1997, was named to the Order of Canada in 1998.

Canada added him to its Walk of Fame in 2005.

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A statue of Chuvalo was erected in his family’s ancestral home in Ljubuski, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 2011.

Some 24 years after his induction into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, Chuvalo took part in a new conference at Mattamy Athletic Centre, site of the old Gardens, honouring the 2014 inductees — and the bell he answered 15 times against Ali some 48 years earlier.

Chuvalo, then 77, rang the bell, gave the crowd a thumbs-up and then shadowboxed.

“I get reminded of it just about every day of the week,” he said of his first fight with Ali. “That makes me very, very proud to be a Canadian.”

The bell was donated to the Hall of Fame by Michael Shillolo, whose father, Frank Shillolo, used to be the official bellman for the Ontario Athletics Commission.

EDMONTON – An online petition calling on the Edmonton Oilers to reverse the signing of Alex Formenton had collected more than 19,000 signatures as of Friday morning.

The petition was started by longtime Oilers superfan Mary Loewen, known as “Mama Stanley,” who said this week she would no longer support the team while Formenton remains on the roster.

The Oilers signed Formenton to a one-year, US$850,000 contract Wednesday. He was one of five former Canadian world junior players acquitted last year of sexual assault charges stemming from an encounter with a woman after a 2018 Hockey Canada gala in London, Ont.

“We acknowledge clearly and without qualification that Alex Formenton was acquitted in court in 2025. This petition does not challenge that verdict, nor does it declare him guilty,” the petition says.

“A criminal trial determines whether the Crown proved criminal charges beyond a reasonable doubt. It does not require fans, survivors, sponsors, or community members to support every employment and roster decision made afterward.”

The Oilers have defended the signing, citing Formenton’s acquittal and reinstatement by the NHL and Hockey Canada, along with what the team called a “lengthy due diligence process.”

In an email to fans, the team’s ticketing and customer service department said the organization reviewed the legal proceedings, the NHL and Hockey Canada processes and “all of the information available” before making its decision.

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The Oilers said they also spoke directly with Formenton and others close to the matter and were “comfortable providing Alex with the opportunity to return to the NHL as a member of the Edmonton Oilers.”

“Alex is grateful for the opportunity and, like every Oilers player, he is expected to uphold the standards and expectations of our organization,” the team wrote. “The Edmonton Oilers remain committed to fostering a respectful, professional and positive environment for our players, staff and fans.”

The NHL reinstated Formenton and the four other players last year, allowing them to resume playing beginning Dec. 1, 2025. NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said this week that Formenton faced no additional league requirements before signing with Edmonton.

An independent appeal board ruled last month that all five players breached Hockey Canada’s code of conduct. Formenton, however, was the only one eligible for immediate reinstatement from suspension from Hockey Canada-sanctioned programs.

The board recommended continued bans for Carter Hart, Dillon Dube, Cal Foote and Michael McLeod.

Hart signed with the Vegas Golden Knights last season and helped the team reach the Stanley Cup final, while Dube signed with the St. Louis Blues in July.

Formenton, 26, spent three of the previous four seasons playing in Switzerland and the other out of hockey. The Barrie, Ont., native had 23 goals and 16 assists in 109 NHL games with the Ottawa Senators before leaving the league.

“It was a difficult road,” Formenton said Wednesday. “It was tough on my family and me personally. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be here today and I’m looking forward to making the most out of it.”

Loewen has supported the Oilers since the team’s championship years in the 1980s and in recent seasons became a familiar presence at games dressed as a sequined Stanley Cup.

The petition calls on the Oilers to take “every lawful and contractually available step” to reverse the signing. It also asks the organization to explain publicly how the decision was made and adopt survivor-informed standards for future signings.

The Formenton signing is the Oilers’ second high-profile move this off-season involving a figure with a controversial recent history.

Edmonton general manager Stan Bowman hired Mike Babcock as head coach in June after the NHL cleared the move. Babcock had not coached an NHL game in seven years and had resigned from the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2023 before coaching a game with the team amid an investigation into reports he invaded players’ privacy.

Bowman’s own hiring in 2024 also drew scrutiny. He had resigned as general manager of the Chicago Blackhawks in 2021 after an independent investigation found the organization mishandled allegations that a video coach sexually assaulted player Kyle Beach. The NHL reinstated Bowman shortly before Edmonton hired him.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2026.