So, I've had a little more time to contemplate this, and I have a couple more explicative thoughts. In fact, I heard something earlier today that crystallized for me exactly why this whole notion of the "humble superstar" is completely bogus:
I mean, First of All™, I'll simply repeat that it's impossible for anyone to be as good at anything as Kawhi Leonard is at playing basketball, and also be humble. Im.Poss.I.Ble. You can't do it. Nobody can do it. If anything, humility is an active impediment to achieving that level of greatness. Like, I've heard it said before, in a snarky manner, but I happen to agree with it, anyway: show me someone who's humble, and I'll show you someone who's not actually good at anything. What I think people actually want is for athletes to not go out of their way to tell you how great they are, because, when someone who is not great hears someone who is great talk about how great they are, it tends to remind us about how great we are not. So sportsball fans want their athletes to keep their thoughts about their own greatness to themselves, so as not to rub the fans' noses in their own relative lack of greatness. Which, I mean, mileage varies on how important that is to each fan, but that's not what humility is, either way.
And second of all, the way that people, in the aggregate, consume sports-as-entertainment tends to be 65 percent tribalism, and 35 percent wish fulfillment. We (and this is the part that helped crystallize my thoughts for me) like to live vicariously through these athletes, so we create a need for them to be "blank slates," so to speak, so that we can project our own personalities onto them. We don't want them to ever say anything about anything, unless it's just empty platitudes and inspirational clichés. And the better they are at sportsball, the more we need them to be blank slates. That's one of the reasons, aside from being Not!LeBron, why the "humble mumbler" Derrick Rose became so popular during his MVP season. At that point, he had revealed virtually nothing about his actual personality: the only two things we knew about him were that he was really good at basketball, and he was loyal to his hometown, which made him the perfect avatar through which a sportsball fan could see themselves reflected. And it wasn't really until Rose started to reveal some of his actual personality that people started to turn on him.
Same with Kevin Durant: he got to dine out, for a long time, on being Not!LeBron, just by going out of his way to not reveal any of his personality. We only like for athletes to show personality when their personalities are in line with our own sensibilities. When an athlete's personality turns out to contravene whatever it is that we ride for, then we criticize their lack of humility, their character, in general, and whatever else. And whatever professional failures they have, we ascribe to whatever aspect of their personality that we don't like: if you argue with teammates, argue with coaches, argue with officials, and you don't win, then it's "You don't win, because you're a loser/malcontent/cancer/coach-killer/whiner/etc." But, if you do all of that stuff, and you do win, then you're just "competitive," or something.
And what happened in the Finals was a perfect confluence of the designated "humble" superstar "taking down" the un-humble superteam, because damned if our second-favorite thing in sports isn't seeing the not!humble being brought low, and "made" humble. My theory is that, on some guttural level, it feeds into all the bull**** we've been fed about the meek inheriting the earth, or whatever. I also think that there's something else at play, but that discussion is a little too close to the edge for this particular message board. But yeah, people need to believe that if they do everything "the right way" that, eventually, their ship will come in, and sports is a way of seeing that played out in real time, for a lot of us. But it only works if they can transpose their values and their beliefs onto the athletes, which they tend to find difficult if the athletes demonstrate anything resembling a personality.
Or, in other words, a "lack" of "humility."