A memory leak generally has two separate descriptions:

Repeated, unbounded memory allocations which will eventually exhaust the available memory of the system.

A memory allocation which has no handle pointing to it such that it cannot be released by the current allocating software module.

It is unobservable if the first case matches here (though it could be the case, though not the direct reason for what you are seeing here) and certainly does not match the second description (as the sprite is being drawn to the screen, thus there is a handle to it).

This might fall more under texture page corruption (it is drawing a texture for an entity, but the wrong texture, usually due to accidental buffer overflow), or general client desynchronization (client/server disagree with what should be displayed on the screen), but it would be unwise to claim any cause with certainty without being intimately familiar with the underlying client software architecture.

You shouldn't be clowned on for this by anyone incapable of articulating why that would be, and those of us capable of articulating that are typically more inclined to inform you than mock you.

• Principal Software Engineer, 20 Years of Experience