Kevin Love is 27 years old, and until this week, he hadn’t lost a playoff game. Now he’s lost two. The Toronto Raptors, meanwhile, had never won a Conference Finals game. Now they’ve won two. LeBron James has made it to five straight NBA Finals. Now he’s two losses from not making it to a sixth. And even if he does, the Toronto Raptors have made things way more difficult than many people—hello!—thought they ever would.
As much as we like to say that sports are unpredictable, most of the time they are. The best team doesn’t always win, but they usually do. And predicting that the best team will win, dismissing the lesser, is the easiest way to look like you know what you’re talking about. Because that prediction will likely eventually come true. The Cavaliers are still the favorites to reach the finals, they still have home court advantage. If they win Game Five at home, they’ll have two chances to win one. And if they manage that, the two wins the Toronto Raptors managed will be forgotten by everyone outside of Toronto. Everyone who expected the Cavs to win—which is nearly everyone—will have been proven correct. The way it happened won’t have mattered.
There must be a reason things didn’t go the way we thought they would. It can’t be because, you know, a 56-win team did something right.
But is that true? Somewhere along the line, our predictions become more important than reality. We cling to them. There are still people out there who say “live by the jumper, die by the jumper” about the Golden State Warriors, a team that won 140 games and an NBA title over the past two seasons. If the Warriors lose, professional doubters like Charles Barkley will claim to have seen this coming all along, despite their successes along the way. And if the Raptors lose, these two wins won’t have counted for anything.
All of this is patently false, yet we all continue to do it. Most of us do, anyway. OK, I do. We construct narratives in our head, then force reality to adapt to them. It comes out in the way that we talk about games, saying one team “dropped” a game rather than another team won it. There must be a reason things didn’t go the way we thought they would. It can’t be because, you know, a 56-win team did something right.
Whatever happens in the rest of this Eastern Conference Finals, the Toronto Raptors have arrived. Wait, see, I’m even doing it now. They’ve been here all along. And they’ve never considered themselves to just be another part of the Cleveland Cavaliers story. Asked by The (Toronto) Star columnist Bruce Arthur when he started to believe, All-Star guard Kyle Lowry negated the very premise of the question: “I believe every day,” said Lowry. “I believe every time I work out in the summertime. I never don’t believe.”
Lowry has been the stubborn piece of reality in this series, the toughest guy (non-LeBron division) to stop or even quiet. He’s the Raptors all-time leader in 35-plus point playoff games now, and the team’s undisputed leader. “Kyle, he’s a little pit bull,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey told NBA.com’s Steve Aschburner. “You question him, that’s when he rises to the occasion.”
Lowry was questioned heavily after Games 1 and 2, when he posted consecutive 4-14 shooting nights and hit just one of his 15 three-point attempts. The Raptors were going down in flames, just like the Pistons and Hawks before them. Until they weren’t. Lowry scored 20 in Game 3, 35 in Game 4.
The series goes back to Cleveland now, all even at two, with the Cavaliers facing the closest thing to a must-win game they’ve faced all year. Bismack Biyombo is playing like he’s in a contract year (oh wait, he is), fellow All-Star DeMar DeRozan is playing like he’s looking for a max deal (oh wait, he is). Drake is feverishly looking for new photos to turn into memes.
It’s been said that a series doesn’t really start until a team wins on the road. That tired old trope isn’t true either. A series starts when it starts. And the Toronto Raptors haven’t just arrived. They’ve been here all along.
