Just like we all predicted in October, the Golden State Warriors are NBA champions! Wait, they aren’t? The Toronto Raptors won? Well, shit that’s awesome! How did that happen?
Let’s get this out of the way early, the Warriors were without Durant for all of 12 minutes and were without Klay for about half of the second half in game 6. Klay also got hurt earlier in the series causing him to miss time in game 2 and game 3 completely. You will hear a lot of people say that this championship has an asterisk next to it for the Raptors, I’m not one of those people. In sports, you play who is in front of you. Yes, the Warriors were missing two of their best players but they are still a very good team without them; they did not turn into the Phoenix Suns. Although, they did not have much shooting without Klay and KD, the team still played well and could have won every game in this series. So, stop it with the Raptors need an asterisk, it’s blasphemy!
Every single player who touched the court in this series was effective for the Raptors and none were afraid to let the shot fly. You saw in the Raptors-Bucks series that many Bucks’ players looked scared of the moment, the Raptors were the exact opposite. Fred VanVleet was fearless in this series. He hit timely threes with no hesitation and he was effective guarding Steph Curry, something I doubted in my finals preview. He even got one well deserved vote for Finals MVP!
Perhaps, the most effective Raptor was head coach, Nick Nurse. Employing a box and one defense for the first time all year in the NBA Finals against Steve Kerr’s Warriors takes some big time guts, but they needed it. For those who don’t know, the box and one is when one defender chases around the other team’s best player and the other four defenders are playing zone. It’s usually a risky proposition as you can get exposed to the three point shot and get attacked in the middle. With Steph being the only real perimeter threat without Klay and KD, there was no real risk to being exposed to the three ball and no one wants to play in the mid range so the Raptors didn’t have to worry about the middle either. In hindsight it was probably a relatively easy decision, but still a gamble that definitely paid off, a constant trend among these Raptors.
Last offseason, the Raptors made a difficult choice, the ultimate gamble, they traded the face of their franchise in Demar Derozan for an extremely possible one year rental, Kawhi Leonard. I think it’s safe to say now that no matter what happens with Kawhi, that trade was worth it. The now 2x Finals MVP brought the Raptors its first ever NBA championship and made basketball even more popular than it already is in Toronto. Being in Canada, Toronto is obviously known for hockey but this title is the first the city of Toronto won since 1967 when the Leafs won the Stanley Cup.
Toronto, in the NBA landscape, you started from the bottom…now you’re here.
