Narratives can be exhausting. You can spend weeks building evidence, amounting stats, and yet that damn narrative will come back to bite you with one mis-step. All season, the Raptors have succeeded in spite of what some will say — regular season success is meaningless with this team, their past playoff embarrassments are what define them.
Yet, haven’t we chipped away at that? The Raptors came into tonight’s game against the pre-season favourites in the Eastern Conference — the Cleveland Cavaliers — ahead of them by 11.5 games in the standings. They dismantled them by 34 points before Cleveland retooled their roster at the trade deadline.