SAN FRANCISCO—If you go back far enough, Kyle Lowry was supposed to be Steve Nash. Not as a player, obviously. They are entirely different kinds of automobiles. But before the Toronto Raptors traded for Lowry in 2014, they offered then-38-year-old Steve Nash a three-year contract, all in. The Raptors wound up with a gentleman named Landry Fields on a three-year deal, for some reason. Mistakes were made.
Nash chose the Los Angeles Lakers, and then-GM Bryan Colangelo traded for Lowry instead. Lowry has been both the bulldog and the fire hydrant in Toronto — the attitude of the former, the shape of the latter, and occasionally the recipient of the same kind of, er, derision for no other reason than he was there.