Every Raptors-Cavs game this year has felt like being on the ground floor of something special. These teams, with their unconscionably good rookies Scottie Barnes and Evan Mobley, and their divergent but similarly rad supporting casts, are good now, and should be among the class of the East for a very, very long time.
And even though we’ve yet to see the Raptors and Cavs play one another at full strength in the Barnes / Mobley era, the sense that these are the early days of one of the NBA’s great rarities – a legit and compelling rivalry – has been inescapable, never more so than during Thursday’s 117-104 Toronto win that definitely had some playoff-like juice to it.