It was one of the great runs in recent Toronto sports history, and it left a mark. As the Raptors built themselves into an organization worthy of an NBA championship in 2019, they built an infrastructure that was the envy of the league.
You could call it a brand. You could call it a “culture,” which was the preferred term of team president Masai Ujiri and the CEO that brought him to Toronto, Tim Leiweke. You could call it, as Fred VanVleet did during Thursday’s post-mortem of Wednesday’s season-ending play-in loss, a “fabric.