The Raptors beat the Golden State Warriors, 114-110, in Game 6 of the Finals on Thursday to win the series, 4-2, with a commanding performance on the road in Oracle Arena’s last game to dethrone the league’s reigning dynasty and win the Raptors’ first title.
To hear “Toronto Raptors” and “NBA champions” in the same breath would’ve sounded like a hallucination to most fans for most of the franchise’s existence. This is the same team that once played in purple dinosaur uniforms. They couldn’t keep star players and couldn’t attract free agents. Toronto was too cold, too Canadian, too much unlike any other team in the league to compete at this level.
HEART OF A CHAMPION! @Klow7 | #WeTheNorth pic.twitter.com/VwMntkCuuI
— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) June 14, 2019
But now they have to declare the Larry O’Brien trophy at customs because of someone who has always been different himself.
There is no one in the NBA like Kawhi Leonard. He is quieter than every other player. He is also better. And he just put together one of the greatest playoff runs in the history of the league.
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And it wasn’t just him. Game 6 was not only a classic but a fittingly insane sendoff to this arena. There were about 47 minutes of pandemonium that came down to one final minutes of madness. The final shot was the one that everyone in the Bay Area would’ve begged for: a Stephen Curry 3-pointer for the win. He missed. The Warriors called a timeout that they didn’t have. And the Raptors won the championship.
Maybe the most insane part about it was who hit the biggest shots for the Raptors: Fred VanVleet. An undrafted guard who is generously listed at 6-feet tall, VanVleet scored 16 points in the second half. All of them were necessary for the Raptors to win a title.
Toronto’s season that ended in confetti began nearly a year ago in a hotel room in Kenya. That’s where Raptors president Masai Ujiri pulled the trigger on the trade that would change the future of his franchise.
His team was coming off the two winningest seasons in its history, but the Raptors kept crashing into a ceiling with an odd resemblance to LeBron James, and their city had become known by another name: LeBronto. Ujiri needed to make drastic changes. He’d already fired the league’s reigning coach of the year and hired Nick Nurse. Now it was time for him to get rid of the face of the franchise. By trading DeMar DeRozan for Leonard, the Raptors gambled on getting an even better player, and maybe even the best player in the world.
