There was a quiet moment — one of the few that any of the Toronto Raptors were able to have in a blurry, short summer of celebration — when it really hit home to Fred VanVleet.
The significance of what he’d done, what his team had done, how his improbable journey from undrafted suspect to Game 6 closer in the NBA Finals had unfolded.
It was a wonderful, liberating, validating moment that he hopes might propel him to even more sustained excellence.
“You can think stuff of yourself — and you always think the world of yourself and all this (stuff) — but to go through it and do it, to prove it to other people but also to prove it to yourself, that’s big sometimes,” the Raptors guard said this week.