Let’s begin with a confession: Your alert correspondent was one of the savvy visionaries who picked the Raptors to beat the Magic in a sweep.
In shamefully re-examining my youthful stupidity of last week, let’s just say I was momentarily awed by a few factors. One was a rewatch of Kawhi Leonard’s most recent playoff appearance circa 2017. There was no better player on the planet on the day Leonard ran roughshod over the eventual champion Warriors in the opening throes of Game 1 of that Western final. His exit from the series on account of that ankle injury gave us one of the great “What if?