It was a nearly impossible game to play, a shocking afternoon on which to try to summon the energy and emotion and intensity for a kid’s game.
It is to the credit of the Raptors and San Antonio Spurs that they were able to do it at all, to perform as professionally as they did in a 110-106 Toronto victory that was the team’s seventh in a row.
“Very difficult to play this game today,” Kyle Lowry said on the television broadcast from San Antonio immediately after the game. “We lost a legend.”
The death of NBA icon Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others in a helicopter crash just outside Los Angeles — news that broke not long before tipoff — cast a pall over the game and the sport.