If we’ve come to know anything about the Raptors in the Kyle Lowry-DeMar DeRozan era, it’s that they almost never make things easy.
The best teams in the NBA pile up low-friction points sharing the ball and shooting threes. The Lowry-DeRozan Raptors have spent most of the past few years taking turns playing back-alley one-on-one and preferring hard twos. They’re contrarians by nature, underdogs by preference. Nobody ever forgets that Toronto GM Masai Ujiri almost blew up the Lowry-DeRozan era before it began because, the conventional wisdom was, you couldn’t win with those guys in the playoffs.
And yet, those guys have won in the playoffs .