It’s the question of the moment in the dog days of this pandemic NBA season, and it’s not a particularly flattering one. You watch a team and you wonder: Are they actually trying to win?
Down the stretch of a compressed schedule filled with too many games in not enough days, the answer isn’t always obvious. The Raptors are the top-of-mind case in point. You don’t need teamwide lie-detector tests to know there have been times when Toronto’s NBA squad has given something less than its full organizational push to the small matter of maximizing its chances at wins this spring.