The one truism about the NBA playoff series between the Raptors and Philadelphia 76ers that starts Saturday — any series, really — is that the numbers don’t really matter all that much.
You can break down possessions and who guarded whom in the past, dissect true shooting percentages and overall shooting percentages, defensive metrics and plus-minus and all the rest of the advanced data that purports to tell the story, and do with it what you will.
It doesn’t really matter because in a short series with adjustments and countermoves and ever-evolving rotations and groups of players on the court, what happened in the past has little to do with what will happen now.