The Raptors, Warriors and stakes of a regular season game

The Warriors are not in a great place right now. Since the loss of Stephen Curry to a hip injury earlier this month, the Warriors have limped to a 5-5 record. More worrying is the fact that, even in the games they’ve won, they have had to repeatedly come back and fight for single-digit victories against teams like the Hawks, Kings, and Magic. Apart from commanding victories against the Nets and Blazers, Golden State has looked like a team struggling for playoff contention more than one hoping to win its third championship in a row. Of course, no one’s really worried and no one should be. It’s not like the team is at full strength and still struggling to keep Terrence Ross in check. In addition to Curry’s injury, Draymond Green has also missed nine of the last eleven games due to suspension and a nagging toe injury and DeMarcus Cousins has yet to play a game.

Regardless of the fact that we can easily figure out what they are struggling, we still like to look for flaws in the Warriors. It’s a way of reassuring ourselves that, despite their apparent inevitability, another ending to the season is possible. And there’s plenty of issues there if you look closely enough. They fall too easily into isolation offensively, which leads to stagnation and a lack of ball movement; they are subpar defensively for long stretches and turn the ball over an obscene amount; Iguodala is showing signs of age while Steve Kerr’s lineups occasionally defy any and all logic. These problems range from the merely less than ideal to the actually worrisome, though if I were a Warriors fan, it’d be hard to imagine any of them truly concerning me.

The Warriors could play .500 basketball for the rest of the season and barely make the playoffs, but barring a catastrophic injury to one of their All-Stars, they would still remain the presumptive favorites, which sort of implies that no matter how good any other team plays or appears to be throughout the regular season, that fans and analysts are going to be inherently skeptical of their chances to unseat Golden State next spring. We saw something similar last year. All season, the Raptors looked deeper and more consistent than the Cavaliers, yet few felt comfortable picking them to defeat Cleveland in the Eastern Conference Semifinals due to Toronto’s previous playoff failings along with the idea that LeBron making the Finals was a bit of a predestined thing at that point. Right now, all the other contenders can do is try to close the gap, to make a future upset seem less shocking.

On Thursday night, the Raptors and the Warriors will play for the first time this season in what may very well be a preview of next summer’s NBA Finals. It’s a game that matters more for the Raptors than the Warriors, for if the Raptors win, it further proves that they are among the league’s elite teams, and quite likely the best team in a top-heavy Eastern Conference. If the Warriors win, though, it signifies little that we don’t already assume about them. And if they lose, well, they were missing Steph.

The Raptors, despite having more success the past few seasons than at any other time in franchise history are still fighting to be respected. The savviness and the intelligence of Masai Ujiri is acknowledged, as is the greatness of Kyle Lowry and Kawhi Leonard, along with their unbelievable depth, but there seems to be a belief that there’s some ineffable something missing from the team’s makeup, and that the changes that occurred in the offseason are not enough to shake off a shadow that haunts the team, preventing it from being a true title contender. I’m not immune to this line of thinking myself.

The Raptors could win 67 games this year, and I’d still feel a tad wary picking them to make the Finals, let alone win the title, even though I would not be able to elucidate why in any cogent or sensible way. When a team suffers from bad luck or silly misfortune enough, it no longer feels like random chance, but a tangible entity whose grasp they cannot escape, until the unexpected moment it finally happens. If the Raptors do defeat the Warriors on Thursday night, it will not have the force or impact of a full exorcism — they’ll have to wait a few more months before that possibility arises — but it will make such an event seem that much more likely to happen in the near future.

Of course, while this feeling is most pronounced with the Raptors due to a string of disappointing playoff performances, the same feeling would be true for pretty much every non-Warriors contender such as the Rockets, Bucks and Celtics. Honestly, even calling them contenders seems generous, like a nod to necessity more than reality. It’s as if it seems irresponsible to consider a team a legitimate threat to the Warriors until they actually beat them in a seven-game series, but we nevertheless need to believe in the possibility of it happening.

It’s hard to shake preconceptions about who you are. Even though they look thoroughly mediocre at the present moment, the Warriors are still title favorites, and even though the Raptors have looked like perhaps the best team in the NBA so far this season, few are ready to accept that possibility in spite of the evidence pointing to it. Hardly anyone will believe the Raptors are capable of making the Finals until they do and even fewer will believe the Warriors won’t win the championship next June until they walk off the court as another team celebrates around them. Thursday night’s game will either further ingrain those already present beliefs or go a little way towards making them a little less overwhelming.