Everything is riding on Kawhi Leonard and Kevin Durant

Building the damn thing almost always takes longer than ripping it apart. The Toronto Raptors currently hold a 3-1 lead over the Golden State Warriors. A dynasty rests precariously in the balance; worlds stacked upon worlds as if they were turtles swimming inside of teacups.

The core of this Golden State team first reached the playoffs in 2013. Mark Jackson was the coach as opposed to Jeff Van Gundy’s dialectical life partner, and Andre Iguodala, the keeper of Steph Curry’s legacy, played for Golden State’s first-round opponent at the time, the Denver Nuggets. He would eventually make his way to Oakland. He would merge with the rising tide and offer stock advice to his teammates. He would win a Finals MVP. He moved with a sense of purpose. All the Warriors did.

After dispensing with this future Finals MVP and his ragtag group in Denver, the rising Warriors encountered the setting San Antonio Spurs. That Spurs team featured a Hall of Fame triumvirate and a promising second-year player named Kawhi Leonard, who, like Iguodala, would come to claim a Finals MVP while preserving the legacies of others. Turtles swimming inside of teacups.

Of course, the Kawhi narrative would undergo major revisions, as would Igoudala’s, as would everyone’s. Meetings in the Hamptons would happen. Meetings with Kawhi’s contingent would not.

After battling chest to chest in two straight Finals with LeBron James in 2013 and 2014, Kawhi would watch and wait as the Golden State Warriors surpassed anyone’s expectations and became one of the greatest winning teams the league has ever seen. Moreover, he watched Steph Curry morph into what everyone believed to be LeBron’s chief rival; a slingshot slaying giants; a Mack overthrowing Yertle. Then, in 2017, Kawhi looked poised to reenter the conversation. In the absence of Tim Duncan, San Antonio was still formidable — still built for eternity — but Zaza Pachulia undercut Kawhi’s momentum and the slow recovery severed his ties with the San Antonio legacy. He became something of a pariah. He played nine games the following year before traveling a bastard’s path north to Toronto. Danny Green traveled with him; a 3-and-D Sancho Panza preserving legacies.

All that brings the world’s orbit to any moment in this year’s NBA Finals where Andre Iguodala finds himself confounded by Kawhi Leonard’s pace of play, immaculate footwork, and programmed head scratch.

Leonard hasn’t looked quite right for much of this Finals. His shot has fallen a bit short. His form has looked a bit flatfooted. He hasn’t looked like the player who got the best of Giannis just a round earlier. In Game 2, the ball clearly stuck too long in those massive claws of his. He looked almost too deliberate; less state of the art and more Disney Hall of Presidents. But Leonard finished Game 4 with 36 points and 12 boards. He looked smooth and in control for much of it. And, in the process, he may have crushed Oracle Arena’s mystique and the Warriors current run of championship success. But how that run ends can’t help, rightly or wrongly, to impact how the game’s many followers remember this era and the ones that preceded it. A story from The Athletic dropped this week about Kawhi Leonard’s college days. His Board Man Gets Paid routine is the stuff of a basketball savant. Even in his monosyllabic monotone, he is changing conversations; changing the physical terrain.

Game 4 began in chaos. The pace was frenetic. Almost two and a half minutes of running and chucking transpired before either team scored a bucket. For much of the first quarter, Kawhi Leonard’s midrange game and the occasional 3-pointer kept Toronto within striking distance.  Still, even as Pascal Siakam showed signs of life by hitting a baby hook in the lane with seven minutes left in the half, one had to wonder what sense does the universe make. How could the Toronto Raptors only be down 31 to 27?

As the game raced on, Kawhi drove the lane, found three Warriors waiting for him, turned away from the basket, and then launched the ball backward over his shoulder. He did not make the basket, but such brittle play would inspire Golden State’s Draymond Green to hit the side of the backboard on a 3-point attempt. This was punk rock. This was garbage in an art museum.

Obviously, the Warriors weren’t playing as well as they appeared. They just weren’t playing so poorly as Toronto. Golden State is not right. They have kept teams in games or fallen behind. They have relied too much on the certainty of third-quarter runs, but basketball certainty is no more sure than weather or even climate. Floods and droughts occur with variations in degree.

The game seemed destined for a tight finish, but the second half unfolded in unforeseen ways. The Toronto duo of Kawhi Leonard and Serge Ibaka outscored Golden State 24 to 21 in the third quarter. The third quarter had been the time for blue and gold haymakers this postseason, but not in Game 4. Instead, Toronto continued to drive and kick to open shooters, and the shots that failed in the first half started to fall. Toronto found its rhythm, and Golden State shuffled about waiting for Kevin Durant’s postgame report

While the Warriors have been to the Finals every year for a half decade now, the Toronto Raptors have fallen victim to LeBron James’ bullying the Eastern Conference into submission. In other words, one can easily paint Golden State as the team of experience and the Toronto Raptors as the unlikely upstart, and yet these descriptors don’t necessarily fit. While the Raptors have never played together in the Finals, Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green are here for the third time. Serge Ibaka, who was pivotal on both ends of the floor to the Raptors’ successes in Game 4, must surely recall his trip to the Finals with the Oklahoma City Thunder. More importantly, perhaps Ibaka remembers the 3-1 lead his Thunder lost in 2016 to Golden State. The Raptors are not a group that has been here before, but they have been here as individuals. Even Marc Gasol can recite how Golden State washed out his Memphis days. This team is something much tougher than often credited. Just look at Fred VanVleet lying on the court bleeding from his face one moment to his walking back out a few minutes later with a bandage under his eye, his tooth lying God knows where in a field of Greek myths. Success here, against the Warriors, would excavate all the many pathways and trenches that have led these players to Toronto.

Meanwhile, the Golden State Warriors don’t look like Warriors. They look tired, which is understandable. The Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green core has been together for a long while now. They most likely have more years together in the rearview than they do in front of them. Several of their teammates are banged up. Klay Thompson is not a hundred percent. Steph Curry was zapped of energy a few games ago. They are all shaking their heads and staring at their feet more than usual. Even Draymond’s baiting of the refs isn’t as efficient and precise as usual. How long did it take him to earn his technical? Part of the shock, though, may just be the fact that someone not named LeBron is doing this to them. For all Andre Igoudala’s legacy talk, this zombie version of the Splash Brothers is not a good look for riding into the hyperbolic arenas of sports debate, but it’s also not a good look for LeBron if another player exists in the same era who is capable of toppling these once mighty Warriors.

The real missing tooth is Kevin Durant. The Warriors are not better without Kevin Durant. He’s the failsafe. They needed him to make beating LeBron James a certainty because LeBron James is a nuclear threat. LeBron James is Thanos. You need an army to defeat him. Or you need him to think his mission is complete. And while not everyone in the Twitterverse finds Durant necessary for championship success—and the team did win a set of rings without him —he is necessary for sustained championship success because teams evolve and make a target out of winners. Both Toronto and Milwaukee were assembled with Golden State in mind. The purpose of their length and depth is to herd shooters, to make life difficult, and obviously, such a task becomes easier when one of those shooters is removed from the equation. Of course, Golden State is not the first team to suffer such an absence. Success and failure in sport are always intertwined with health. There is, after all, that nagging question about what happens against Cleveland in 2015 if Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love weren’t sidelined by injury.

The Warriors can’t be written off yet in this series. They’re too good. The Warriors also can’t be written off in the annals of history. They’re too good. But their legacy is the collective, and the collective is a fragile ecosystem right now in place of a programmed simulation. That also isn’t meant as an insult to the Warriors, but a lesson for the rest of us. Strength in numbers requires those numbers being there in the end.