“I’m willing to take risks.” That’s what Masai Ujiri said the day after he traded for Kawhi Leonard, with no guarantee the blank-faced superstar would stay. The Toronto Raptors had risen to a damned place where they could truly disappoint you, and themselves. So their team president fired the coach of the year, and traded one of his two all-stars in the middle of the night from Nairobi. All in all, he made the biggest bet of his professional career. All the roads converged on Sunday. The Toronto Raptors will play Game 7 of their second-round series against the Philadelphia 76ers, and everything that led to this place will either be rewarded, or not. “We’re going to have to find out where it ends up, right?” said head coach Nick Nurse, who replaced Dwane Casey, just as Leonard displaced DeMar DeRozan. “But again, I still think there’s a ceiling to get to. I think you’ve seen some high peaks in these playoffs, right? We’ve gotta diminish some of these valleys a little bit, but maybe that’s just who we are. But the high peaks are pretty damn good. Pretty damn good.”So many things had to happen for this to happen. There was the catastrophe of Game 1 against Cleveland last year, where a still-recovering Fred VanVleet took the first of four shots that could have won the game, but didn’t. There was the LeBron buzzer-beater in Game 3, and that was the straw that broke the coaching back. There were potential deals involving DeRozan that would have nudged toward a step-back reset rather than contention, but the Spurs decided to move Leonard for present value. There was the non-pursuit of a deal for Jimmy Butler, who has been ferocious for Philadelphia since they got him from Minnesota. It probably would have required something like OG Anunoby, Serge Ibaka, maybe Delon Wright before he went to Memphis in the Marc Gasol deal. But it was never really discussed.There was the everything-on-the- ...
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