Hubie Brown, the basketball broadcaster and coaching sage, once summed up the key to building a championship-worthy NBA team. Talent is important, sure. But talent is never enough.“Chemistry is always what it’s all about,” Brown said. “The Lakers had (hall of famers) Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, and they never won a championship (with Baylor). I always use that as a reference point. I never assume a team is going to have the necessary chemistry.”Given that eternal bit of wisdom, how could anyone have assumed the Raptors, rebuilt around Kawhi Leonard last summer and substantially rejigged with Marc Gasol’s arrival at the trade deadline, could find the necessary stuff in time for Sunday’s Game 7? This is a league in which the winning teams often point to the virtues of year-over-year continuity as the linchpin to prosperity. It’s how the Raptors styled themselves in the DeRozan-Lowry era. Overcoming a relative lack of familiarity — a relative nanosecond of time spent together in the post-season’s pressurized cauldron — is no small feat. Toronto’s 92-90 win over the Sixers, punctuated by Kawhi Leonard’s four-bounces-and-in jumper over Joel Embiid at the buzzer, wasn’t a work of art as much as it was a study in the virtue of work. They didn’t beat the Sixers so much as they overcame their own shortcomings — in this case 38-per-cent shooting from the field and a 7-for-30 night from three-point range — by simply refusing to give up.It didn’t need to be pretty. It was enough to get them to Milwaukee. Game 1 of the Eastern final against the Bucks goes Wednesday in Wisconsin.There were moments on Sunday when the Raptors looked like a team that didn’t trust one another. Leonard looked like he didn’t trust many of his teammates. A lot of Leonard’s teammates looked like they didn’t trust themselves. As Gasol was saying in the ...
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