Recent injuries to the Raptors deny Toronto the opportunity to determine whether its team is for real.

Even before Kawhi Leonard joined the team a few years ago, the Toronto Raptors routinely exceeded preseason projections. The forecasters consistently underestimated Toronto’s win total, frequently by sizable margins. Even though Toronto was winning a lot of games, the same analysts consistently refused to consider the Raptors as serious contenders for the Eastern Conference during the regular season.

The harsh reality is that, with the possible exception of the 2015–16 season, those forecasters were accurate in the end. There was a ceiling that the DeMar DeRozan-led Raptors of the past were unable to break through. (If you’d like, refer to it as the LeBron ceiling.) In an attempt to lick their wounds, Toronto supporters gnashed their teeth, wept, and ripped their jerseys into black and purple ribbons year after year.

We would yell, “DeRozan is a bum!” “Kyle is too little.” The chorus would start, “Casey is an idiot—the team wins in spite of him!” The crowd would roar, “Play more Valanciunas!” to which the crowd would reply, “but not in the fourth quarter.” Eventually, defeated, we would groan, “You just can’t rely on Patrick Patterson.”

In retrospect, the Raptors were actually a scrappy team that repeatedly proved they lacked the skill—or maybe the strategy—to defeat the greats. That proved to be true when Kawhi arrived and Toronto had a gladiator who could set terms for the first time.