CLEVELAND – Jeff Van Gundy loves the Toronto Raptors. He thinks they’ve had a great season. A historic season. He thinks Toronto is a great city, a great basketball city and a worthy free agent destination.
He just doesn’t think the Toronto Raptors have a chance to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers. Not even a whiff of one, like, not even close.
"They just simply don’t have enough," Van Gundy, who will be the colour analyst for ESPN’s coverage of the Eastern Conference Finals, said on ESPN’s Zach Lowe podcast previewing the series. "Cleveland is too good over the course of a series. If Toronto won a game that means that they played an exceptional game because really, when you look at it, the firepower of Cleveland, with (Jonas) Valanciunas out, listen, the Raptors are playing Jason Thompson spot minutes.
"… It’s just a tough matchup," Van Gundy continued. "Toronto to me has had an incredibly successful season. If they win one game in this, to me, they should be very proud. If they win two it would be absolutely phenomenal. Cleveland is just a superior team."
Van Gundy isn’t the only one to see it that way. On ESPN.com, 18 of their NBA experts were polled for series predictions and all 18 picked the Cavaliers to win, with only three even seeing the series going as far as six games.
In Las Vegas, oddsmakers have the Cavs as 12-1 favourites over the Raptors, and on CBSSports.com the Raptors were such an afterthought that their online fan poll for possible NBA champions listed the Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Cavaliers, Oklahoma City Thunder and ‘Other.’
Naturally #WeTheOther was trending on Twitter in about 30 seconds, even after @CBSSports explained that the poll was posted before Game 7 on Sunday and Raptors/Heat wouldn’t fit.
Regardless, the Raptors get it.
"We’ve been underrated for forever," DeMarre Carroll said at shootaround prior to Game 1 on Tuesday night. "It’s not different. I feel the country of Canada has been underrated forever, so it’s no different. I think this team, we’ve got a chip on our shoulder, so we’re going to just try to come out and do what we can … and we’ll live with our end results."
It makes sense that the Raptors are underdogs. The Cavaliers are the No. 1 seed after all and are the defending Eastern Conference champions.
They have LeBron James, who is gunning for his fifth consecutive NBA Finals appearance, sixth overall and trying to bring Cleveland its first championship of any kind since 1964 while earning his third title.
But are the Raptors really that prohibitive an underdog? Are their prospects as hopeless as Van Gundy and everyone else seems to believe?
That seems a bit much, given the No. 2-seeded Raptors won the season series against the Cavs and won 56 games to 57 for Cleveland, and given the Raptors have been rock solid through all kinds of adversity during the regular season and in the playoffs in particular and the Cavaliers have flipped coaches and had their share of not-so-infighting.
How can the Raptors flip the script?
It starts with Carroll who was signed as a free agent in the off-season to give the Raptors someone who can offer some resistance to some of the bigger ‘3s’ in the Eastern Conference, James the biggest and the best of them.
No one stops James but Carroll has had some success against him. Carroll missed 56 games this year with injuries but in the one game he played against Cleveland he helped hold James to 19 points on 5-of-15 shooting in the 37 minutes they shared the floor.
Last season in the Eastern Conference Finals with Atlanta – a sweep by Cleveland – Carroll was playing on a sprained knee but still helped limit James to 21 points a game on 42.9 per cent shooting compared to 25 points on 49 per cent shooting during the regular season in 2014-15. The Raptors have also had some success using Patrick Patterson on James.
In any case they do have the personnel to guard James without having to completely reconstitute how they defend everywhere else.
Another factor that could work in the Raptors’ favour is that the Cavaliers are coming off nine days rest and the Raptors have played every other day since April 29.
According to Elias Sports, teams playing on eight or more days rest in the post-season are 5-6 since 2000.
Even Van Gundy sees an opportunity there:
"They have to be riding a high coming off their Game 7 win," said Van Gundy. "… They just need to be more ready to go. Cleveland, mentally, will want to be ready but their rhythm won’t be there, necessarily. Toronto has to play from ahead, right from the start. … Play from ahead and hope you have enough in the fourth."
One thing experts might be overlooking is that outside of James, the ultimate X-factor, the Raptors matchup favourable across the board with the Cavaliers.
The Cavs’ Kyrie Irving might have better brand recognition and can certainly score – his 24 points a game leads the team and he’s shooting 53.8 per cent from three – but Lowry is a better all-around player and has thrived against Cleveland, as his 43-point masterpiece in their last regular season meeting would attest.
DeMar DeRozan vs. J.R. Smith? DeRozan.
Patrick Patterson vs. Kevin Love? Again, on paper Love might get the nod, but Patterson’s overall contributions, in particular defensively, shouldn’t be so quickly dismissed.
Similarly Bismack Biyombo and Tristan Thompson are comparable players. The Cavs’ Thompson grades out a little better offensively while Biyombo’s defensive metrics are better, with each of them earning reputations as being among the NBA’s best and most aggressive rebounders.
After that? The loss of Valanciunas, likely for the series given he’s still walking with a limp, certainly gives the Cavaliers an edge in depth and three-point shooting – they lead the playoffs in both makes (134) and efficiency (46 per cent). It could prove too much for the Raptors to overcome if those numbers keep up.
But the Raptors’ status as underdog is overdone. I’ll take the Cavaliers, but it won’t be in less than six games and could very well go seven, if only because it’s hard to imagine the Raptors being eliminated on their home floor.
It might not get the Raptors to the NBA Finals for the first time, but it would prove Jeff Van Gundy and seemingly everyone else wrong.