TORONTO – In the days after the Toronto Raptors defeated Golden State to win their first NBA championship, sports analysts and fans expressed their disbelief that the Warriors could ever fall to what was, by any objective metric, a clearly superior team.
“Total fluke,” claimed Fox Sports’ Skip Bayless. “Sure, Toronto was better in the regular season, better in the playoffs, and had the best player on the court, but they got lucky.”
“Tainted title,” echoed ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. “If Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson don’t get hurt, the Raptors do not win this title. And I can prove it using this ‘what if’ machine I’ve just made out of a crystal ball, some duct tape, and my own tears.”
Many journalists are concerned the Raps win could lead to a new era in basketball where the better team always wins.
American fans in particular seemed to be having a hard time understanding how a Raptors team made out of the best defenders in the world held Golden State well below their usual scoring average.
“Dubs just went cold. Simple as that,” said Warriors fan Samuel Barnes, in a tweet that sounded eerily similar to the tweets of Bucks and Sixers fans claiming their team simply “missed shots.”
Some were willing to give the Raptors some credit. Jay Williams of ESPN complimented “Fred VonFleet”’s hot shooting, and Chris Broussard noted that Kyle Lowry was “not quite as big a choker as I have always claimed.”
In related news, all of the analysts who confidently predicted the Warriors to win easily were confidently predicting that Kawhi Leonard would leave in free agency. Except for Paul Pierce who was still predicting the Warriors would win in 8.
