Photo: nba.com

The Toronto Raptors have been a bit of an enigma in the NBA these past few seasons.

The team shockingly got rid of 2018 NBA Coach of the Year Dwane Casey after he led them to a season record in both wins and points, promoting Nick Nurse, a man with no previous experience as a head coach in the league as his successor. They also traded a franchise star in DeMar DeRozan, with Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green joining them as a result.

Both moves were widely criticized. Yet in the end, Toronto won their first-ever NBA championship on the back of Leonard’s brilliance. Of course, they lost him after one season, a campaign in which they finished second in the Eastern Conference, but little has changed since then – they’re still second in the East, somehow.

Bereft of arguably the best player in the league, certainly the NBA’s best two-way player, and a two-time Defensive Player of the Year, the Raptors have actually gotten better on defense. Bleacher Report notes the team has improved from the fifth-best defensive outfit in the NBA to the second-best, going from 106.8 to 105.1 in the wake of Kawhi’s exit.

This was hardly the case when the forward left the Spurs after 2017/18; Gregg Popovich’s side fell from its position as the league’s fourth-best defensive team, all the way to 20th.

“No one in this locker room is surprised by what we’ve done so far,” guard Fred VanVleet told the publication.

“We didn’t know what it would look like, but I know we weren’t forecasting the losses to be what everybody else thought it would be like. I mean come on, Kawhi is Kawhi and Danny is a huge, huge piece of what we did last year, but we knew we had enough.”

Nurse has drilled an unforgiving defensive philosophy into his squad but they employ multiple systems to frustrate opponents as they trap, switch and suffocate with different strategies based on what’s happening on the floor.

“We scramble,” wing Stanley Johnson explained. “We have a lot of really good communication. We have a really good game plan every game. It gives us a distinctive edge going into every game. Our game plans are really, really good. We don’t accept ‘not good enough.’ We don’t accept guys getting open shots.”

The Raptors have already secured their spot in this year’s playoffs and will look to keep the championship in Canada come June. They’ve managed to surprise on every level this season but are still out of the conversation where the 2020 title is concerned as the Lakers, Clippers, and Bucks are being touted as the favorites.

Count Nurse’s Raptors out at your own risk, though.