Fred VanVleet has decided to take over the most important basketball games of the year. He shot the Toronto Raptors into the NBA Finals, combining to go 14-for-17 on 3-pointers in games 4, 5, and 6 of the Eastern Conference finals, one of the most meaningful multi-game runs of near-perfect shooting in postseason history. The Bucks lost all three games, because what the hell are you supposed to do when there’s a dude on the opposing team shooting 82 percent from 3? You absolutely cannot give Fred VanVleet any space. Just look at his last name.

And now, VanVleet is taking over the NBA Finals. He only went 1-for-4 from 3 in Game 1, but still had a crisp 15 points on eight shots, including this drive through the body of Jonas Jerebko:

VanVleet with the TOUGH bucket



Ibaka with the block on the other end



( @ATT ) pic.twitter.com/tFWCB4RXkq — ESPN (@espn) May 31, 2019

And this miracle of a buzzer-beater:

Replay Review (Davis): if VanVleet's made field goal (initially ruled a 2-point FG) was a 2 or 3-point FG in Q4 of #GSWatTOR. Ruling: Confirmed, 2-point FG. pic.twitter.com/OQoesUs1tp — NBA Official (@NBAOfficial) May 31, 2019

But more important than any of that was the work VanVleet did as the primary defender on Stephen Curry. Curry played 80 offensive possessions Thursday night. On the 47 possessions when other Raptors guarded him, he had 30 points while shooting 7-for-12 from the field and 4-for-6 from 3. On the 33 possessions VanVleet guarded him, he had four while shooting 1-for-6 from the field, missing all three 3s he attempted. VanVleet was hounding him:

It’d be easy to dismiss this as a fluke if VanVleet didn’t have something of a history of locking down Curry. In Curry’s lone regular-season matchup against the Raptors, he actually performed even worse against VanVleet, scoring just four points on 39 possessions. FiveThirtyEight actually cut a highlight tape of VanVleet’s finest work on Curry ahead of the series, and even watching Curry try to shake VanVleet is exhausting. Normally, Curry’s flurry of high-speed off-ball movements gets him a second of open space, which is all he needs to drill a 3. But VanVleet never leaves his side. He’s there when Curry pops off screens; he’s there when Curry tries to sneak open after Warriors offensive rebounds; he’s there when the Warriors try to start fast breaks. Curry can be so dangerous if teams forget about him for an instant. VanVleet never forgets. He chases Curry like it’s the only thing that matters in the world.

And for a Golden State team without Kevin Durant, the whole thing is kinda doomed if Curry can’t create offense. The Warriors were minus-11 in the 26 minutes Curry and VanVleet played together. They lost by nine.

This is a shocker if you watched VanVleet earlier in the postseason. In the first 15 games of the playoffs, the Toronto reserve guard looked like a man unsure whether he needed to apply some sort of metric conversion to finishing on Canadian rims. He was shooting 25.6 percent from the floor and a dismal 19.5 percent from 3. He shot just 1-for-14 from downtown in the seven-game series against the Sixers in the second round, and bottomed out with a 1-for-11 shooting performance in Game 3 against Milwaukee. VanVleet didn’t make up for it defensively, as the Raptors were outscored by double digits during his time on the floor six times in 15 games. He was a weakness.

But of course, VanVleet is himself a Shocker. VanVleet won Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year twice, including in 2014 when the Shockers went 34-0 before the start of the NCAA tournament. But he was not the best pro prospect to go through Wichita (that would be Landry Shamet, a first-round pick by the 76ers), nor did he ever lead his team in scoring (during his freshman and sophomore seasons, the Shockers were led by future Knick Cleanthony Early; in his junior and senior seasons, the leading scorer was future Knick Ron Baker). (We know how to pick them in New York.) He seemed like the ultimate College Player—a tenacious point guard repeatedly praised for his leadership, but without any noteworthy pro-level talents. He was short (6 feet) and slow (he, uh, didn’t get invited to the draft combine, but, yeah) and didn’t seem like he had the shooting to make up for it (he shot 38.6 percent from 3 over his four seasons in college, which is decent, but not elite).

How did VanVleet go from undraftable to a legitimate rotation player in just two years? How did he go from a cold-as-ice burden to a can’t-miss Curry stopper overnight? Seriously, why isn’t there a space in between the “Van” and the “Vleet?” I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but I have some guesses.

The first explanation is the miracle of childbirth. VanVleet’s son, Fred Jr., was born May 20. The night before was the 1-for-11 game; the night after he started his 14-for-17 shooting run. VanVleet, for his part, declined to give his baby credit for the turnaround—completely fair; that baby didn’t do shit. But perhaps the euphoria and mental clarity provided by fatherhood focused him, and allowed him to become an unstoppable basketball machine. I think this checks out. VanVleet’s first child, his daughter Sanaa, was born on January 30 of last year, halfway through his breakout season. He immediately followed her birth by shooting 48.4 percent from 3 over the next two weeks. We can conclusively prove that VanVleet locks in when he has kids. (I also suspect his defensive performance on Curry is motivated by his desire to prove that his daughter is better at cutely interrupting press conferences than Riley Curry ever was.)

But I think the better explanation is that the Raptors have been absolutely incredible at developing talent. Here’s a stunning fact: The Raptors do not have a single player on their roster who was selected in the lottery of the NBA draft. It seems impossible to pull off, considering lottery picks account for almost half of first-rounders, and first-rounders make up a huge percentage of the league, but it’s true. Toronto’s highest-drafted player, Kawhi Leonard, was picked 15th overall. The Raptors don’t get credit for developing Leonard, but their homegrown star, Pascal Siakam, was drafted 27th. Siakam won MVP of the 2017 G League Finals with Toronto’s minor league affiliate, Raptors 905, but it was arguably VanVleet who won the series with a 28-point, 14-assist outing in the winner-take-all Game 3 of the series.

Now they’re playing together in the real NBA Finals. VanVleet is a pivotal force in the most important basketball series of the year. He’s hitting every shot he takes, even the ones he’s throwing up off his back foot, and he’s locking down one of the most dynamic players in the history of the sport. If the Warriors want to have a chance in this series, they cannot let him have any more children. He will grow too powerful.