Kyle Lowry took off his sunglasses and put down three boxes of shoes. It was his birthday. He is 33, playing for the best team he’s been on in his life, less than three weeks before the playoffs begin. His ankles hurt.

“It sucks,” said the Toronto Raptors point guard Monday, long after practice. “It does suck. But I’m doing all I can to be ready for June. That’s all that matters: April, May, June. Yeah, it sucks.”

Lowry played Sunday as the Raptors lost a game to Charlotte where they tried really hard in the first five minutes and again in the last five minutes and watched a 50-footer bank in to beat them. He practised Monday. The team says nothing is structurally wrong, but he has sprained each of his ankles in the last two weeks: first the left, then the right. They still hurt — Lowry says the right ankle is more about a sore foot — and Lowry said Sunday he was unlikely to be 100 per cent the rest of the season. Old story, for him.

“But I’ll be fine,” he said. “No matter how I play or what’s wrong with me, no one’s gonna care, right? So me saying my ankles hurt doesn’t matter.”

Why not?

“I think the last couple years, the last three years, if you look at my numbers, people say I don’t play well in the playoffs,” Lowry said. “Look at my numbers. They’re not bad. They’re actually pretty good numbers.”

Lowry knows his playoff reputation, which has been somewhat conflated with some of Toronto’s team failures: three sweeps in the past four years, two of them humiliations at the hands of Cleveland and LeBron James. In 2017, Lowry said, “I know I’m not a LeBron, and DeMar (DeRozan)’s not a LeBron.”

But the short, squat, fierce and cerebral guard also believes he’s been better than he’s been made out to be, and not enough people have noticed. He charts it back to Game 2 of the Miami series in 2016; to that point he had shot 33 per cent or so through Toronto’s first 11 games against Indiana and the Heat, including that lonely post-game when he was shooting on a darkened Air Canada Centre court after that Game 1 loss to Miami.

“I’ve been in a groove since,” Lowry said. “Go ahead and look at all the numbers and, ever since then, every playoffs, every series, I’ve just been in a good groove.”

He’s … not wrong. The 2016 post-season was boom and bust for Lowry especially, back when he and the departed DeRozan tried to shoulder so much of the load, and teams loaded up to stop them. Through nine playoff games, it was often bust. Lowry shot .308 in those first nine games. He had 11 points in Toronto’s near-death Game 7 against Indiana, on 14 shots. He went out and shot in his hoodie after Game 1 of the second round, and it made ESPN.

And since then, the difference is stark. Before Game 3 against Miami in 2016, Lowry scored 528 playoff points in 20 games as a Raptor by shooting .365 from the field, .257 from three, and .731 from the free-throw line for a true shooting percentage of .527, which is awful. In the 27 games since, which included his greatest moments in Games 5 to 7 against Miami, he has scored 560 points on .473/.401/.790 shooting, for a true shooting percentage of .605. He’s shot over .600 in that combined measure over a full season once in his career.

And then last year a healthy Lowry was terrific. Lowry averaged 17.4 points, 8.5 assists (his best mark ever), 4.3 rebounds, 1.5 steals, and shot a line of .508/.444/.813. He wasn’t enough to save the Raptors against LeBron, even in the close ones. But he was good.

Partly, it was the result of an intentional redefinition of his role. Lowry averaged 16.5 shot attempts in the grinding run to the conference final in 2016. He attempted more than 15 shots once in the 14 playoff games that followed : the critical Game 4 win in Milwaukee in 2017. He was asked if he deliberately pulled back from his 2016 hero mode and its mixed results in favour of a more controlled approach.

“No, it’s just playing, being healthy, doing whatever I have to do to win the game,” Lowry said. “Sometimes people only look at scoring, but it’s everything else I feel like I bring to the game. And no one notices that, because they say, ‘He had a meltdown against Cleveland,’ whatever year that was. Go back and look at the numbers. ‘Is Kyle Lowry so important during the playoffs?’ Go back and look at the numbers, I’ve been pretty good, and I’m happy with the way I’ve performed personally in the playoffs.

“And that’s why it’s an unfair judgment, and that’s why I don’t care what I feel like, nothing matters, everybody’s going to say what they’re going to say anyways. And it sounds like I’m being defensive, in protecting myself, but go look at them. Go look at the numbers. I’ve done it the last three years.”

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His injuries were a part of some of his failings, too; the knee against Brooklyn in 2014, everything in the Washington mess of 2015, the sprained ankle after two games against Cleveland in 2017. Last season he was healthy, and the Raptors disintegrated in seven days against the Cavaliers. He said Monday, “I’ve done what I can do, and last year I felt like I had even more to give, and this year I feel like I’ll be at a high level.”

Less than three weeks away. Lowry says, “It’s not about me aging; it’s about seizing the opportunity to be in a situation that I’ve never been in before.” Lowry doesn’t think people care about how his ankles feel but, quietly, he cares about what people think. This is another chance to change the story, with a better team than ever. Just watch.

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