OAKLAND, CALIF.—A poignant moment, a personal moment, an emotional one.

There sat Nick Nurse on the bench at Oracle Arena: head bowed and in his hands, his coaches and Raptors players joyous all around him, celebrating a major victory on basketball’s biggest stage.

And the Raptors head coach was thinking about his mother.

Tuesday would have been Marcella Nurse’s 95th birthday and she was immediately in her son’s heart and mind in the aftermath of Toronto’s 123-109 win over the Golden State Warriors in Game 3 of the NBA Finals, as anyone who knows Nurse would have realized.

And when Wednesday’s game was over, when Toronto had played one of its most complete games of the post-season, it was a private time for the coach.

Marcella Nurse died in December, ironically while the Raptors were on a west coast trip that including a stop here for a regular-season game.

“She passed right in the middle of the season on that west coast road trip, and she had said that she was glad she lived long enough to see me become a head coach and hoped she’d see me win a championship, but if she didn’t she would be watching anyway,” Nurse said in the team’s locker room at Oracle in the wake of Toronto’s win.

The bond between Nurse and his mother was strong and enduring. The 51-year-old did not miss a game when she passed away because it’s not what she wanted, and he wanted to honour her memory in one of the biggest moments of the Raptors’ season.

“I’m here because my mother wouldn’t want it any other way,” Nurse said before the first game he coached after her passing. “She had a big impact because she had nine of us, and I was the last one. Lots of games — 94 years, nine kids and about 80,000 games watched are her final stats.”

While Nurse was having his private moment, his team was calmly but publicly celebrating a thorough pasting of the injury-ravaged Warriors. With a couple hundred Toronto fans chanting “Let’s go, Raptors” and breaking into an impromptu rendition of “O Canada” after the game, the Raptors benefited from one of their best offensive performances of the playoffs.

And Kawhi Leonard — who is not one given to open displays or discussions of sentimentality, and will not play along with your narrative very often, no matter how good it is — was at the centre of it.

Somewhere deep down, somewhere in his soul, he had to have felt just a bit of a twinge of glee Wednesday night, and he must have appreciated how good the story truly was.

He’d take a jump shot and there would be no feet of Zaza Pachulia sliding under his as he landed. He’d dominate at stretches and still be on the floor when the game was decided. He was in his element, and not in pain.

Leonard played his first game at Oracle since suffering a debilitating injury in a playoff game here with the San Antonio Spurs in early May 2017, a high-ankle sprain that kick-started his demise and ultimate departure from the Spurs. It was like he was never gone from the venerable old gym that will close with the end of the NBA Finals.

Overcoming a marvellous 47-point game from Golden State’s Stephen Curry, Leonard helped spearhead a great offensive night by the Raptors, who took it to the Warriors from the opening tip in an unrelenting performance.

Leonard did not play again in the 2017 playoffs after Pachulia slid his foot under Leonard’s on a jump shot, ending a 26-point, 24-minute game and his season. After missing three regular-season games here over the last two seasons, he was back on familiar turf and in a familiar role.

In the first quarter when the Raptors got off to their best start of the series, he had seven points and got to the free-throw line five times, grabbed three offensive rebounds among his six boards and dished out one wonderful assist with a great pocket pass to Marc Gasol for an easy bucket.

In the third quarter, Leonard was even better at a more significant moment in the game.

The Warriors are known as an explosive team coming out of the intermission and, down only eight at the break, they looked poised to get right back in the game. But Leonard had 14 of his points in the third as Toronto actually won the quarter, 36-31, continuing a wonderful offensive night.

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Not surprisingly, he wasn’t interested in the redemption angle.

“It feels good,” Leonard said. “I don’t think about what happened two years ago, pretty much living in the now and just happy we were able to get a Game 3 win, another step closer to our goal.”

Leonard, Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam were all effective and Danny Green, replaced by Fred VanVleet to start the third quarter, made six three-pointers in his best game in weeks. Lowry finished with 23 points, and VanVleet sealed the game with a high-arcing three-pointer that gave Toronto a 13-point lead with 97 seconds left.

“Our offence wasn’t very good in Game 2, and we knew that was hurting our defence as well,” Nurse said. “We tried to play with more pace up the court, and we tried to play with more pace in the half-court. I thought you just saw a lot more cutting and passing — obviously 30 assists. You saw a lot more shots go in. That helps, right?”

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