Marc Gasol can see it, if he closes his eyes. He doesn’t think about it every day because his days are full. His Toronto Raptors are in the NBA final; Gasol’s life, as a player, husband and father of two, is full to bursting.

But he can see it, if he tries. Some things you don’t forget.

“I don’t think about it all the time, but it’s something that’s there,” said the 34-year-old Raptors centre, in a quiet corner of the practice facility. “You remember the five-year-old kid being carried out of the life raft. You can’t erase that. The body burned by gasoline, that will stay with you. Bagging him in a body bag, that will stay with you. One body was in very bad shape. The skin was coming off with gasoline and salt, and the skin was off. The boy had passed away that night.”

The Raptors play the Golden State Warriors for a title, starting in Toronto Thursday night, and Gasol is a big reason why. The seven-foot Spaniard was acquired from the Memphis Grizzlies at the trade deadline. He made the offence and defence better, and in the first round was a defensive force against Orlando’s Nik Vucevic. He did it again against Philadelphia’s monstrous Joel Embiid in the second round.

Gasol’s shot-taking can come and go. But his unselfishness, passing, defence, and toughness has been essential to this team’s path to the final. Asked at the podium what this meant to him, Gasol deferred comment. He doesn’t like to make things about him.

“There’s nothing I do in my life for show,” he said, away from the glare. “I don’t play for show, I’m not into social media, I don’t enjoy that. I enjoy other stuff than basketball and sports. I enjoy relationships and one-on-one contact and that kind of stuff.”

That’s why he didn’t want to tell anyone he was on the boat until he saw the bodies, and then he got so angry. He knew they existed. He reads newspapers, watches the news, lives in the world. He had seen the famous picture of the little Syrian boy dead on a beach last summer, facedown on the sand, as part of the Mediterranean refugee crisis that reached the public consciousness in 2015 and continues today. “His name was Alan,” Gasol says now. “Alan Kurdi.”

“When I had my daughter, I realized I’ve got to be the best version of myself that I can for her first,” he said. “And then after that it was just more. So when I saw that — I still get chills — I thought, what would a mother, a father have to go through to put their most valued thing, to go through that, to risk the most precious thing that you have in your whole life? To risk it all? And then I saw the organization went to Lesbos with nothing, and they just started pulling people out of the water. And they were from where I was from, and I called and said, ‘I want to work with you guys.’ ”

Gasol called Proactiva Open Arms, a refugee rescue NGO, whose founder Oscar Camps was also from Barcelona. He underwent training that included psychological testing, and spent 10 nights sleeping in a normal-sized bunk on their rescue ship. They had been targeted by anti-refugee, anti-immigrant populist European governments; Gasol wanted to see what Open Arms did up close, to understand. On the third day they found flotsam, the remains of a wrecked boat, and bodies. The boy. The burned body. And a woman named Josefa, alive. Gasol was in the rescue skiff as a crew member, Savvas Kourepinis, pulled Josefa from the water.

“The main difference between Josefa and me, she was born in Cameroon, and I was born in Barcelona,” said Gasol, the younger son of a family doctor and a nursing administrator. “I was fortunate. And as a fortunate person, that’s the only difference. You should try to help everybody who is in desperation.”

Gasol decided to tell people. Nearly a year later, he still bites back emotion speaking about it.

“It’s pretty brutal stuff,” Gasol said. “And the thing that we understood is that if we weren’t there, it would have been unseen and untold. And nobody would have been there to see it. People would have been ... well, 145 migrants were saved by the Libyan Coast Guard. Well, there were a few more left behind, and one of them was actually alive.”

He is big on basketball empathy, and real-world empathy, too. So as Gasol grew rich and famous and became a father, he had to decide who he really was. His parents had put him and his NBA-bound brother Pau before themselves. The lessons they taught stuck.

“First you’ve got a look at who you are, and who you want to be, and what you stand for,” he said. “You have to look at yourself, to the core. If you look at yourself through your daughter’s eyes, who do you want her to see?

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“What you get out there, for me at least, was very, very tough. We’re not talking about making a shot or pick-and-rolls or help defence or schemes. Here everything is beautiful and great.” He waves at the practice gym.

“But that’s not how we want to deal with migration of humans, because migration will happen more and more. And there’s got to be a better way. I don’t know the way, but there’s got to be a better way than the way we’re doing it right now.”

The final is the apex of Gasol’s professional career, and he will try to be the best man he can be. Like every player, he gets two tickets for the game. In Games 1 and 2 in Toronto, Camps, his fellow Barcelonan, will be in one seat. And Kourepinis, who pulled Josefa from the water, will be in the other.