There may be uglier ways to win a basketball game, but you would be hard-pressed to find them.

In what was an absolute slugfest of a first half, the Toronto Raptors hung around on the burly shoulders of Kawhi Leonard, then rode him all the way to the biggest win in franchise history.

Leonard had 14 of the Raptors’ 17 first-quarter points to keep his side within striking distance while the rest of the team shot 1-for-13 from the field. Serge Ibaka joined the party to keep the boat afloat heading into halftime before Leonard went to work in the third.

He began with two threes that gave the Raptors a lead, punished the Warriors on mismatches either getting to the basket or pulling up from the midrange and finished with 17 in the quarter to give Toronto a commanding 12-point lead heading into the final frame.

“Kawhi Leonard came out and hit two big eff-you shots to start the half,” Fred VanVleet said when asked about what changed in the second half. “There’s no defence for that. There are no schemes for that. That’s two big-boy shots that he came out of the half with, two back-to-back threes. And that just kind of let you know how we were going to approach the third quarter and the rest of the half. It put us in good position.”

From there, the Raptors kept the offence steady while maintaining their stellar defence en route to a 105-92 win and a commanding 3-1 series lead in the NBA Finals — a situation in which the team with the advantage has gone on to win 33 out of 34 times. Only the Cleveland Cavaliers pulled off the comeback, in 2016, against the Warriors.

In many ways, this was what Golden State did to Toronto in Game 2 of the series. Back then, the Raptors failed to take advantage of what was a great first half, and the Warriors showed true championship mettle to pull away with the victory.

If there is one thing the Raptors have shown over the course of this post-season, though, it’s that they age like fine wine and only get better as series go on. On Friday night, it was their turn to show they’ve got some championship mettle of their own.

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Trailing 1-0 against the Orlando Magic, 2-1 against the Philadelphia 76ers, and 2-0 against the Milwaukee Bucks, they figured out a way. Sure, injuries have foiled the Warriors to an extent, but the institutional knowledge of having been to four Finals in a row prior to this one — and winning three of them — was always going to be difficult to overcome.

But this Raptors team is as cerebral as they come.

“It is a really smart team, there's a lot of veteran guys that are high IQ players, there's a lot of defensive intelligence there,” head coach Nick Nurse said before the game. “There's a lot of accolades among those guys. All-Defensive Team, Defensive Players of the Year, and that helps.

“I mean, that helps when you're trying to make adjustments in the game, you throw something at them maybe they have never seen before, and they go out and do it pretty well because they have been around the block. And they also trust each other. That's important. It makes my job a lot easier, I tell you that.”

Whether it was adjusting to Fred VanVleet replacing Danny Green to start the third quarter for the second straight game or flummoxing the Warriors with a box-and-one strategy for the second time in this series, or even momentarily going to Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka as two bigs together, Nurse is brave enough to keep throwing stuff at a wall and this team is intelligent enough to find a way to make it stick.

While they may not have needed a series deficit before levelling up in this one, perhaps it was the 18-0 run the Warriors went on in the third quarter of Game 2 that helped this team find another gear mid-series yet again.

Trailing 44-36 with just over three minutes remaining in the first half, the Raptors then outscored the Warriors by 24 points over the next 18 minutes of game action to send Warriors fans at Oracle Arena into a state of shock, and the best travelling fans in the league into delirium.

“Let’s go Raptors” chants rang through the arena from there on out and Toronto ran out of the building with what may go down as its most memorable road win in 24 years of existence.

Still, the players showed no satisfaction, no real joy over taking both games in Golden State or that they’re just a single win away from what they’ve set out to do from training camp in September.

“We didn't do nothing yet. We haven't done anything,” Kyle Lowry said after the game. “We won three games. It's the first of four. We understand that. They're the defending champs, and they're not going to go out easy. They're going to come and fight and prepare to play the next game, and that's how we're preparing ourselves, that we have to — we got to prepare ourselves to play the next game. We haven't done anything yet.”

These Raptors, to a man, are trying to be remembered, and a championship? That gets etched in history forever.

Game notes

Klay Thompson returned to action after missing Game 3 of the series with hamstring tightness.

Kevon Looney, once ruled out for the series after a Game 2 injury, also returned with the Warriors in desperation mode.

DeMarcus Cousins left to the locker room with 7:30 remaining in the third quarter and did not return.

Fred VanVleet left the game at the beginning of the fourth quarter after receiving an elbow from Shaun Livingston. He needed seven stitches but did not suffer a concussion.

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