In 1995, the N.B.A. created two Canadian franchises, the Toronto Raptors and the Vancouver Grizzlies. Six years later, the Grizzlies moved to Memphis, Tennessee, leaving the Raptors alone up north. Though the team has been good for the last several years, and though Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America, Raptors games don’t air on national television in the United States as frequently as those of comparable franchises, and their fans often lament a seeming lack of coverage from the American press. “We’re, like, in a witness-protection program,” Jack Armstrong, a Raptors television and radio analyst since 1998, told me recently. This sense, that the league and the press don’t give the team its due—despite heading into the playoffs as the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference—has led to feelings of resentment, even paranoia. Zach Lowe, a senior writer at ESPN who has been called America’s best sportswriter, says that the Raptors have the most paranoid fan base in the league. “I don’t even know who would be in competition,” he told me.

A few of those fans, those that Lowe refers to as “the Spooky Mulder crowd,” believe that the league actively works against the team—and that referees, even, are biased against them, presumably because the U.S.-based association does not want a Canadian team to succeed. But, mostly, Lowe said, “they’re paranoid about the performance of their own team. Even during successful years, there’s a looming fear that it is all going to come crashing down.”

Andrew Barkley, who just turned thirty, has watched the Raptors since he was in the sixth grade. A while back, he started to occasionally mute Raptors games on television when things started to go badly on the court. Three years ago, after the Washington Wizards swept the Raptors in the first round of the playoffs, he began watching entire games on mute. Paul Pierce, a forward then playing for the Wizards, “really got under my skin,” he said. As the team has improved, the playoffs have become the real source of concern for fans like Barkley. In each of the past four postseasons, the Raptors have lost Game 1 of the first round, each time at home; they have been swept out of the playoffs twice. Their star players, Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, have shot below their career percentages in many of these games; to watch a Raptors playoff game has often felt like watching one side lose more slowly than the other. Bruce Arthur, a sports columnist for the Toronto Star, told me that “this team is way better, way better than the teams they’ve had before,” but even he has his doubts. “I still don’t know what we’re going to get from Kyle and DeMar in the postseason,” he said. “I don’t think they do, either.”

“When the team cracks in any way, Twitter becomes a dark, depressing pit of insecurity and fear,” Shankar Sivananthan, who has been a Raptors fan since the franchise’s first season, said. Sivananthan believes that the team’s marketing slogans, “We the North” and “North Over Everything,” create an inherent us-versus-them mentality that is hard for Raptors fans to shake when things don’t go their way. Sean Craig, who grew up in Texas but who recently spent several years in Toronto for work, told me that “Raptors fans are, unfortunately, emotionally destructive lunatics who tear themselves into pieces.” When he lived in Toronto, Craig watched his friends go through an annual cycle of pessimism, anxiety, and sadness when the playoffs rolled around. “That’s unfortunate,” he added, “because they’re also some of the best fans in the world.”

Nav Bhatia, a Toronto Raptors superfan. Photograph courtesy Fiction Street Media

The team’s best fan, or at least its biggest, might be Nav Bhatia, the owner of two Hyundai dealerships in Toronto, who can be seen seated courtside at every Raptors home game—and who frequently travels to watch the team on the road. When the Raptors clinched the franchise’s first playoff-series win, over the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, in 2001, their star player at the time, Vince Carter, found Bhatia, seated several rows up from the court, and handed him his headband in appreciation. “I still have it,” Bhatia told me. After that night, the Raptors went fourteen seasons before winning another playoff series. But Bhatia’s faith has never wavered, and he does not count himself among the paranoid. “Most of the games, the refereeing balances itself,” he said. Bhatia believes that this is the season in which the team will, for the first time, make it to the N.B.A. Finals.

Bhatia is Sikh and wears a turban, and he is an inspiring figure for Indu Rehal, who credits him with publicly signalling the passion that many Sikhs in Toronto have for basketball. “He helped normalize the Sikh image at the Air Canada Centre,” Rehal said, referring to the Raptors’ home arena. She doesn’t quite share his confidence about the team, though. “I’m definitely anxious,” she said, “because I just want them to prove everyone wrong.”

Lowe, for his part, believes Raptors fans should alter their collective psyche this time around. “Be confident in your team,” he said. “They’ve been the best team in the East all year. Try that on, see how it feels, workshop it for a day.”