The scar under Fred VanVleet’s eye is still pink, and a little jagged. He had already scored 12 fourth-quarter points when he found himself bleeding on the floor on the night the Toronto Raptors won Game 6 in Oakland, and the NBA championship. Four months later it’s a new season, but there are reminders. VanVleet carries one on his face.

“At least for now,” he says. “We’ll see. It’ll maybe go away in a few years.”

A potentially temporary scar is very NBA these days. Kawhi Leonard carried the Raptors to the title and left in a league-shaking power play, in a summer that reordered the NBA. The Raptors had been told Paul George would come to Toronto if, like the L.A. Clippers, they gave up the world to Oklahoma City for him. To this day, they are not sure they believe it.

So now comes the aftermath, and the defending champions have to build something new. They went 17-5 without Kawhi. Other players scored 25 of the last 28 points of the final game. What is this team now?

“We haven’t mentioned that, Kawhi, ever,” says centre Marc Gasol. “You guys obviously, you have to. But we don’t think about it, we don’t talk about it. He moved on, we’ve moved on and we’re about something different. And we’re trying to build, or continue to build, who we are as a team. Regardless of who’s on the floor, we’re going to be the most unselfish, the toughest team.”

“You re-centre around what you have,” says VanVleet. “You re-centre around Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol, Pascal Siakam and build off of that. We were never centred around Kawhi and Danny (Green). They were added to what we already had, and we made it work.”

“I think we know who we are,” says Raptors coach Nick Nurse.

They should. Toronto did well without Kawhi last season, and the combination of defence and unselfish offence in those games should look familiar. The way they handled the Brooklyn Nets last Friday was a clue. That wasn’t just a pre-season game: that was a game where the champs laid down some beautiful, screw-you ball. They clicked. Pascal Siakam has his new max extension. Like Gasol, Lowry — with his new one-year contract extension — knows he has to score more.

“I’m ready for the challenge again,” says Lowry. “Got to do what’s best for the team and get back to the promised land.”

They still talk like champs. They will, at times, still play like them.

Still, when Kawhi left it led to what is a crossroads season, and there is more than one possible road. That chemistry and fit should result in a top-three finish in the unimposing East. But is that enough to keep Gasol and Serge Ibaka’s expiring contracts? As it stands, this franchise doesn’t think it is scared of Milwaukee without Malcolm Brogdon, or Philadelphia without Jimmy Butler and J.J. Redick, even if those teams have more talent. That could, of course, change with experience.

But if the team somehow flops — if Lowry’s off-season thumb surgery leads to a slow start, if OG Anunoby and Norm Powell and VanVleet can’t fill the void left by Kawhi and Green, and most of all if injuries play a role — then it’s an obvious play to send Gasol and Ibaka and maybe even Lowry somewhere else, to maximize them as assets. Gasol’s ability to fit in anywhere, on and off the court, is exceptional. Ibaka sounds ready for the best season of his Raptors tenure. The extra year on Lowry’s deal makes him easier, not harder, to deal. Short-term certainty.

So what’s winning now with a limited ceiling worth, versus gathering assets for the future? And the answer is probably, whatever sets you up best for the free agency gold mine of 2021, headlined by Giannis Antetokounmpo. The Raptors considered chasing Washington’s Bradley Beal in a trade if he became available, since his contract was up in the holy year of 2021, but a two-year extension scotched that. There aren’t a lot of other obvious trade targets to bolster Toronto, which is funny since they’re a team that is one special player away, again.

With Ujiri anything is possible, except taking on salary past 2021. As colleague Dave Feschuk writes, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment probably should have gotten him a contract extension this past summer, just to be sure.

So the path will be determined by this crazy league, by Ujiri’s instincts, and most of all by how well Toronto plays. They will have to commit to a collective effort, knowing it could get disassembled. They should be able to make it hard to split this team up.

“I’m always going to be a teammate and I’m always going to be an asset,” says Gasol. “You control what you can control. You can’t worry about the things you can’t control. There are too many pieces moving; you’d be in over your head. It’s about having fun, doing your job day-in, day-out. You can’t worry about the things you can’t control. You’ll go crazy.”

He’ll be all-in, every day. Ibaka will be too, as long as he gets the right role. Lowry? We’ll see. The Raptors don’t have the unstoppable brute genius of Kawhi. They might have everything else, including the residue of a title, and what they carry forward.

“I think it’s just the focus more than anything,” says VanVleet. “The talent is there. People don’t understand that: The talent is there. Even the guys who don’t play well, the talent is there. How do you get your mind in the right space to make the right plays, to get your body to do the right thing, to get the right sleep, to eat the right thing, to just find that zone?

“And there’s different ways to get to that zone. And it’s not exact science. You’re not always going to get there. But how do you get to … your potential (as consistently) as possible? And we did it for two months. So I think we got the experience of what it takes in terms of locking in for that amount of time in pressurized moments. So I think that’s probably (what we carry with us) — how good you have to play to get it done.”

“(It’s) not just the chemistry and understanding,” says Gasol. “It’s the trust, what the guys are about in crunch time, how much you’re willing to put on the line for the guy next to us, and what we are about as human beings.”

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“I think that there’s certainly an opportunity here,” says Nurse. “But you know what? If we come out 13-4 or something like we did a year ago, it just doesn’t mean that much. You can’t say, ‘Yeah, see, we’re doing it, we’re doing it.’ Or whatever, you come out the other way. Again, they’re not awarding too many things here … (Tuesday) is going to be the first small step in building the team to get as good as they can get, and reach their potential come playoff time.”

The Toronto Raptors know what it takes. They know they need each other. They’re the defending champs and they deserve all the credit they get, and they get to carry that with them into a new season, in more ways than a scar under Fred VanVleet’s eye. The banner goes up opening night, and it gets to fly forever.

And the clock is ticking on how long it will be before they change again.

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