Zach Lowe

Shout out RJ Barrett.

Oh, that's right.

He's awesome.

24 a game, 53% shooting, 46% on threes.

You know, the Raptors made that Ananobi trade partly for financial reasons and partly to get Emmanuel quickly.

And RJ Barrett was kind of an afterthought, kind of the price of getting Emmanuel quickly.

And he's not a sexy player.

Three-point shot, comes and goes.

Defensively, he's just eh.

And Harden and Mitchell have been hunting him a lot in the series.

And that's really the only offense that the Cleveland guards have consistently had is hunting Barrett and Ingram and drawing double teams or shooting iso threes or whatever.

But he's a pretty rock-solid all-around player.

He does everything pretty well on offense.

decent secondary creator.

He's averaging four dimes a game in this series.

And his bully ball layups have been just like, again, oxygen for an offense that can wheeze sometimes.

And he had that one huge one over Sam Merrill at the end of game four with like 40 seconds left to pull him within one.

I do think

I do wonder, let me test out this theory for you.

I remember years and years ago, there was a Toronto, Indiana first round series where Toronto was the higher seed and had a ton of expectations.