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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – Historically, the Raptors have played the Golden State Warriors tough, despite the one-sided results.

The reigning two-time NBA champions are winners of eight straight meetings with Toronto, though five of the last six were decided by six points or fewer.

Can the Raptors finally get over the hump?

The two teams will face each other a couple times over the next two weeks, with the first meeting coming at Scotiabank Arena on Thursday (live on TSN4 at 8 p.m.), and there’s more buzz surrounding the game than you’ll typically see in late-November.

At 18-4, the Raptors enter Thursday’s contest with the best record in the NBA. Despite battling injuries and some early-season turmoil, the Warriors are still the gold standard in basketball. The game will be televised nationally in the U.S. on TNT and, as if it needed any more hyping up, people are talking about it as a potential Finals matchup – including one of the featured players.

“Right now [the Raptors] are the best [team in the East] and I expect them to be there probably throughout the whole season,” Warriors guard Klay Thompson told reporters following the team’s comeback win over Orlando on Monday. “They’ve got tremendous length. They’ve got so many two-way players. Obviously Kawhi [Leonard] is back and playing at a MVP level. Kyle Lowry is a great leader as well as a bulldog out there. So it’s going to be a great test for us. Who knows, it might be a preview of June. They’ve got something really special up there in Canada right now.”

As the hunters, you can understand why the Raptors would take a different approach in the lead-up to this week’s showdown. They’ve been careful not to fuel the fire, but they’re not throwing water on it either. They’re embracing the hype, even if they’re not quite willing to call their shot and endorse Thompson’s assertion that they’re the favourites to come out of the East.

“That's nice of him to say that,” Raptors guard Fred VanVleet said following his team’s optional practice Wednesday afternoon. “Obviously, much respect to the group they've got there and Klay is probably one of the deadliest guys in the league, so it's funny when guys who are that cold-blooded on the court make nice comments. But who knows? We have a lot of work to do. They are established as champions and it's our job to knock them down, but we have a lot of work to do between now until then.”

“We're going out there to measure ourselves. Obviously it's one of the better teams in the NBA. We feel like we are a top team. They have obviously been a top team for the last however many years. We'll see how the game goes.”

Their humility is not without cause, but their confidence isn’t unfounded either. Record and early season success aside, the Raptors have never been better equipped to match up with, and maybe even beat, Golden State.

The Warriors have become the archetype for the modern basketball team. Replicating the way in which they were built is virtually impossible – we may never see a team with that much star power on one roster again – but the challenge for 29 other NBA clubs has been to try and emulate their style of play.

“People are trying to do what they do, but nobody does it like them,” Raptors head coach Nick Nurse said. “They still crush you with that 30-footer, and then another one. They do. That spirit it takes away from you, the discouragement of playing so hard and well, and you turn around and they throw in another 30-footer. You can see every team shaking their head like they just got punched off the ropes and they’re trying to stay in the fight.”

At minimum, the Warriors' high-octane style was a motivating factor and something Raptors president Masai Ujiri considered when he reconstructed his team over the summer, trading DeMar DeRozan – a throwback mid-range scorer and limited defender – along with traditional centre Jakob Poeltl for two versatile wings who contribute on both ends and have a history of doing battle with the Warriors out West.

In Danny Green, the Raptors have a player they can feel good about assigning to guard half of Golden State’s big four of Steph Curry, Thompson, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green. In Leonard, they have one of the league’s very best perimeter stoppers, who can reliably defend all four.

“The biggest thing is this, is that you’ve gotta have the bodies to guard ‘em,” Nurse said. “I’m not saying you’ve gotta have somebody that can look Kevin Durant in the eye, but you can’t be looking him in the belly button either. You’ve gotta have some size on some of these guys or they’re just shooting over you and it doesn’t matter how well your guarding them, they don’t even see you down there.”

The Raptors have size and defensive versatility at every position, plus they’ve got the shooting to theoretically keep up with Golden State’s firepower. But the biggest difference between this Raptors team and the ones that would knock on the Warriors’ door without ever breaking it down is their best player.

There may have been some gamesmanship to Thompson’s praise of the Raptors, but it’s not hard to believe he views them as a semi-legitimate threat. That’s the respect that superstars like Leonard command, and he’s the type of player that you need on your roster to have any real chance at taking down the Warriors.

Of course, in spite of the hype, there’s only so much we can take from Thursday’s game, regardless of how the Raptors fare.

First of all, the visitors are unlikely to be at full strength. Green’s battling a toe issue and isn’t expected to play in Toronto. Curry has ramped up his on-court work and is nearing a return from his groin injury, but he seems questionable at best.

In their absence, and following his tiff with Green, Durant has put the team on his shoulders and taken his game to another level. Coming off their four-game losing skid, the Warriors have won three straight, with Durant totalling 125 points in those outings, including back-to-back 40-plus point performances.

For the first time since adding Durant to their all-star trio in the summer of 2016, the Warriors are looking a bit vulnerable. Are they merely bored or is their squabbling and good, albeit un-Warriors-like 15-7 start to the season the beginning of the end for this Golden State dynasty, with Durant and Thompson set to hit free agency this coming summer? If nothing else, it offers a glimmer of hope for the rest of the league.

Until proven otherwise, the Warriors are the team to beat. They’re the team that the Raptors, or any other prospective contender, should be measuring themselves against.

The Raptors have a long way to go before they can even think about seeing Golden State, or anybody else, in the Finals. However, if they’re going to start closing the gap, a win on Thursday would be a good place to start.

“I think there's a little more buzz and juice around the game,” Nurse admitted. “These guys are walking around a little bit, people are telling them way before last night's game how big a game Thursday’s is. They're getting that. They feel it.”​