TORONTO — The downside of playing meaningful basketball in the late stage of the NBA season is that you can fail.
They hosted the Sacramento Kings, a team that is last place in the Western Conference, were losers of six of their past seven games and came into the game ranked 26th on offence and 28th on defence.
They are only a couple of years removed from winning 48 and 46 wins in the West, but have crumbled like stale chips since. Their new plan hinges on drafting a star this summer and starting over.
That might work. Their plan for this season — accumulating a collection of past-their-best-years veterans and hoping to extract some asset value at the trade deadline — decidedly didn’t work because no one else…