Sixers sure looked like the more talented team against the Raptors in a resounding Game 3 win | David Murphy

There was a minute-and-a-half remaining in the second quarter when you started to question everything you thought you knew. A shot from Tobias Harris bounced off the rim, and Ben Simmons launched himself skyward, high enough to bat the ball away from a Raptors rebounder and out to the three-point line. Joel Embiid gathered it and charged toward the rim, perhaps envisioning a windmill jam. As two defenders converged, the big fella slammed on the breaks and instinctively looked toward the three-point line. Jimmy Butler was all alone.

It was hardly a defining sequence -- there would be plenty of those to come -- but it was an early hint that the Sixers were in the midst of flipping the script they were supposed to follow. By the end of a 116-95 blowout win that gave them a 2-1 series lead in this Eastern Conference semifinal, the Sixers had forced everyone at the Wells Fargo Center to arrive at a dramatic realization. They were the most-talented team on the court on this particular night. And they just might be the most-talented team in this series.

That’s a remarkable thought to consider less than a week after the Raptors opened the series with a four-quarter pummeling in Game 1. When Brett Brown came out the next day and pointed to the fact that the national and local media had almost unanimously projected Toronto to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals, it seemed a curious time for the nobody-believes-in-us rhetoric. But Brown’s bosses had made it clear heading into the postseason that they believed he had the type of talent to consider his team a front-runner. And, now, two games later, it is an evaluation that is awfully difficult to dispute.

Credit Brown with finding a way to summon that talent after many left the Sixers for dead. In Game 3, he once again was the best coach on the sidelines, putting the offense in the hands of the increasingly dominant Butler and confusing the Raptors with a constantly rotating set of defensive schemes. Brown has always been a coach who believes in letting his talent prevail, and every game this star-studded lineup plays together, the cream continues to rise.

“I think more than anything, we enjoyed ourselves,” said Butler, who scored 22 points and came an assist and a rebound shy of his first postseason triple-double. “We were out there having fun. It’s fun to win. It’s fun to hit shots. If we keep that energy up, I think we’ll be fine.”

The most consequential plot shift came in the performance of Embiid, who, after a couple of lackluster outings, suddenly transformed into the player who dominated during the regular season. Embiid finished with 33 points and 10 rebounds and a handful of highlight-reel plays on the defensive end, punctuating the performance with a thunderous windmill jam that he celebrated by sprinting down the court with his arms spread like an airplane.

“When I have fun, my game just changes," Embiid said.

Like Embiid, the rest of them are getting better, both individually and as a unit. With Butler spending much of the game with the ball in his hands, Simmons thrived in an auxiliary role. With 6:40 left in the third quarter and the shot clock ticking down, he spun into the paint against Danny Green and dropped in a one-hander that gave the Sixers a 77-62 lead. A couple of minutes later, he made a similar move but dished to James Ennis underneath the hoop for an easy layup.

“Everybody’s a threat,” Simmons said. “Our chemistry is building, getting a lot better, to a point where we are figuring it out.”

The Sixers came out of the gate with their fists flying, and the Raptors never found a way to answer. Outside of Kawhi Leonard, the Raptors looked lost. Going into the series, the thought was that Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam gave the Raptors a three-headed scoring threat every bit as potent as the Sixers’ well-rounded attack. Three games into the series, Lowry has been invisible, and Brown’s defensive adjustments have rendered Siakam an afterthought. The leg whip that sent Joel Embiid tumbling to the court in the second half was the action of a man who knows he is beaten.

“They did a great job scoring,” Leonard said afterward. “We didn’t.”

There were still five minutes left when the benches emptied, Game 3 finishing with T.J. McConnell running the point and Boban Marjanovic throwing alley-oop lobs to Amir Johnson as Jonah Bolden looked on. The Raptors didn’t even bother to stand up and greet their starters as they were ushered off the court in advance of Game 4.

There is still plenty of basketball left to play in this series, still two days of practice left for the Raptors to adjust their scheme, to alter their rotation, to find answers. But, on a sheerly physical level, the Sixers are ahead of them right now.

They just might be the better team.