"You're an animal, dog." Paul Pierce told Kyle Lowry five years ago. "You're an animal."

The words came after Game 7 of the first round of the 2014 NBA Playoffs of the Toronto Raptors against the Brooklyn Nets, where the Raptors fell to the Nets. Lowry, along with his best friend DeMar DeRozan, had recently led the Raptors to a resurgent and franchise-best record of 48-34 after a putrid 6-12 start.

The Raptors were down by one point with six seconds left. Greivis Vasquez inbounded to Kyle Lowry five feet from the three-point line. Lowry was closely guarded by Deron Williams, and then double teamed by Williams and Kevin Garnett. But Lowry brilliantly splits both defenders and seemed to get a clear shot and easy layup to take the game and the series for the Raptors...and then his shot was blocked by Pierce at the basket.

It's essential to note how far Lowry and the Raptors had come that season. They hadn't made the playoffs since 2008, and the team trading away Rudy Gay at the 6-12 mark of the season was supposed signaled the start of a rebuild.

But it didn't.

Now, Kyle Lowry and the Raptors are champions. The journey for the Raptors here was rocky, and, at times, incredibly disheartening, so it is essential, for me, to account for how Lowry became an NBA champion.

At the start of the 2013-2014 season, it seemed like Lowry's career may have been done. A journeyman who clashed with his coaches in both Houston and Memphis and couldn't seem to find a home, no one ever doubted Lowry's toughness as a player. He was stubbornly confident, always willing to go for a loose ball and likely win every 50-50 ball. And although that confidence was his fuel, it was also, in the words of Jonathan Abrams, former Grantland writer, "the hindrance that threatened him from reaching his potential." On most teams he'd been on, the hindrance outweighed the fuel. Teams didn't trust him as "the man."

And the only time a team did was when the Raptors did after the Rudy Gay trade, in an attempt to tank the season. Rudy Gay, a ball-dominant player, wasn't the right fit to be on the floor the same time as DeRozan and Lowry, leading to no spacing on the floor, as the start of the season was evidence to.

"It just didn't work out," Raptors' president Masai Ujiri said about the trade. "He was the fall guy. It was tough for everybody. It was really tough for me. I was close to Rudy. I was having a good time, too, kind of mentoring Rudy and taking him through it. He was a victim of our business in some ways."

But right after the trade, DeRozan approached Lowry, with the knowledge that Lowry and DeRozan's names often surfaced in trade talks, too. DeRozan told Lowry that the team had two weeks to decide "if we're going to go up or going to go down." If the two of them didn't make the postseason, it was "all or nothing," in the words of DeRozan.

Lowry would then go on to play so brilliantly and to establish himself as one of the best point guards in the East, widely regarded as one of the biggest snubs on the All-Star team that year. But DeRozan would get the vote and Lowry was happy for his best friend.

Meanwhile, Lowry and Coach Dwane Casey would build their relationship of trust and dependency. Casey knew that Lowry was an edgy, tough, and hardheaded player. In no way did Casey want to change that. He fashioned the way he coached Lowry in the same way his mentor, George Karl, coached Gary Payton, another brash, talented, and talkative point guard on the Seattle SuperSonics. "Casey appreciated how Karl coached and coaxed Payton, how the coach allowed Payton to be himself in a way that didn't take away from the team," Abrams reported. Casey wanted to give the same space to Lowry.

Lowry would re-sign with Toronto that summer for a four-year, $48 million contract. The stars were aligned for a bright future and for Lowry, DeRozan, and the Raptors to be perennial contenders for the championship.

"I tried," Lowry said of the Paul Pierce block. "I did what I was supposed to do. It just didn't work out. Next time, I'll make sure it works out. And if that fails, I'll try again."

But that Paul Pierce block would set in motion several years of playoff disappointments and heartbreaks for Lowry and the Raptors. Looking stellar and unstoppable in the regular season, the Raptors would get swept by the Wizards the next season, and from 2015-2018, the Raptors would fall to a familiar opponent somewhere in the playoffs: LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. They would look utterly helpless as LeBron tore the team apart. In no season was this trend more evident than in the 2018 NBA playoffs, where Toronto was the first seed of the Eastern Conference. The Raptors were so completely destroyed by LeBron that the term "LeBronto" became an ESPN meme it almost became necessary to rename the whole city of Toronto.

"Playoff Lowry" was a pejorative term used to describe Kyle Lowry's atrocious playoff play in relation to his regular season performance, as someone whose performance dipped substantially and who choked in clutch situations. After he scored 0 points in the first game of the first round of the NBA playoffs this year, the term was all over social media. But what often went unrecognized and misrepresented in that game is that he also had eight assists and seven rebounds, and finished with a team-high of +11. And no matter how poorly Lowry shot, he always helped set the pace on offense for the team. No matter how poorly Lowry shot, he always played hard, dove for loose balls, or defended at an elite level.

Sure, Kyle Lowry may have been fairly maligned for trying to dribble between Tobias Harris's legs in the final, do-or-die possession of Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals against Philadelphia, but what was often always overlooked about Lowry was what went beyond the stat sheet. Look no further than Game 1 of the 2019 Finals to see that impact: ostensibly, Lowry looked like he had yet another bad game. He scored 7 points on 2 of 9 shooting. But he drew a charge on DeMarcus Cousins close to the end of the fourth quarter, and also made a 29-foot 3-pointer with 30.8 seconds left in the game.

Look no further than the hustle stats in the NBA Playoffs to see Lowry's crucial contribution in the not-so-sexy parts of the game. He led all players in offensive loose balls recovered and charges drawn, many of those charges in crunch time. Kyle Lowry is a straight grinder. During the playoffs, the Raptors player with the best +/- and statistically the most valuable person on the floor was Kyle Lowry (not Kawhi Leonard) with a +6.7. In the regular season, he led the team with a +8.2 stat.

"He gets more slandered than anybody I ever seen in the league," Teammate Fred VanVleet said of him. Although he doesn't deserve it, he has taken it with grace and used the critiques as fuel and fire to remain the Raptors' steadying force and face of their franchise. He withstood his best friend get traded away and constant scapegoating criticism from the media and fans, and through it all survived and kept his composure. Coach Nick Nurse said of Lowry that "he's going to defend, he's going to lead the team, he's going to make those tough plays. He just intrinsically does that game after game after game." A credit to the player and leader he is on the team.

In Game 6 of the NBA Finals, we saw all that hard work and toughness pay off, aggressively scoring the team's first 11 points and 26 total points, 10 assists, and 7 rebounds. And now, he's a champion.

Masai Ujiri praised Lowry, "There's something about that guy that I just believe in. It's incredible. We have been through so much, and he's a winner. There's no other way to put it: He's a winner. He's been hit upside the head from every different angle in the world, whether it's personal — everything — and he survives it."