Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving shot a combined 4-for-28 in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals. Irving, who had been torching the Toronto Raptors from midrange through the first two contests of the series, lost the drumbeat on his rhythm jumper. Love clanked a handful of open threes and couldn’t do much in the post beyond heaving a few awkward turnarounds that only grazed the rim.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the floor, DeMar DeRozan was too much for J.R. Smith, spinning the ink-drenched guard every which way on his forays to the basket and hitting difficult 16-footers from the elbow and baseline. And Bismack Biyombo rose up in Jonas Valanciunas’ injured stead and claimed dominion over the lane, altering drives with his length and grabbing every rebound within reach.

Basketball is at once byzantine and simple. There is more to be said about Game 3, but it can be explained without much fuss, too: the Cavs’ second- and third-best players were awful, one of the Raptors’ stars played great, and a role player put in a career performance. That anodyne bit of coach-speak about the NBA being a make/miss league doesn’t mean wins and losses aren’t more complicated than that; it just means that beyond all the big-picture strategy and granular goings-on of a particular sequence, there are outcomes that undeniably happen—a steal, a foul, a shot that swishes through the hoop or rims out—and they decide everything.

Kevin Love was terrible in Game 4, too. When he’s not scoring, he’s just about useless. He’s a good rebounder, but the intense beneath-the-rim scrap in this series isn’t for him, and there’s no one on the Raptors with whom he can keep up defensively. Love didn’t play in the fourth quarter ostensibly because of a turned ankle, which was for the best because Channing Frye’s three-point stroke was pure and Love looked beaten down. DeRozan was incredible again, and so was Kyle Lowry, who nailed ever-deeper threes all night. They put up 67 points between them.

Kyrie Irving spent the first half arcing jumpers off the front rim and unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to fool Biyombo with lay-ups that ricocheted off the backboard like well-struck racquetballs. Irving then gathered himself in the third quarter, sinking a pair of triples and a long two in the opening minutes and looking like the ebullient scorer he usually is for the rest of the game’s duration. He finished a respectable 11-for-21 from the field, which wasn’t enough to help the Cavs crawl out from the 16-point crater Toronto put them in at halftime.

That is the story—if not in full, then in essence—of how the Raptors came back from two games down to even the Eastern Conference Finals. The story of their initial predicament is even simpler: they got annihilated, run off the floor in every respect. LeBron James bullied DeMarre Carroll in the post. Irving freed himself for open jumpers. Cavs' perimeter shooters enjoyed acres of airspace. Lowry was a non-factor. Biyombo grabbed nine total rebounds over two games.

One of the reasons the series has flipped is that the Raptors have made a wise defensive choice. They’ve decided to take away driving lanes at the expense of perhaps being a bit slow to close out on shooters. That’s worked for them, not just because the Cavs have been quite bad from beyond the arc, but because they’re shooting a low percentage (32.9 percent) from three-point range while taking twice as many threes (82 vs. 41) in Toronto as they did in Cleveland. Many of the shots that are now 24-footers were dunks and lay-ins during the pair of blowouts that opened the series.

Beyond that—well, there is such a thing as playing better. The Cavs looked low-energy on defense for the first game-and-a-half on the road and DeRozan and Lowry are doing what stars sometimes do and ascending to being unguardable. Biyombo is doing Tristan Thompson Things better than Thompson at the moment. LeBron has been his typical brilliant self, but he hasn’t had much help.

NBA playoffs series are best-of-seven because this length renders them pretty useful as epistemological exercises. The superior team usually wins. But sometimes 'the why?' of the winning squad’s superiority isn’t particularly instructive. What we’ve seen between the Cavs and Raptors are three contests that were over by the fourth quarter and one drubbing that turned into a failed comeback after halftime. When the teams keep switching poles—one always lousy, one always hitting on all cylinders—it’s hard to learn much from it. You can see the futility of this in the way the fan hysterics have shifted. After two games, Clevelanders were laughing off the Raptors and prematurely daydreaming about the Finals. Now, Toronto fans think their guys are well-positioned to pull off an upset.

In the end, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, even if it hasn’t yet manifested itself on the court. The Cavaliers are comfortably better than the Raptors and still favorites in the series, though they can expect a squad that now has some belief in itself to give them everything they can handle over the remainder of the series. The Raptors, for the their part, can beat the Cavs if they play well, but they have considerably less margin for error.

The old cliché goes that at 2-2, it’s a new series, but this one has well and truly been reset. We know now about as much as we knew before these teams played their first game. We know that if Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love are off-target, the Cavs will struggle, and that if DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry play up to their potential, the Raptors are potent. We know the Biyombo-Thompson paint battle is important. We know LeBron James is the best player on the court. We know all the obvious things. What we don’t know is where this wildly disparate series is headed. This is part of the fun of the playoffs—that they occasionally produce spectacular nonsense. Up to this point, in the Eastern Conference Finals, we’ve gotten nothing but rapturous noise.