Before the season, we wondered if there was anything the Toronto Raptors could do to prior to the postseason to convince us that they’re a serious championship contender and not just the last team LeBron James has to brush past on his way to yet another NBA Finals. After losing their first three meetings with LeBron and the Cleveland Cavaliers this season — by only 11 combined points, by the way; all three games were dogfights — the reality is that there probably isn’t.

You’ve still got to try, though, and it’s hard to argue with the Raps’ preferred method of persuasion: absolutely incinerating opposing defenses every chance they get.

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Toronto doused the Milwaukee Bucks in gasoline and set them ablaze on Monday night, notching a 122-100 win. The offensive performance gets even more impressive when you account for the pace of play. The Bucks entered Monday ranked 11th among 30 NBA teams in defensive efficiency, allowing an average of 102.5 points per 100 possessions. Toronto carved them up at a 130.7 points-per-100 clip, the kind of an imaginary number of monstrous offensive excellence that typically only exists in Don Nelson and Mike D’Antoni’s wildest fever dreams.

Toronto shot 50.6 percent as a team on Monday, logging 26 assists on 42 made field goals. They knocked down 14 of their 25 3-point tries, and doubled up Milwaukee at the free-throw line, 24 to 12. DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry continued to stack evidence in their ongoing inside-outside debate, with DeRozan going 6-for-10 inside the arc and 15-for-15 at the foul line for his team-high 30 points, while Lowry knocked down four of seven 3-point tries on his way to 18 points and seven assists.

The Raptors parried an early Milwaukee thrust, took the lead three minutes into the first quarter, and just kept pushing. The starters moved the ball, created quality shots and set the tone, but — as has been the case for most of the last two seasons — it was Toronto’s buzzsaw second unit that turned the Bucks to ash.

The lineup of Lowry, Cory Joseph, Patrick Patterson, Terrence Ross and Lucas Nogueira outscored Milwaukee by nine points in just over six minutes of second-quarter run, nearly doubling the 10-point advantage that Toronto had after 12 minutes. And after the Bucks finally broke out in the third quarter, riding the one-two punch of Giannis Antetokounmpo (who’d finish with 30 points, eight rebounds, five assists and three steals) and Jabari Parker (27 points, three rebounds, two assists, one steal) to get back within 10 entering the fourth, the Lowry-led reserve corps once again put the hammer down, as Ross ripped off seven straight points as part of a 19-6 run that put the game away well before the midpoint of the quarter.

Ross would finish with 25 points on 10-for-17 shooting, five rebounds and two steals in just 21 minutes off the bench … and he almost threw all that good will away with this regrettable unsuccessful attempt at a fast-break windmill dunk in the fourth quarter:

Luckily for Ross, the Raptors rebounded the miss and Lowry followed it up by drilling a 3, because everything’s going right for the team’s killer lineup these days.

All told, the Lowry and The Bench lineup outscored the Bucks by 22 points in just under 13 minutes of play. Considering the Raptors won by 22, that seems significant.

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The sterling, scorching play represented just another day at the office for the Raptors’ second unit, which has now outscored opponents by 76 points in 125 minutes, and by an average of 32.2 points per 100 possessions, for the 2016-17 campaign. That makes Lowry and The Bench, statistically speaking, the NBA’s most dominant lineup to log at least 100 minutes of floor time this season, head and shoulders above even wrecking crews like the Golden State Warriors’ reconfigured Death Lineup with Kevin Durant in place of Harrison Barnes, and the Dubs’ own All-Star-led second unit of Durant, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston and David West.

Those Warriors lineups torch opponents by spreading them out, cranking up the pace, pinging the ball around the perimeter, bombing away from long distance, and generally looking like the model of a modern NBA offense. The Raptors, though, rank in the bottom third of the league in possessions per game and 3-pointers attempted per game. (They make long balls as well as anybody, though.) A pace-and-space team, this isn’t.

And yet, behind the somewhat stunningly consistent excellence from midrange that has noted throwback DeRozan averaging 27.9 points per game, top-five marks in free-throw rate (how often you get to the line) and turnover percentage (how infrequently you cough up possession), and that killer second unit hitting the gas at the start of second and fourth quarters, Toronto has been right up there with Golden State in the running for the NBA’s most effective offense through the first quarter of the season.

“In fact,” Ian Levy of FanSided noted earlier Monday, “the Raptors currently have the second best offensive efficiency mark of all-time, relative to the league average.” And that was before they hung 122 on Milwaukee to take over this season’s No. 1 spot in points scored per possession from Golden State.

“The Raptors are learning their lessons and getting better,” SB Nation’s Paul Flannery wrote Sunday. “At the end of the day, that’s all they can do.” And if, in the process, they continue to roll out a historically potent offense, then so much the better. Whether it’ll give them a puncher’s chance against LeBron and company come May remains to be seen, but it’d sure make the trip there a hell of a lot more fun to watch.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!

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