It will only get harder from here.

Not only because the Toronto Raptors' regular season still has 81 games and 17 road trips to go, but because the number of those games to be played against teams like the Chicago Bulls — the Raptors' victims in their opening-night beatdown — will be few and far between this season. 

It’s by the NBA’s design. 

The Washington Wizards, who won 15, 18 and 17 games the last three seasons? 

They are no more. While they are no one’s pick to advance to the NBA Finals — or even necessarily make the Play-In Tournament — the tank job is over, and they will roll out a lineup against the Raptors that features three quality seven-footers in Anthony Davis, DeAndre Ayton and Alex Sarr, with Trae Young directing traffic. 

In Davis and Young, each acquired by trade last season as the Wizards plotted their pivot from oblivion to mediocrity, Washington has positionally complementary veterans with 14 all-star nods between them. 

The Wizards won their opener against Milwaukee Wednesday, anchored by Davis’s 34 points and 12 rebounds, and 20 points and 13 assists from Young. 

Having barely digested their own win over the Bulls, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic hadn’t looked ahead to the meeting against Washington, but the Wizards represent a new fact of NBA life that the league hopes will be its ‘parity era’: Truly bad teams could be a thing of the (recent) past.

Embarrassed by the epidemic of tanking, the uncompetitive basketball that had swept through the league in recent seasons as teams took ‘building through the draft’ to the extreme, the NBA decided to put a stop to it.

Apparently, having nine out of 30 teams actively trying not to win by resting key players, playing unqualified players or sidelining their best players for months due to........

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