TORONTO – Unlike most workplaces, the average NBA locker room is full of guys with bellies ribbed enough to do laundry on. Six-packs are the rule, rather than the exception. Such is life in a league full of genetic lottery winners in their physical primes whose first responsibility is to be in outstanding physical condition.
So no wonder Kyle Lowry is feeling a bit chuffed these days. The Toronto Raptors point guard who has been known to carry a little extra padding at times in his career, will start his 10th NBA training camp in the best shape of his life.
He’s managed the rare feat of getting seemingly looking smaller and bigger at the same time. If he doesn’t have new muscles, he’s trained to the point where the old ones stand in sharp relief.
He looks like an “after” picture.
Put another way: He finally fits in.
“It’s nice to have abs,” said Lowry. “I can walk around with my shirt off and my wife goes ‘wow.’ She likes me.”
His teammates are incredulous.
“I saw him in the locker room the other day and I was like, ‘you’ve always been this short, chunky, bulldog fat kid,” said Patrick Patterson. “Now it’s like the evil twin brother or something.”
What prompted his off-season commitment to exercise and clean eating isn’t entirely clear.
The easy answer would be that after a season in which Lowry experienced higher highs and deeper lows than a six-year-old overdosing on refined carbohydrates, it’s an acknowledgment that he needed to improve his fitness to be able to sustain the excellence he’s capable of over an entire season, but hasn’t quite pulled off yet.
That a year that featured both his first all-star nod – as a starter, no less – and a strange second-half spiral the ended with a four-game beat-down at the hands of the Washington Wizards prompted him to dig deeper than he ever had in the off-season.
Lowry is not one for easy answers, or at least obvious ones.
“No,” he said when asked if how his season ended prompted his commitment to conditioning and diet program that made him lighter and leaner without sacrificing any strength. “I worked on my body because I wanted to work on my body. Honestly, that’s the truth. I wanted to be something different. I know what I can be.”
But Lowry’s diet hasn’t relieved him of the boulder-sized chip on his shoulder. Just ask him.
All those athletes who say they never read what people write about them or listen to what they say? Lowry isn’t one of them. He doesn’t even pretend to be.
“Everything drives me,” he said. “I read everything. I see everything. I know every person that said something bad about me. But that’s part of the business. I don’t need the motivation from that, I just use it. … There’s always going to be extra fuel for the fire when people bad-mouth you or bash you.”
To his credit, Lowry doesn’t disagree with the view that his post all-star swoon corresponded closely to the Raptors dismals second half. The Raptors were 24-8 through Dec. 31 and Lowry was averaging 20.7 points, 7.7 assists and 4.8 rebounds on 45.1 per cent shooting and playing like one of the best guards in basketball. The Raptors finished 25-25 and just 16-18 after Feb. 1. Lowry took some time off after the all-star game and another few games off to rest undisclosed injuries in March.
He averaged just 15.3 points and six assists while shooting just 37.5 per cent after Jan. 1. It got uglier in the playoffs, as Lowry shot just 31.6 per cent against the Wizards, couldn’t keep up with John Wall and hurt the Raptors with early foul trouble in a four-game sweep that had no bright spots.
“It was true,” he said of the criticism, but his goal is to make the critics eat their words this time around, all the while he’s guzzling smoothies spiked with wheat grass, presumably.
If that’s what makes him go, so be it. The Raptors are hosting the all-star game this season and Lowry will likely have to do something special to make sure he’s part of it after the way his season cratered following his debut in New York a year ago.
And following the 2016-17 season he’ll be able to opt-out of the final year of his four-year, $48-million contract and test the free agent market as the salary cap balloons with a flood of new television revenue, in what will be his last chance to cash in, most likely.
So there are plenty of good reasons for the 29-year-old to become a shadow of his former self. Lowry says he expects to see benefits when he hits the floor in Burnaby, B.C., where the Raptors are having training camp.
“I feel faster, quicker, sharper,” said Lowry, who said he didn’t know how much weight he lost, only that none of his pants fit anymore. “I feel lighter.”
These things are all good, because if there was a theme to the off-season it was that the Raptors aren’t going to wait around for their all-star point-guard to find his game again.
Toronto’s Cory Joseph wasn’t signed to a four-year, $30-million contract to start at point guard, which is a lot of money for a player to only ever be a back up. The past two seasons the Raptors didn’t really have someone they trusted at the one when head coach Dwane Casey felt the need to pull back on Lowry. Now they do, and you didn’t have to go very far at media day without hearing glowing reviews about Delon Wright, the crafty point guard who the Raptors took with the 20th pick in the June draft and is judged as only a serviceable jump shot and some experience away from pushing to be an NBA starter.
In addition, general manager Masai Ujiri went out and added players – notably DeMarre Carroll, Joseph and Luis Scola – that have made their way in the league (or in Scola’s case, the peak of international basketball) by happily being a part of teams or organizations that are about the group rather than any individual.
“They’ve come from winning programs, they’ve won,” said Ujiri. “They understand how to create a culture of winning basketball.”
For the second half of the Raptors’ surprising 2013-14 season and the first-half of 2014-15 the team seemed to have figured it out on its own and the constant was Lowry driving the play. At his best he played with a snarl and his teammates followed his lead.
But at some point, he and the Raptors lost their way. Even with an off-season to reflect he’s not sure what happened.
“I wish I could tell you,” Lowry said. “I started taking shots I shouldn’t have taken. I was forced into a lot of shots I didn’t want to take. Looking at film I could have done a lot of things differently, but you learn from it.”
As he heads into a pivotal fourth season in Toronto, one thing is clear: Washboard abs or not, his body of work will have to speak for itself.