CLEVELAND – Vince Carter has no hard feelings that his 2000-01 Toronto Raptors team has finally been supplanted as the best in franchise history.
The Memphis Grizzlies guard followed his old team’s run to their first-ever Eastern Conference Finals with interest and was happy to see this edition of the Raptors blow away all the previous standards for regular-season and post-season success.
“It was awesome,” said Carter before Game 3 of NBA Finals. “I reached out to Kyle [Lowry] and DeMar [DeRozan]. I’m not really big on doing the whole reaching-out-through-social-media-so-everybody-sees-it type thing. It’s just not my thing. You know, we talked. I just told them, I was like, ‘You guys are the best,’ and they should hold their head up high. Because not only did they make history, they actually changed a lot of minds of a lot of people. Everybody thought they could be here.
“So I think they had a heck of a run, and I was just proud to read about it, to listen to people talk about it. Where it was like at one point they weren’t even talking about them in the Finals and next thing you know, the Raptors could possibly do it. It was great to see it, and to know at one point I was part of that and to see your record go down, I mean, all records are broken at some point. We’re seeing a lot of history this year throughout the NBA, and it’s great to see, because that’s why we play the game.
“All these young kids that are growing up are now in their minds thinking they want to make history and beat the records that are being set today. So it was awesome.”
Carter was speaking before taking in his first-ever NBA Finals game after 18 seasons in the league. The circumstances, while prestigious in their own right, weren’t exactly as he dreamed. The former Raptors superstar played in one conference final as a member of the Orlando Magic in 2009-10, losing to the Boston Celtics in six games. And famously, for Raptors fans, he came within a shot of the Eastern Conference Finals in 2001.
Carter was at Quicken Loans Arena to receive the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year Award, which recognizes the player deemed the best teammate based on selfless play, on- and off-court leadership as a mentor and role model to other NBA players, and commitment and dedication to team as voted on by his fellow players across the league.
It marks an impressive transition to a veteran role player that a lot of superstars struggle with but Carter has made seamlessly. He credits the foundation laid early in his career as a rising star on those veteran-laden Raptors clubs.
“I was fortunate, my first couple years I had Charles Oakley, who played with Michael Jordan. I had Kevin Willis, who played with Dominique Wilkins. I had Dee Brown, who played with Larry Bird; Doug Christie, who played with Magic Johnson, and Antonio Davis, who played with Reggie Miller. It doesn’t get any better than that,” said Carter. “I had these guys around me to show me what it was like. In media scrums this is how you handle yourself. This is what you should talk about. This is what you should say. On the court, how to prepare myself each and every night. It helped me. As a rookie, I felt like I had played against some of the best players in the world prior to my rookie year. So it’s just something that’s always been a part of me. And once I kind of learned that and got to see what it did for me, it was something I always wanted to do for the next generation of guys, even guys who were actually rookies or older than me at that time.”
With at least one year left on his contract Carter’s only remaining goal is to make it back to Finals as a player, rather than an award winner.
“If I stick around long enough, hopefully I’ll get to actually play in it,” he said. “But being here is pretty awesome as well. Just the intensity. I watched it, I studied the game, I know a lot about it, so it’s one thing, of course. Watching it is one thing, playing it is another. Hopefully one day.”
