The Toronto Raptors have the NBA’s full attention.
The franchise and fan base that has channelled an at times justifiable insecurity about their place in the league’s star-driven galaxy into a ‘We the North’ code of conduct is no longer trapped in a middle seat, flying economy when the rest of the league flies private.
Their good players stay. They have signed sought after free agents, and even if hell quite literally froze over when they hosted the NBA all-star game a few years back, everyone still had a good time. All the key influencers in the U.S. national media have made their way north to write favourable features.
LeBron James likes it here, and not just because of his personal 10-game post-season winning streak on this side of customs. Los Angeles is home, but he’s rolled through town during TIFF enough times to suggest he gets us. Charles Barkley shouts us out on TNT.
But the Raptors aren’t just a neat story anymore. They’re a factor. An obstacle. A team to be reckoned with. At 18-4 they have the best record in the NBA, three games clear of their closest competition, and they don’t even think they’ve played all that well.
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On Thursday night the only NBA game in the Eastern time zone features Toronto and the two-time defending champion Golden State Warriors, the marquee game on TNT’s Thursday night broadcast.
They can’t hide and they won’t be taken lightly.
“Right now they’re the best, and I expect them to be there throughout the whole season,” Golden State Warriors sharp-shooting straight shooter Klay Thompson told reporters Monday in Oakland as the Warriors were poised to head on a five-game road trip that kicks off in Toronto at Scotiabank. “They’ve got tremendous length and so many two-way players. Obviously Kawhi [Leonard] is back and playing at an MVP level. Kyle Lowry is a great leader, as well as a bulldog out there. So it’s going to be a great test for us. Who knows, it might be a preview of June. They’ve got something really special up there in Canada right now.”
So, with everyone watching, what are the Raptors going to do?
It’s a remarkable turnaround. The last time the Raptors had the NBA’s attention, they were a favoured No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference and were folded up in four games by James and his very flawed Cleveland Cavaliers. After a five-year build that had rescued Toronto from the league’s fringes, the bright lights proved too much. The team Raptors president Masai Ujiri had worked so hard to make relevant and important and something serious was rendered a punchline – LeBronto — in the space of four disheartening games.
The Raptors rise has largely over-lapped with the Warriors emergence as an NBA team for the ages, but where the Warriors have racked up three titles and records for sheer dominance, all the Raptors have to show for it were brooding bouts of existential NBA dread: ‘If a team isn’t truly championship worthy, does it even exist? Is existence worthwhile without championship aspirations?’
For Ujiri the answer was no, no it’s not.
Which is how we got here. The stage fright against Cleveland prompted Ujiri to fire former head coach Dwane Casey, hire his assistant Nick Nurse and then pull the trigger on the biggest trade the Raptors will ever make: sending DeMar DeRozan (and Jakob Poeltl) to San Antonio for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green.
The returns have been instant. Off the floor the Raptors were the talk of the off-season; possibly the biggest NBA story outside James signing with the Lakers. On the floor, the new-look Raptors have exceeded most reasonable expectations and believe they’ve yet to fully hit their stride.
“It’s a lot of things, you know what I mean? I just don’t want to hit on all of them right now,” Leonard said at the Raptors practice facility on Wednesday. “But I just feel like we can still get better. I feel we are moving as a team and everything, but I just feel like we still have room for improvement … it’s not even necessarily the record. It’s about how we’re playing, and wanting to play consistently, and with us having leads of 15 points and teams coming back, and us being down 15. Just things like that, just be able to play consistently. The record doesn’t show that but once you’re on a team, you can get a feel.”
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Leonard has won an NBA title and appeared in two NBA Finals, as has Green, and that seems to be the standard against which he’s holding himself and his new team. 60-win seasons are fine, but it’s 16-win post-seasons that matter.
So when he says he’s not all that moved about matching up with Kevin Durant and the Warriors, you tend to believe him.
“It’s just another game to build off of and get better,” said Leonard. “To go out and challenge those guys, to score, also to defend, same thing we do every night. It’s a long road.”
But for the Raptors, the road to the Promised Land – a date in June against (presumably) the Warriors has to start somewhere.
Even if this version of the Warriors seems relatively vulnerable – they are 5-5 in the 10 games Steph Curry has missed with a groin injury and locker-room tensions have bubbled over into the public sphere at times – they are still the Warriors. With Curry and Draymond Green poised to return soon, they’ll again look like the group that has shaped modern basketball with their pace and three-point shooting and their ball movement and freedom. It just won’t be Thursday:
Like many teams, the Raptors were assembled with the Warriors in mind – with an emphasis on long and versatile athletes capable of switching across positions on defence, making plays and scoring from deep on offence, too.
But everyone has a plan – as Mike Tyson famously said – until they get hit in the face, and the Warriors still throw bombs. Before Curry was hurt they were 10-1 and rolling.
“People are trying to do what they do, but nobody does it like them,” said Nurse. “They still crush you with that 30-footer, and then another one … it takes away [the spirit] from you, the discouragement of playing so hard and well and you turn around and they throw in another 30-footer.
“You can see every team shaking their head like they just got punched off the ropes and they’re trying to stay in the fight,” said Nurse. “Hopefully, mentally, we’ll be strong enough to deal with that because it’s coming.”
How the Raptors deal with it may give some clue as to where the Raptors are going.
It’s a group that hasn’t had any experience collectively rising to the occasion while under the lights and here we are, barely a quarter of the way through the season and the league has handed the Raptors a full dress rehearsal of what things might look like in June.
The NBA will be watching and the Raptors would be wise to use every opportunity they get to figure it all out.
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