The Toronto Raptors have been notoriously known for getting the short end of the stick.
At least that’s the way the Canadian media views their American counterparts’ coverage of the team.
Whether it’s Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan upset about not playing on Christmas, or Sports Illustrated’s annual shun of DeRozan in their player rankings or the fact that the two top and hottest teams in the NBA played last Friday and it wasn’t on U.S. national TV, the players see it all.
“They are very aware of it,” Raptors head coach Dwane Casey said on Monday’s Prime Time Sports. “I think they use it as a motivational tool … but how that game Friday night [was] not on national TV in the U.S., it blows my mind. You got the two top teams in their respective conferences playing — no matter if it’s Toronto or Boston or whoever — [and] they’re playing on a Friday night.”
Casey certainly has a point. The Friday night game against the Houston Rockets become the most-watched Raptors regular season game ever in Canada. So why aren’t they getting the same appreciation south of the border?
Perhaps it’s the misguided reputation they’ve picked up during their last couple of post-season runs.
In 2016-17, they put up 51 wins and got swept in the second-round of the playoffs by the Cleveland Cavaliers. The year before they amassed 56 wins and lost in six games in the conference finals, also by the group led by LeBron James.
But the story of the Raptors being a poor playoff team because they get bounced by this generation’s greatest player each year is getting old. At least, that’s the way Casey sees it.
“But what bothers me more than anything else is, you know you hear the narrative and the stories about how Toronto plays great during the regular season and then they flame out in the playoffs. Well, guess who we flamed out against? It’s No. 23 in Cleveland,” said Casey. “That’s the lazy narrative of a lot of the media in the U.S. [from] some of the people who don’t follow Toronto enough and the only thing they’ve heard is they got beat two years in a row by Cleveland.
“I think it’s just something that we just gotta keep doing what we’re doing, doing it at a high level and they’ll finally get the picture amongst the so-called U.S. media.”
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And perhaps that narrative is starting to change.
Toronto jumped to the No. 1 spot in the power rankings at both NBA.com and Sports Illustrated. But not entirely changed as ESPN still has them in third behind the Rockets and Golden State Warriors, not to mention former thorn-in-the-side-of-the-Raptors Paul Pierce doesn’t think they have the “it” factor.
But there’s no reason to whine about it. Casey knows the only way to change those opinions is to go out there and produce.
“The only way you get recognition: you don’t sit and pout about it. You gotta go out and continue to win, be consistently winning and let the numbers speak for themselves,” he said. “And I think that’s the way our guys have approached it.”
“More than anything else, they use it to fuel them, to continue to win, to continue to play hard, just to prove that, ‘Hey, we’re doing something special in Toronto.'”
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