TORONTO – Toronto Raptors vs. Washington Wizards?
We’ve been here before. And before looking ahead at what promises to be as compelling a post-season as the Raptors have ever had, it’s worth looking back a little bit; it explains where we are.
If the best season in Raptors history has been because of a culture reset, it’s important to understand the issues the team was trying to get right – and largely has had a history that ran deeper than just the previous twelve months.
And if you were going to pick the moment when the it looked like things might go off the rails it wasn’t last season, when the Raptors were swept aside by the Cleveland Cavaliers.
No, by then the Raptors had some history together, a modicum of playoff success and proof that staying on plan was often the best path forward.
But in the Spring of 2015 when the Raptors were swept aside by the Washington Wizards, when Paul Pierce told the world the Raptors didn’t have ‘it’ and then proceeded to shoot the lights out against a Toronto club that had no faith in each other, limited faith in their coach and limited history of success to fall back on to bolster them through the storm.
That’s when things could have changed, drastically, and the Raptors as currently constructed might never have existed.
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Count Raptors head coach Dwane Casey among those who wouldn’t have predicted Raptors president Masai Ujiri having the patience to let him see the job through after the Wizards stumble.
“No, I didn’t,” he said. “And we shouldn’t have [expected it]. But I knew from a coaching stand point it was going the right way, there were going to be ups and downs … everybody is trying to flip the switch on everything. But Masai had patience, saw what’s coming and stuck with it.”
Recently, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski coaxed from Kyle Lowry in plain terms what had been widely understood – the relationship between the franchise point guard and his head coach was tenuous.
“There were definitely nights when it was, ‘man, I gotta go, or he gotta go, one of the two,’” Lowry said in a recently aired feature.
This was, arguably, never more apparent than after the Raptors were swept by the Wizards, but Ujiri stuck with Casey and demanded Lowry work with his head coach rather than get lost in his frustration.
If this season was based on the famous “culture reset,” that things even got that far was because Ujiri opted to keep things the same.
What follows has become part of club lore. How after a first-round sweep the Raptors maintained their core, backed their coach and were rewarded with a then-club-record 56 wins and a trip to the Eastern Conference final in 2016.
The rewards have been plentiful – consistent success and an organizational culture that seems to breed it. The Raptors are embarking on their fifth straight playoff appearance and have averaged 53 wins a year in that span. That consistency doesn’t emerge from nothing and building a roster that can bid adieu to veterans like Patrick Patterson, DeMarre Carroll, Cory Joseph and P.J. Tucker and then win 59 games almost entirely due to internal improvement – hand’s up who figured Fred VanVleet was going to be an essential piece of the team with the second-best record in the NBA this time a year ago – are clearly firing on all cylinders.
It would have been easy, in the wake of the Wizards sweep, to change course, to make a trade, to fire a coach.
Instead the Raptors pushed forward with no one more than Lowry, who shot 31 per cent against Washington and just 21 per cent from three, setting in motion questions about his post-season performance that he could go a long way towards answering with his play beginning in Game 1 against Washington Saturday afternoon.
“I know I got a lot of blame from some people in this room,” he said when asked about the Wizards sweep. “And I took it hard. I came back and got better from it. I think a lot of people got better. That’s old news, it’s years ago, we’re a different team, different style of play, different people on the team, different egos, things are just different.
“I’m a lot slimmer, got a lot more hair. I have two kids now. A lot of things are different.”
Along with Lowry, DeMar DeRozan and Jonas Valanciunas are the only Raptors players left over from that 2014-15 team, but it was interesting to hear Valanciunas’s view on what is different now compared to then:
“Finally we find that connection with each other,” the Lithuanian big man said. “We became better players, we were good individual players, but now we are better as a team, as one unit. There`s been a lot of saying like there’s no ‘I’ in team. So, finally we probably got it, and now it feels great to play on this team.”
Much will be made in the coming days and weeks about this version of the Raptors and where this playoff run could lead.
It’s dizzying to think about, even if it’s hard to completely shake off the ghost of past playoff stumbles.
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But before all that gets rolling it’s worth looking back and appreciating how far the franchise has come since the last time the team met the Wizards in a first-round playoff series.
Win or lose, the real winners are emerging generations of Raptors fans that now have their own era of sustained success to look back on fondly, to share amongst themselves.
Fans need that: a stretch of years to let a team’s roots sink in, to come to expect success. It’s a lot to expect for the Raptors’ competitive run to end like it did for the Toronto Blue Jays with a steady build culminating in a pair of World Series titles, or to enjoy a dynasty like the Toronto Maple Leafs had in the 1960s – albeit in a six-team league.
But with the playoffs starting and nothing guaranteed, its always worth remembering to even be in in position to have your heart-broken again is a privilege, and one that seemed out of reach for Raptors fans even three years ago at this time.
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