Toronto Raptors forward Chris Boucher drives to the basket as Orlando Magic guard Chasson Randle defends during the first half at Amalie Arena on Apr 16, 2021 in Tampa, Fla.Kim Klement/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
In theory, tanking is easy.
You trade away your best players. You start a bunch of backups and scrubs. You make it clear that while everyone is still expected to show up to work, they are encouraged to fall asleep at their desks. That way, when it all falls apart, no one in particular is to blame.
Simple stuff. If you’re still confused and want to plan a tank of your own, give the Toronto Raptors a call. That way you can figure out how they planned their auto-destruct season and then you can do everything the opposite way.
It’s hard to figure out what the Raptors are worse at just now – playing basketball, tanking at basketball or pretending to care about basketball.
When they were supposed to win in March, they lost. When they were supposed to lose in April, they started winning. Nothing they do wrong turns out right.
They decided not to trade Kyle Lowry at the deadline because they couldn’t strip enough value out of moving him. Then Lowry got injured. So what exactly were the Raptors offered that wasn’t worth more than nothing? Because nothing’s what they’re getting.
Lowry could’ve decided to punish the Raptors by trying very hard. By not playing, he is doing them a weird sort of favour. Not that it’s working.
There was a COVID-19 outbreak in the middle there, the full extent of which is still unknown. A bunch of guys just disappeared for a while and almost no one wanted to talk about it.
Even that wasn’t enough to fully submerge the campaign. Now the Raptors have resorted to “resting” their “stars” (you need a lot of air quotes with this team right now).
That’s another thing they got wrong. The only way this organization could be more transparent in its efforts to lose is if head coach Nick Nurse started tripping his own guys as they ran by. The NBA grew so weary of Toronto’s mix-and-match lineups it fined the team US$25,000 for playing silly buggers.
And yet Toronto keeps winning. Not winning a lot. But just enough to make all its other efforts pointless.
The Raptors lose two for every victory and they are somehow moving up in the standing. This speaks to a malaise throughout the league. Who could blame them? The pandemic was always going to make 2020-21 an asterisk season, but it’s turned instead into a forgotten one. So that’s another thing the Raptors got wrong – timing.
Of all the places a team can finish in the standings, the worst is 10th. Tenth is the neither/nor position – neither going anywhere in the playoffs, nor giving yourself much chance at moving up in the draft. Guess what spot the Raptors are currently circling?
Lots of teams are failures. But it takes a special one to fail at failing.
It goes to show the power of sports inertia. Bodies that are inept at one thing (basketball) tend to be inept at others as well (the politics of basketball).
A perfect tank is impossible, but good tanks share a few qualities. First and foremost, they are quick. It’s down and back up in a fluid, no-more-than-two-year-long motion.
They pay off. You need to round out the tank by acquiring a player everyone can unequivocally get excited about. Then you need to start contending.
The last part is the least discussed – a good tank hollows out a team, but doesn’t leave it motivationally devastated. Inevitably, some players will transition between eras. One moment, you are telling guys they aren’t good enough. In the next, you need them to be good again. Players may come out of that experience embittered. You don’t want that.
That’s another thing – how many is that now? – Toronto is doing wrong.
Take Pascal Siakam. This was supposed to be his year. Fat, new max contract; cornerstone of the new core; the team’s Mr. Everything.
Or perhaps not. Performance-wise, Siakam’s been all over the place. He is so far away from the star the Raptors thought they were hiring, he is essentially underground.
That max contract now looks like a mistake. If that’s the case, it’s the sort you can’t afford to make. One max player who isn’t carrying his weight prevents a good team from ever becoming great. And this team isn’t even good.
Cornerstone players have bad nights and even bad years. Before he was a winner, Lowry spent years losing. But what cornerstone players don’t do is become the sort of guy who wigs out, giving permission to everyone else to wig out as well. At least temporarily, Siakam has become one of those guys.
Then you have Fred VanVleet – the steadiest personality in the franchise – talking about how little he enjoys basketball right now. VanVleet complained about business considerations trumping athletic ones in the NBA, calling this season “unpure.”
On the one hand, welcome to the real world, pal.
On the other, it’s never good when one of your top employees tells you he doesn’t like coming to work. That is a problem that a couple of months off in the summer doesn’t solve.
So what’s the solution? There isn’t any obvious one. That’s another thing the Raptors are bad at right now – plans. They don’t have one. Maybe the draft will save them, but it’s highly unlikely.
For now, the 2019 NBA champions can only try being the worst they can be. That shouldn’t be so, so hard for a team that, all of sudden, does everything wrong. And yet it is.