In days-of-the-week terms, the Toronto Raptors season has been a Sunday. Perfectly pleasant, but in retrospect you’d be hard pressed to say exactly what happened or who did what.
Kawhi Leonard was as advertised. Pascal Siakam got good. Everybody else played to their mean.
There was a big deadline-day trade. Old friends lost and new ones gained. The wagon train kept bumping on down the trail without blowing out a wheel or having to shoot any of the horses.
If there is one overriding theme to the Raptors in the Masai Ujiri era it is that they have become the most boring regular-season team in the NBA. Boring in a good way.
They are paragons of competence and responsible stewardship. (As opposed to their former incarnation, a recorded-in-front-of-a-live-studio-audience soap opera about 12 men playing basketball like the goal is to hit the backboard as hard as possible.)
The Golden State Warriors are a Thursday, with all the anticipation of the weekend to come. The Milwaukee Bucks are a Friday, a day on which a lot of things are possible. And the L.A. Lakers are very late on a Saturday night, when you wake up on the living-room floor and realize that, hey, I don’t have carpet in my living room and what exactly happened last night?
Toronto beat Brooklyn on Wednesday. As it (very tenuously) stands, the Nets will be the Raptors’ first-round playoff opponent.
The story coming out of the game was Siakam vs. Brooklyn guard D’Angelo Russell for the NBA’s version of a participation prize, the Most Improved Player Award. That’s how thin the narrative gruel has become.
But good news, it’s about to get exciting. Perhaps even terribly exciting.
We can say this about the gambles the Raptors have taken in their recruitment and staffing over the past year – they have eliminated the concept of “do-overs” as it applies to this team.
The cumulative effect of firing Dwane Casey and DeMar DeRozan and hiring Nick Nurse and Leonard to replace them is that the club must win now.
First- and second-round victories are a given. Doesn’t matter if they’re playing the present-day Philadelphia 76ers or the Bill-Russell-era Boston Celtics. They had better go through those teams like an electric knife through liquefied butter.
You wouldn’t know that to hear from anyone. Another trademark of the Ujiri Raptors is that they don’t say much, and promise less. You hear a lot about process and injuries and the team coming together. You do not get a lot of concrete detail about expectations.
Every team is always at some sort of fork in the road, but these Raptors have two options – the path up to glory or one that goes off a cliff.
Before it gets crazy, we might ask ourselves what a “successful” Raptors campaign looks like.
Lose in Round 1? Complete failure. Worst one ever. Arrange for UPS to begin packing up Leonard’s locker before the team jet has touched down and then head straight to the office to begin preparation for a modified teardown.
Lose in Round 2? See Lose in Round 1, but more morose.
Lose badly to Bucks (presumably) in the conference final? Very difficult to imagine how you spin that positive.
Then it gets serious.
Would losing the conference final in muscular or unlucky fashion count as a “successful” year? Say, a critical player being injured in Game 2 or the ball rimming out at the end of Game 7. The Raptors have never been that close before.
They’ve been to the next-to-last phase only once. LeBron James laid into them like a repeating bag. Afterward, the cry was all “We’ll get him (not them) next time.”
The next two times they were flattened before they’d gotten out of their own corner, which is how we arrived where we are now.
Almost getting there? Looking convincing while doing so? I suspect people would buy that as a good year – at least up until Leonard makes his decision about whether or not to leave.
If they get to the final, that’s a guaranteed good year. Though no one has ever said the words out loud, that’s the baseline expectation of a team with one truly elite player, a couple of all-star level players, serious depth and no more LeBron to go through.
We won’t even speak here about a championship. Though you don’t pull for any one team, you also don’t care to jinx it. (And by “it,” I mean the story, rather than the result.)
If I owned stock in the Raptors, losing this year’s final would be bingo on my card.
The long-term goal is persuading Leonard to stay. Having no clue where his head is at, under what circumstances is he most likely to do that?
Should the Raptors win a title, Leonard can hang out a “Mission Accomplished” banner and leave with a clear conscience. Knowing the temperament of Toronto fans, they’d probably line the streets to the airport to salute him out of town.
Tripping over the final hurdle puts everyone in an “unfinished business” mindset, and the business looks doable.
Then it’s, “Let’s do it for Kawhi (and Kyle and Marc and the towel guy’s sister)” and a highly profitable, one-year march to greatness. Theoretically.
Though there is a grim pleasure to be taken from watching the Raptors grind through regular-season opponents, we ought to pause now to enjoy how perilous things are about to get.
It is rare in team sports that a club this good exists in a state so close to disaster. There are multiple scenarios, but only two possible outcomes, and of diametric extremity.
This is why you follow sports – to experience either the agony or the ecstasy. The 2018-19 Raptors have been designed to give you one or the other. Then we’re into après moi, le déluge territory.
If you’ve been following along, it’s been a long wait. But now, after six months of Sundays, the Raptors are finally going to work.