GIVEN NO RESPECT, RAPTORS PRIMED TO WIN
Nick Nurse was speaking about the burden of a championship when he noted that, actually, it hasn’t felt like much of a burden at all.
The Toronto Raptors head coach suggested that might be because expectations of his team were lowered after the off-season departures of Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green.
Or, as he put it on Sunday: “Nobody really expects much from us. Ever.”
This might sound like an overstatement, coming as it does after a season in which the Raptors have been universally praised for performing at a 60-win pace despite losing two-fifths of their starting rotation, but Nurse has a point. The Vegas win total for the Raptors in the first year after Kawhi was 46.5, which means oddsmakers expected them to lose more games than they had in any season since 2012-13. They were expected to be a worse team than even Dwane Casey’s first Raptors playoff team, the same one that was almost blown up at midseason before catching fire late and reminding everyone that Raptors fandom didn’t necessarily have to be an exercise in suffering.
The suspicion in some NBA circles last fall was that the Raptors would offer a competent title defence for a while, but would also be open to kick-starting a rebuild by trading one or more of their older veterans during the season.
Instead, they won more games than every team in the league other than the Milwaukee Bucks.
They won four more games than Leonard’s L.A. Clippers.
And yet, the oddsmakers had a point, too. There were good reasons for the lowered expectations. And, as the Raptors’ title defence begins in earnest on Monday with a series against the Brooklyn Nets, or at least a team that bears a vague resemblance to the Brooklyn Nets, it’s hard to know exactly where those expectations should be this time.
When Leonard arrived in the trade for Demar Derozan, it was the first time the Raptors were able to check all the usual boxes for a title-winning team. They finally had an Mvp-type, the kind of player who could take over a playoff series, who could score against stout defences, who could basically do to opponents what Lebron James had mercilessly done to them in each of the preceding three seasons.
It took until only the second round for the Raptors to learn what it was like to lean on a player of Leonard’s calibre: when the rest of the roster was struggling against the bigger Philadelphia 76ers, he dragged them along with him, thanks to four helpful bounces on the Scotiabank
Arena iron. It was everything that Derozan had been unable to do over repeated playoff struggles. The Raptors were no longer bringing a gun to a bazooka fight.
Before Kawhi, the same questions were asked of the Raptors every spring: Could they win without a proven superstar? Could they take a series in which the best player was on the opposing team? Could a deeper team beat one with better top-end talent?
These are, essentially, the same questions that can be asked of the Raptors today. None of them apply to a first-round matchup against the undermanned Nets, whose four highest-paid players are not in the Orlando bubble, but they are key to whether the Raptors will enjoy another long playoff run.
Pascal Siakam has done an admirable job of increasing his impact in the absence of Leonard, but the team isn’t built around him in the same way, and the scoring load is more spread out. In the bubble, he led the Raptors in scoring in just one of eight games. Could he become the main scoring threat every night in Orlando? He has that ability if his shots are falling, but Siakam simply hasn’t had the chance to do that yet in the playoffs.
The more likely scenario is that the Raptors will be what they have been all season, a stingy defensive team that has so much versatility on offence that different players will fill the box score from night to night. Eventually, that could be an issue, as it was in all those pre-kawhi seasons.
In the 2017-18 season, the Raptors had transformed themselves into a free-flowing offensive machine that no longer put so much emphasis on Derozan, but then Lebron showed up in the playoffs and casually tossed them aside again. All that talk about depth and coaching and versatility didn’t matter when they couldn’t make a bucket at the end of Game 1 against Cleveland that year, and it didn’t matter at the end of Game 3, when Lebron collected an in-bounds pass in the closing seconds and hit a running, floating game-winner, slipping the knife in between the ribs of the Raptors and effectively ending the Casey-derozan era.
Sometimes you just need that guy to be the playoff bully, as Leonard demonstrated over and over for the Raptors last year.
But for now, they are back to being that different kind of playoff team. They have depth and versatility again, and all kinds of coaching smarts and not a small amount of moxie, which comes when you are the champs.
NBA history suggests that won’t quite be enough. But the Raptors of this season have proven a lot of people very wrong, already.