Why can’t the Maple Leafs be more like the Raptors?
Almost everything the Toronto Raptors are, the Toronto Maple Leafs are not.
The Raptors make you proud, the Leafs make you angry. The Raptors make you want to love them, the Leafs make you question your loyalty. The Raptors get all they can out of their deep lineup, the Leafs leave you counting salary dollars and wondering why the results don’t add up.
In Masai Ujiri and Nick Nurse, we trust. In Brendan Shanahan, Kyle Dubas and Sheldon Keefe, we doubt.
Same ownership. Same building. Two teams apparently growing up together. One with a recent championship. One with a championship 53 years ago and nothing ever close again.
The Raptors win their firstround playoff match just about every year. They should breeze through it again this year playing what’s left of the Brooklyn Nets starting on Monday. That would be five first-round wins in a row, seven straight years in the playoffs.
The Leafs were eliminated in the play-in round, essentially missing the playoffs, which is a giant step backwards from losing in the first round the previous three seasons.
The Leafs lost to Pierre-luc Dubois and Joonas Korpisalo. The last three times the Raptors were eliminated, they were defeated by Lebron James.
As a sports city, what Toronto admires more than anything: Effort, intensity, hard work, physical play, smart and tough defence, a hard-hat mentality for a white-collar town. Kyle Lowry personified. Fred Vanvleet. Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol. Toronto loves a team far more than a collection of players.
And in these strange and challenging times, it’s awfully difficult to feel the love for the historically beloved but troubled Maple Leafs.
Really, if I had a choice between the Vancouver Canucks roster today and the Leafs, I’ll take the Canucks and that’s not just because Bo Horvat is playing Doug Gilmour-like in the playoffs. That’s a team that turned things around very quickly ... I like Jacob Markstrom better than Frederik Andersen, Quinn Hughes better than Morgan Rielly, and the depth up front better than the Leafs’ all-in-one basket approach to offence ... Half season in there was a lot to like about Keefe’s first foray as an NHL coach. He’s certainly bold and unpredictable, which worked for him and against him at times. His grade from his first trip through the NHL: Incomplete ... Apparently, the Leafs analytics department rates Cody Ceci as a reasonable NHL defenceman, which has me concluding that Ceci had a better year than the analytics department ... Next season, should the NHL go back to its regular playoff format, the Leafs will be in the same Boston-tampa Bay dilemma in their division. To get through the Atlantic Division, they have to be better than good. They have to be great ... A number of NHL general managers are expecting to play next season without fans in the stands, and that will create some kind of chaos at the ownership level ... It’s clear, having the best players doesn’t necessarily win at playoff time. Having the best team wins. And if you can’t compete on loose pucks and you can’t play without the puck, you won’t win.
Repeating as champion is an against-all-odds proposition for the Raptors. After a first round they should win, they will likely get the Boston Celtics in the second round and the Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference Finals. Which isn’t next to impossible, but pretty darn close to that ... And if they get through that, it’s either James and the Lakers or Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers ... Those working from home will now be watching Raptors playoff games during work hours. The first three games of the series are in the afternoon, which is great for sportswriters in need of deadline help. Not so great for a national audience that on the West coast will be watching playoff basketball in the morning while having Zoom meetings with their clients ...
The country won’t be tuned in to the Raptors the way they were last June. Not with playoff hockey going on for Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal.
This is how weird this baseball season is: The Baltimore Orioles are in a playoff spot ... Bianca Andreescu hasn’t done anything but rehab since winning the U.S. Open last September and making history. The longer she’s out, the more you wonder if she’s going to be a one-year wonder.