Raptors quickly rebound back into underdog role
NBA title defence promises to be extremely difficult
When it was almost over at Oracle Arena last June, when the Toronto Raptors were about to win their first NBA championship after two-plus decades of trying, when the basketball world was being knocked off its axis, the scene was, in a word, surreal.
Steph Curry, the greatest three-point shooter in history, had just clanked a wide-open three that would have won Game 6 of the NBA Finals for the Golden State Warriors. Kawhi Leonard stood at the free throw line, about to cement his remarkable mercenary run as a member of the Raptors. In Oracle, the crowd was processing what was unfolding: the Warriors were down a point, Leonard was shooting, and there was essentially no time on the clock.
So that was … it?
One of the best teams in NBA history was about to lose the title, on its home court, to a franchise that had been at turns a laughingstock, an NBA backwater, and most recently, the personal playoff chew toy of LeBron James? None of these things made any sense.
Four months later, it still seems hard to figure. That Raptors playoff run was a fever dream, from the brawl with the Philadelphia 76ers that ended in iconic fashion, to the creeping dread of an 0-2 hole against Milwaukee that somehow turned into four straight wins, to a finals in which the Raptors won three times at Oracle, a place where that Golden State team hadn’t dropped that many games in entire post-seasons.
That the Warriors had lost two of their stars to injury during the series only added to the bizarre aspect of the whole thing: good fortune wasn’t supposed to smile on the Raptors like this.
But now, here they were, champions. Surreal.
It’s a feeling that is likely to linger.
If there had never been a championship team quite like the Toronto Raptors, a talented but flawed vehicle that became something else when it suddenly had a superstar welded on to its side like some kind of Mad Max contraption, then there has never been an NBA title defence quite like the one that begins on Tuesday night at Scotiabank Arena.
Leonard is gone, the first time an NBA Finals MVP has left his team before the championship banner is even raised. That he left after a protracted delay during which it seemed like he might actually sign a contract in Toronto only makes his absence that much more bittersweet. Raptors fans will always have
The Shot, and the title, but there will be a “what if ?” element to this season.
At least Leonard will do the bulk of his work on the west coast, so Toronto fans won’t have to face daily reminders of what they lost.
Danny Green is gone, too, his shooting and defence to be replaced by some combination of Fred VanVleet and the carnival ride that is Norman Powell.
Usually, a team wins a title and they strut around for a year with their chests out. The Raptors, meanwhile, never had a chance for hubris to set in. They are universally considered at least a notch below Philadelphia and Milwaukee in the Eastern Conference, and there have been plenty of playoff predictions in recent weeks that have placed the Raptors as a low seed, if not out of the picture altogether.
Some of that is due to a belief that the Toronto front office will trade some of its battle-tested veterans — Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol, Serge Ibaka — in a rebuildon-the-fly.
That front office, president Masai Ujiri and GM Bobby Webster, has undercut the rebuild theory rather significantly since training camp started, signing Lowry to a short contract extension and then Pascal Siakam, the new franchise cornerstone, to a longer one.
None of that means the team couldn’t pivot into sell-off mode if the title defence turns into a championship hangover, but the evidence suggests that Ujiri and company expect the Raptors to be a competitive team. They aren’t running it back, but this isn’t a Miami Marlins-style post-title fire sale, either.
Which makes sense.
Few expected the Raptors of last spring to beat Milwaukee, and almost no one expected them to beat the Warriors. They defied those expectations rather comprehensively. Might as well see what happens with this bunch.
But teams, and their fans, don’t dream of title defences. They dream of championships. The Raptors have one of those, now.
It will do.