Raptors juggling plenty of balls as they settle into Tampa life

Team building world-class training facility in local hotel just days before camp opens

Twenty-nine NBA teams continued the process Tuesday of getting better.

The 30th team, the Toronto Raptors, did that, as well. But in addition to focusing on fielding the best possible team for a Dec. 22 tipoff this year, they're juggling about 1,000 logistical tasks to make Tampa home for at least the next 13 weeks, and very possibly longer.

The 2020-21 season portends all sorts of firsts for the league as a whole, but no team will face more obstacles than the Raptors this year.

This isn't completely foreign territory (pardon the pun) for the Raptors. Even before last year's wildly successful Disney bubble in Orlando, the Raptors were the only team preparing for the restart somewhere other than in their home market.

The same border restrictions that prevented them from training in familiar surroundings on Tuesday took them to Fort Myers, Fla., last June, where they took over a temporarily vacant hotel for a couple of weeks before the 21/2-hour bus ride to Orlando, where they joined the rest of the league.

Raptors general manager Bobby Webster and his management team are busy overseeing the transition of their OVO Training Centre in an adjoining hotel to the one where they currently reside.

Fair to say, no other management team in the NBA is dealing with that just five days from the start of the first official team workouts.

“The NBA doing it in Disney (last season) in the ballroom in a packed convention centre space really gave us the idea to do it,” Webster said. “But then, to actually construct it ourselves is what we're doing here. If you can imagine a world-class basketball court, a world-class training room, a world-class weight room ... essentially the idea here was to create a world-class practice facility in a place where there isn't one. That's been fun and challenging for us.”

That idea is basically to take two unoccupied ballrooms in the adjacent hotel and install two courts, offices, and many of the facilities the players have at their disposal in Toronto.

The question becomes: At what cost is there to whatever else a management team should be, or in the case of their 29 opponents, is doing right now?

But that's only one item on a lengthy to-do list for the Raptors. By the time training camp opens this week, the team will have had less than two weeks to accomplish countless things.

Players and staff will all have the option to leave the team hotel and take up residence, with a healthy living allowance from the club, in condos or units throughout the Tampa area, which will be another task for the Raptors.

Then there's the question of whether to bring their respective families down to Florida with them, another big decision.

It's a lot to ask of a team when none of its 29 competitors have anything like this to contend with. If nothing else, the playing field doesn't exactly feel like a level one right now.