RAPTORS RIDING HIGH
Rout Pistons in NBA opener
Basketball fans who had not been to the Air Canada Centre since the last regular season ended might have noticed something different as the new season began on Wednesday.
There is a banner celebrating the team’s 2015-16 Atlantic Division title, adorned with the latest iteration of the Raptors logo. The team slipped it up there last April and didn’t bother mentioning it to anyone. This is how weird this version of the Raptors, the one led by Masai Ujiri and Dwane Casey and Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, is — they have made success kind of ho-hum.
It’s hard to understate how unusual that is for this franchise. Through their first 18 seasons in the National Basketball Association, the Raptors won more games than they lost four times. They made the playoffs five times in their history up to that point, won one division title and one playoff series — and that a wee best-of-five, before the NBA went to the best-of-seven format in all rounds. They had players who refused to accept a trade to the Toronto hinterlands, players who complained about the cold, about the taxes, about the lack of good cable channels in Canada. Mostly they had players who left as soon as they could secure a rich contract elsewhere. It was tough to blame them, really. The Grizzlies had long ago fled Vancouver for Memphis and as recently as six seasons ago, a full dozen years into the NBA in Canada experiment, the Raptors were an utter train wreck: 22 wins in 82 games, the 10th time in 16 seasons that the franchise hadn’t managed at least 40 wins.
And now this. Barring a catastrophic turn of events, the Raptors are expected to compete for a fourth straight division title — amid stronger competition from a much-improved Boston Celtics team — and are being pencilled in for somewhere around 50 wins in the regular season and TBD in the playoffs. This for a team that had never won more than 47 games in a year before 2013. They then improved on that mark for three straight seasons, up to last year’s total of 56, which still seems strange to write. The Toronto Raptors, a 56-win team? The Toronto Raptors, Eastern Conference finalists? Did we slip into an alternate universe and no one told me about it?
Coach Dwane Casey said before Wednesday’s season opener against the Detroit Pistons that he took a measure of pride now that the Raptors and their players and fans have started to earn a reputation around the league for not being completely irrelevant. Kevin Durant, merely the NBA’s biggest star not named LeBron or Steph, texted one of Casey’s assistants recently to say that, having played alongside DeRozan and Lowry at the Rio Olympics, he thought the team could not be in better hands.
Casey said that kind of feedback made him feel like “a proud papa,” not just because those are his guys, but because of what it says about the growth of the team. The all-star reputations of the backcourt, the playoff run last season, and the big, loud support at home last spring, which took even LeBron James, who has seen some loud crowds, by surprise.
“They weren’t talking about that six years ago,” Casey said.
No, they were not. When DeRozan hit unrestricted free agency in the summer and then resigned with Toronto for US$139-million without even talking to another team, it underlined the sea change that has taken place with the franchise. A superstar wanted to stay here. It was almost as significant a development as the playoff wins.
But if that was new, what unfolded as the season began on Wednesday night was not. The Pistons jumped out to a quick 11-4 lead, which on many nights in many years for this franchise would have been enough to start a slow circling around the drain. Instead, the Raptors showed the kind of poise and steadiness that good teams are supposed to demonstrate in big games on their home court.
They blew the doors off the Pistons is what they did, coasting to a 109-91 win. Jonas Valanciunas, continuing the terrifying Giant from Beyond the Wall impersonation he debuted in the playoffs, scored 32 points, with 12 of them coming at the free throw line. The 7-foot centre dared the Pistons to guard him, which they mostly could not, and he punctuated the point with a huge first-half dunk over Detroit’s 7-foot-3 Boban Marjanovic, which is like dunking on The Thing. DeMarre Carroll looked spry and healthy, Terrence Ross made some plays (and didn’t make any dumb ones) and rookie Pascal Siakam, starting at power forward, collected nine rebounds and hustled a lot, which is all Casey wants him to do in that role.
The night, though, belonged to DeRozan, who had an up-anddown post-season with precious few ups. All he did was score 40 points, breaking the franchise record of 39 for an opener set by Vince Carter, on a tidy 17-for27 shooting night. That’s right: DeMar DeRozan, efficient scorer.
So not everything about this team was familiar, even if the result was.