RAPTORS RISE ABOVE THE REST
Historic NBA title triumph easily earns Postmedia Team of the Year honours
Choosing Canada’s team of the year for 2019 was, quite appropriately, a slam dunk.
“Who was our competition?” asked Toronto Raptors general manager Bobby Webster when informed that the club he helped construct was Postmedia’s selection.
The truth is, nobody else was in the running. How could they have been? Not with the 2018-19 Raptors bringing the NBA title north of the border for the first time after a stellar regular season was topped by a memorable playoff journey littered with thrilling peaks and heart-stopping valleys.
It all culminated with Toronto ending the Golden State Warriors’ dynasty and closing down Oracle Arena in Oakland in style.
Even the most optimistic of Raptors fans couldn’t have imagined what was to come after Webster and team president Masai Ujiri boldly dealt away franchise icon Demar Derozan and brought Kawhi Leonard, one of the best players on the planet, to Toronto — which wasn’t his desired destination — along with steady veteran Danny Green.
Not long before that, the Raptors had fired Dwane Casey, easily the most accomplished coach in franchise history and the eventual choice as the NBA’S coach of the year. He was replaced by his former lead assistant, Nick Nurse.
Nurse had to deal with the impact of Leonard constantly being shuffled in and out of the lineup as we all learned the meaning of “load management.”
The coaching staff and management also had to convince players — many of them proud veterans such as Serge Ibaka, Jonas Valanciunas, Marc Gasol and Kyle Lowry — to change roles, accept new responsibilities and take a step or two back, if need be. All in the name of doing what was best for the team.
Team. There’s that word again. So much could have gone wrong. Nothing is ever seamless or easy in professional sports. The egos are vast. Hundreds and thousands of dollars could rest on each decision.
“Obviously, team of the year is fitting, right? I think that’s the whole point of why we’re in this and it’s not an individual sport, it’s a team sport,” Webster told Postmedia.
“Watching some of the highlights and kind of reliving it in those moments, I think that is what stands out to me is how many different people contributed, and not just contributed in a small way. Basically, the top eight guys that played, you can look back and see each one of them had an iconic moment in their career throughout the run. And you don’t win unless all of those guys do it.
“Sometimes, maybe, individuals can have success or a team can have success, but different players don’t feel it. But I truly felt like everyone felt like they played a big part of that (accomplishment).”
Ibaka was one of those players. He wept when he finally reached the pinnacle of his sport. But the road to get there was bumpy at times. Ibaka spoke cryptically at times during the run about how difficult it was for he and others to adjust to their new lot in life.
“It was not something that I was prepared for,” Ibaka said in April of shifting to a bench role. “But like I said, the reason why I had one of the best seasons of my career is because it challenged me to play my best basketball so I can help my team.”
Ibaka said he and his teammates pushed aside any distractions or hurt feelings because they knew what was at stake.
“All of us, all we are thinking is like, ‘OK, the time is now, we have to go for it,’” Ibaka recently said upon reflection.
“It’s not tomorrow, it’s now, and we saw the opportunity, so then that’s why we all sacrificed. Because of the opportunity. I think that’s what made us unique.”
Looking back six months later, it’s natural to skim past the challenges the Raptors faced in coming together. But it’s never far from Nurse’s mind.
“It’s never as easy sometimes as maybe it looks out there,” Nurse said when asked to look back on how the pieces all came together. “You know when you’re coming out and playing well and winning a lot of games, there’s always some kind of dual thought in your head. How’s the team doing, first and foremost, and then how are the players doing individually?”
It wasn’t just Leonard and Green that had to be integrated with the existing players.
“You’ve got to integrate me. They had to get to know me. I had to get to know those new guys a little better,” Nurse said.
“And it’s a process. Those guys, even though I was in the locker-room for five years (prior), I wasn’t the head coach and those guys had to get to know me (in a different role),” he said.
“There was lots of things we’re going through. The departure of Demar was a cloud hanging over a little bit. It was all kinds of things that we were, not battling, but we had to sort through,” Nurse said.
“It was a long process to get to that point ... I give some of those guys credit, Serge especially, for being able to come off the bench (when he had been a starter for so many years) and then I was alternating (Ibaka and Valanciunas).
“And then Marc came (via trade from the Memphis Grizzlies in a deal that sent popular chemistry-setter Valanciunas south, which further shook up the dressing room) and I let him start — or we let him start — for a while, and then he went back to the reserve role and he played great.
“Then on top of that, I think our team continued to grow. I thought they really, really wanted to win. They poured as much mental, physical energy as they had into preparing and playing and handling the results whatever way they went and we had a fantastic memory (in the end).”
That they did, and Nurse is right in mentioning how the Raptors recovered from tough outcomes. It wasn’t just the eventual lifting of the trophy that separated them from the pack. It was also how they got there.
Falling behind in the second round series against a Philadelphia 76ers team many thought was also good enough to win it all, only to dig deep to prevail in Game 7 on Leonard’s now iconic four-bounce game-winner.
They were in even more dire straits a round later, when the NBA’S top regular season squad, the Milwaukee Bucks, took a 2-0 lead in the conference final and came close to taking a stranglehold on the series. Yes, Leonard scored 36 points in an eventual thrilling, double-overtime triumph that saved everything, but he got quite a bit of help.
With Lowry and Norman Powell fouled out, Pascal Siakam broke out with 26 points, Fred Vanvleet began what would turn out to be a remarkable ascent and
Gasol bounced back from a poor performance. At other times it was Lowry or Ibaka or Green stepping to the fore.
Raptors television analyst Jack Armstrong saw that depth as a major strength. He credited the arrival of Leonard and Green as the missing pieces that took an already good group over the top.
“They’re workers, they’re blue-collar guys, and I think you bring that into the room.
And you’ve come so close and you can’t get over the hump,” Armstrong said. “I just think you know that residue of winning, that (feeling) like, ‘Hey guys, we’ve been here before. We know how to do it,’” was crucial.
“I kind of reflect on the great Detroit Pistons team, the one with Larry Brown, and the sum was more important than the parts,” Armstrong said, recalling the 2004-05 Pistons, who stunned the star-laden Los Angeles Lakers to win an unexpected title of their own.
“So I guess as great a player as Kawhi is — and he’s great — the sum, ultimately, was what made that (Raptors) team. They were the best team. And this still is a team sport.”
When it was all over, the Raptors had not only won a coveted championship, they had brought together a nation that hasn’t had all that much time for hoops.
According to Google, some of the top trending questions of
2019 included newbies wondering how many games are in the NBA Finals, how tall is Kyle Lowry and how many fouls does it take to foul out in the NBA? “Toronto Raptors” and “Kawhi Leonard” were the top two trending searches of 2019, ahead of things like the national election and even Game of Thrones.
Sure, the diehards were already there. Many of them shed tears and sang O Canada while draped in Canadian flags. Some were in Jurassic Park in Toronto, some at viewing parties across the country. Many gathered and sang and chanted at the arena in Oakland long after the team’s champagne-soaked celebration had shifted into the bowels of Oracle Arena.
But how many stories did you hear about new fans paying rapt attention to every second? The Raptors heard them, too.
“One of the incredibly cool things about being the only team in Canada is that, no matter where we go, whether it’s training camp in Quebec City or Vancouver, you rarely meet someone that didn’t follow that run,” Webster said.
“And there’s really no other team, maybe in the world, maybe other than national teams from different sports, that can say that. So hopefully, we touched a lot of people for generations to come.”
So I guess as great a player as Kawhi is — and he’s great — the sum, ultimately, was what made that (Raptors) team. They were the best team.