Relocation has team scrambling
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 Bay 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 isn’t completely foreign territory (pardon the pun) for the Raptors.
Even before last year’s successful bubble in Orlando, the Raptors were the only team prepping for the restart somewhere other than their home market.
The same border restrictions that prevented them from training in familiar surroundings this week took them to Fort Myers, Fla., last June, where they took over a temporarily vacant hotel for a couple of weeks before the 2.5-hour bus ride to Orlando, where they joined the rest of the league.
Raptors general manager Bobby Webster and his management team are busy at the moment overseeing the recreation, or a close-as-possible facsimile, 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 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 are doing here.
“If you can imagine a world-class basketball court, a world-class training room, a world-class weight room, there are challenges in doing that in the equipment, but 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 as many of the facilities that the team has 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 list of to-dos the Raptors have. By the time training camp opens this week, the team will have had less than two weeks to accomplish countless things.
The players and the 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 yet another task for the Raptors.
Then there’s the question of whether or not to bring their respective families down to Florida with them, another decision that will entail further man-hours and time away from the actual task at hand.
Webster said the team is making the best of their situation, something they have become pretty good at throughout the history of being the one or two (Vancouver, briefly) teams in the NBA to play outside the continental U.S.
“I think as you all know, when faced with different challenges or obstacles, we thrive and we like it, so we’re looking at it much more from a really unique experience for our team, for our staff,” Webster said, putting a pretty bow on things.
“Most of us came from Disney where we had a similar situation, so it’s not altogether foreign for us. But I do think we’re viewing it as, for lack of a better experience, we are here in a nice, sunny Florida with no state income tax.”
Well, yes, there is that. But how much can vitamin D and a little less off your take-home pay really make up for all the inconveniences of uprooting your entire operation and taking it some 2,200 km south?
On top of that there are the actual dollars, a figure no one even wants to speculate upon yet, that this move is costing MLSE.