A good-but-not-great week
Nobody gets it all, but Lowry, Raptors get another chance
To say you want to win a championship is a lot like saying you want to be happy, or want to breathe. Who doesn’t? You can want anything, dream as big as the world. But very few people get everything they want.
And so, we come back to Kyle Lowry, or Kyle Lowry comes back to us. The 31-year-old point guard was reintroduced as the centrepiece of the Toronto Raptors on Friday, and they brought back big man Serge Ibaka, too. Faced with a choice of abandoning a goodbut-not-great team or trying again, Toronto is trying again.
And they couldn’t have tried without Kyle.
“I think it’s a good start for us to put our foot forward to go out and compete the next couple years,” said team president Masai Ujiri.
“Obviously we give ourselves that window . . . You never know where these things go. I think all we’re trying to do is set ourselves up to be competitive to put yourself in a position to maybe compete for a championship. It’s all based on the team, chemistry, all of those things coming together.”
That window is built on Lowry’s threeyear, US$90-million, with another US$10-million in incentives; Ibaka’s three-year, US$65-million deal was a complementary piece. DeMar DeRozan can opt out of his deal in 2020, too. This era of the Raptors — the one with the first three best-of-seven series wins in franchise history, the first two 50-win seasons, the first conference finals — has an expiration date, or at least a horizon that you can see.
And so, this is Kyle Lowry’s last chance. He was never a leading man until he came here. He was always too prickly, too moody, too caught up in fighting battles that didn’t need to be fought. His ascendence to this level is a sort of miracle: he’s not big, not fast, not quick. Lowry willed himself to become a secondtier star here, and he’s still a natural curmudgeon. He barely smiled Friday, except when he had to conjure a grin for the pictures of him holding his own jersey. I’ve always appreciated his calculated grumpiness.
He settled. The Raptors settled. He is a good-but-not-great player, and this is a good-but-not-great team.