Tampa trip another oddity in strange year
Not long after the Spurs wrapped an easydoes-it 120-97 victory in Orlando on Monday night, players and staff boarded a pair of buses in the bowels of the Amway Center.
This in itself was not usual.
The buses were not there to drive the Spurs back to the team hotel, or to the airport to catch a flight to the next city on their road itinerary.
Instead, the Spurs traveled 85 miles west on the Florida Turnpike to Tampa, Fla., where — in a sentence that underscores the continued weirdness of the NBA’S pandemic season — they will face the Toronto Raptors tonight.
To Spurs forward Drew Eubanks, who became accustomed to no-frills transportation during his time in the G League, the prospect of a midnight bus ride wasn’t all bad.
“At least I’ve got free Wi-fi,” Eubanks said. “I don’t need to put my phone in airplane mode.”
The Spurs can look on the bright side of the first Orlando-to-tampa bus trip in franchise history.
Once tonight’s game is over, they get to come home to San Antonio. The Raptors must remain in Florida, where they have been marooned all season.
Because of Canadian border restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Raptors began the 2020-21 campaign in Tampa.
In February, the club decided to complete the season in the Sunshine State.
“It took us a while to get settled in,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said at the time. “I think to pick up shop and go back and try to resettle in … we might as well finish it out now.”
For Spurs forward Demar Derozan, who spent his first nine seasons in Toronto and remains the franchise’s all-time leader in scoring and games played, a trip to face the Raptors in Tampa will be no kind of homecoming at all.
“Just the amount of people I know in Toronto,
the fans, everyone sitting courtside — it was always good to see them,” he said. “To not see them there will definitely be crazy.”
Since December, the Raptors have taken up residence at Amalie Arena, the home of the NHL’S Tampa Bay Lightning.
The city of Tampa has done its best to make the Raptors feel at home in a building originally known as the Ice Palace.
A 2019 NBA championship banner hangs from the arena rafters, next to retired jerseys for Lightning stars Vincent Lecavalier and Martin St. Louis.
The court on which the Spurs and Raptors will play was flown in from Toronto.
Signage with the Raptors’ “We The North” battle cry is omnipresent down south, including in the hotel ballroom the team uses as a makeshift practice facility.
In an interview with the Associated Press earlier this season, Raptors guard Fred Vanvleet compared the setup to what teams experienced in the Orlando, Fla., bubble to close the 201920 campaign.
“We kind of got brainwashed into practicing in ballrooms in the bubble and it became normal for us,” said Vanvleet, who is not expected to play Wednesday because of a hip injury. “This doesn’t feel all that different, but it’s nice to see all our Raptors stuff in here.”
No matter the site of tonight’s game, the Spurs aim to keep up momentum spawned from their first two-game winning streak in nearly a month.
The Spurs recovered from a five-game skid to win at Dallas and Orlando on back-to-back nights Sunday and Monday. The victories marked the first time the Spurs had won both ends of a back-to-back on the road since November 2016.
With them, the Spurs got back to .500 at 26-26.
“We just wanted to come in a capitalize on our win (in Dallas) and take a little bit of a different approach to playing a back-toback,” Eubanks said after posting his first career double-double with 10 points and 10 rebounds against Orlando. “We need more wins coming up to end the season. We wanted to be aggressive and leave it all out there.”
Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said he was pleased with his team’s approach against a reeling Orlando squad, especially coming off an emotional 119-117 win in Dallas made possible by Derozan’s clutch jumper with 0.5 seconds left.
The Magic had dropped five in a row heading into Monday, losing those games by an average of 22 points.
The Spurs took control midway through the first quarter, pushed their lead as high as 30 points in the second half, and used the fourth quarter of a blowout to steal rest for weary veterans.
“They took it seriously; they respected their opponent,” Popovich said. “Orlando is in a tough spot right now, but you can’t worry about that. You have to come in with the attitude that you want to win no matter what the situation is.”
The Spurs will look to employ the same attitude tonight as they take the floor in a city and arena they have never visited before. Thanks to NBA coronavirus protocols, the Spurs’ sightseeing on their first trip to Tampa will be limited to the team hotel.
At least they won’t have to contend with Toronto’s notoriously raucous home crowd at Scotiabank Arena, some 1,300 miles away.
Typically one of the more unbeatable home teams in the NBA, the Raptors were 11-14 in Tampa heading into Tuesday’s “home” game against Atlanta.
“With what the home crowd means to that team, you take away a very big advantage from them, not allowing them to play at home,” Derozan said. “It has been a struggle for them.”
But Derozan spent enough time freezing through Toronto winters to know not everything about the Raptors’ move south has been a hardship.
“I know they are definitely not complaining about the weather,” Derozan said.