GM says Raptors about to turn corner

Bryan Colangelo is limping these days, but he seems comfortable enough with it. He hurt his knee back when he was hurriedly moving stuff in his Phoenix house, which he had sold, and after a minor surgery it is bothering him again. His bold, purposeful stride has been turned into a bit of a hobble.

He might need more work done.

It is not a metaphor, but it could serve as one. As Colangelo’s Toronto Raptors get set to open their 201213 season, the general manager seems more relaxed than he has been the last couple of years, during which the Raptors won 22 and 23 games, their lowest victory totals since their expansion days.

Since this franchise has finished over .500 just twice since 2002, and five times in its 18-year history, it was all pretty bleak.

Now, though, there is a crack of daylight in Toronto.

The assembled pieces aren’t overwhelming, but they are coherent. The coach, Dwane Casey, might be the most capable bench boss in franchise history. It feels as if the Raptors could become a team Toronto could like again, could care about again.

“We want to accelerate the process towards our end goal, which is to return to playoff contention, and then take it to the next step beyond that,” says Colangelo, leaning against a wall in the Air Canada Centre. “But right now, this is the next step.”

“Our goal is to make the playoffs, but being realistic, it’s going to be a scratchand-claw season,” says Casey, who squeezed the absolute maximum out of his roster last season. “We know that. Nothing’s going to be easy. To even get in the hunt is going to be a fight for us, because we don’t have the super-duper star.

We don’t have him. We’ve got really good basketball players, highI-Q basketball players and we’re going to have to do it as a unit.”

They have the pieces that make sense, though. Kyle Lowry is a point guard with talent and edge in equal measure — well, maybe more edge — and will relegate Jose Calderon to a still-significant bench role, to which he is suited.

Landry Fields will be a slightly overpaid binding agent who will push Linas Kleiza to a bench scoring role, to which he is suited. Fields would work better if DeMar DeRozan was a more effective scoring wing — DeRozan’s numbers have improved over his first three seasons, but he hasn’t, not really — but No. 8 pick Terrence Ross should push DeRozan, if everything goes well.

Valanciunas will push Amir Johnson to a comfortable role as the first big man off the bench, and Aaron Gray to the spot behind that, and it all makes a sort of sense.

Valanciunas is also almost a perfect antidote to Andrea Bargnani — outgoing versus poker-faced, energetic versus diffident, a blacksmith versus a violinist — which is the story of this team’s modest ambitions.

Everyone has to find their place in the puzzle.

“They can help each other,” says Casey.

“Andrea spacing the floor can help Jonas rolling to the basket, and Jonas rolling to the basket helps Andrea. So they need each other, rather than emulating each other. Now, Andrea’s never going to blow and huff and puff like Jonas, he’s never going to do that, and Jonas is never going to shoot the three like Andrea. So everybody has a gift, and we just have to make sure we use and pull and tug everybody’s gift that they have.”

That is the Raptors in one relationship — if you put Bargnani and Valanciunas in one body, you’d have a Hall of Famer.

Instead, they are building a little fire, which they hope to turn into a bigger fire.

And for the man in charge, it feels like Colangelo has circled back to his beginnings here, in a very different way.

Colangelo came here off a wonderful run in Phoenix, where perpetual bad luck kept the Suns from playing for a title.

He succeeded immedi-

Andrea spacing the floor can help Jonas rolling to the basket. RAPTOR COACH DWANE

CASEY

ately, and then his golden touch gradually deserted him.

He was criticized more, spoke to the press less, kept chasing success, kept pushing and pushing, in his obsessive fashion.

He made mistakes, and he was unlucky — his proposed trade with Charlotte that would have brought Tyson Chandler to Toronto probably would have been consummated had it been agreed during the NBA’s office hours, but the overnight wait gave Michael Jordan a chance to veto it — and the result was Chris Bosh leaving, and a wasteland left behind.

And now Colangelo, who two years ago had to drag himself to even say the word “rebuilding,” feels comfortable about what he has fished from the ashes. And maybe he should be. Colangelo likes saying this team reminds him of 200607, when the Raptors won a franchise-high-tying 47 games.

Those pieces fit together, too.

But as a general manager, he has changed.

He came to Toronto believing in a golden age of offence, and now talks about “the installation of a new belief system, if you will, changing from an offensive-minded team to a defensive-minded team.”

He went all-in on Steve Nash — and came close, since even Nash’s agent, Bill Duffy, told the Raptors he had advised his client that Toronto was the play, before the Lakers came swooping in — and while that would have brought him back to his days in Phoenix, Lowry was a more than adequate backup plan.

Colangelo raised the bar, then lowered the bar, and now success will be what it was when he got here: a playoff run, development, some games that mean something in March and even April.

His contract with MLSE is not guaranteed beyond this season, and there are new bosses to impress, and though he insists “it’s not about me,” he has as much riding on this season as anybody.

Bryan Colangelo is trying to break into a run again, to rediscover his stride. And he either has a lot more work to do in Toronto, or not much at all.