Making it to the final doesn’t satisfy Raps
Players put playoff success behind them as they gear up for rare championship bid
The city is awash with love for the Toronto Raptors.
Maybe too much so if you listen to some of the Raptors themselves.
There’s a notion that now that the Raptors have made it to the NBA Finals and made team history in the process, everything from here on out is gravy.
Win or lose, the season has been a success.
The fan base already had their lock-the-streets-down celebration following the Game 6 win over the Milwaukee Bucks that earned the Raptors their first birth in the NBA Finals.
That might be good enough for some of the paying customers and the celebratory types, but the individuals who will actually help decide the outcome of the series have a different take.
Getting here isn’t good enough. They want and expect to win.
“I mean, we certainly don’t have that attitude,” said Fred VanVleet, the hottest three-point shooter in the NBA over the past week. “I can’t control what other people think or feel. Obviously, I feel there’s a general high in the city of Toronto. It’s exciting for an opportunity to get over that hump, but as players, we’re not happy or satisfied with what we’ve done.”
There’s a lot of uncertainty from year to year in the NBA. Good teams and even great teams stumble.
Consider the nose dive the Raptors’ chances will take a year from now if, say, Kawhi Leonard opts to take his talent elsewhere.
To date Leonard has given no indication whether that’s indeed the case, but it’s a possibility.
Without him, the Raptors’ odds of playing for a championship would diminish significantly. That’s just the reality of the situation.
So even a young player like a Pascal Siakam or a VanVleet with (hopefully) plenty of years left in a promising NBA career have to consider the possibility this chance might not come again soon, or even ever.
Siakam, who could one day find himself in the role currently occupied by Leonard as the No. 1 scoring option on this team, knows the importance of hitting the reset button and he believes the Raptors will for Golden State just as they did after the first two series wins in this playoff run.
“I think one thing that we did from Orlando to (Philadelphia) to the Bucks, once the series is over, it’s over,” he said. “We move on, and we know it’s going to be a different series. I think we’ve just got to reset and refocus on what you want to do. It’s a new team, different style of play. I think everything is different. So it’s a different mindset. We don’t think about everything else. It doesn’t matter how we got here. We’re here, and we’re ready to win it.”
The Raptors also have some players who may not have that many more opportunities to get to these heights.
Marc Gasol is 34 years old and winding down a stellar career that began in Memphis. Leaving the only NBA home he’s ever known wasn’t easy for the big Spaniard, but he signed off on the move knowing it came with an opportunity to win.
Does anyone think just getting to the final would be good for a man who left a situation he loved, teammates he considers friends for life, just to get close to the goal he’s been chasing since he came into the league?
Kyle Lowry is 33. Like Gasol, this won’t be his final season, but how many more chances will he have? The same could be said for 31-year-old Danny Green and even 29-year-old Serge Ibaka.
A lot has to go right for a team to get this far. It starts with health and includes some luck, as well as finding the proper blend of talent, toughness and role players.
Even then, if the timing is off, if just some of the players aren’t quite operating at their peak, that could be the difference between an early exit and a chance to play for a title.
“None of us, in October and July and June of last year, were working out thinking about the conference finals,” VanVleet said. “Obviously, it’s a great accomplishment, and we’re happy to be taking that next step, but you want to win a championship, and you want to win the whole thing.
“It’s not about just making it to the finals. We’re not satisfied. We’re not happy to be here. We’re really hungry, and we want to go out here and have a chance to win it. We’ve earned it, and we deserve it. Now it’s just a matter of going out there and having to perform at a high level on the biggest stage.”
Maybe, just maybe, there is one more big celebration yet to come.