Raptors help Valanciunas lift off

‘It’s kind of a motivational team inside joke’

• As Jonas Valanciunas prepared for the tip-off against Houston’s Joey Dorsey on Monday evening, four of his teammates stood up at the far corner by the Toronto Raptors’ bench. James Johnson, Patrick Patterson, Greg Stiemsma and Landry Fields were all out of their seats, arms outstretched.

Channeling their avian instincts, they then began moving their arms up and down, as if they were flapping. This was nothing new.

“I looked over there one game, and I was like, ‘ What the hell are they doing?’ I didn’t understand what they were doing,” DeMar DeRozan said. “Now I know.”

Explaining it, however, requires knowledge of multiple years of Raptors minutiae.

Rewind more than five years to Chris Bosh’s final season on the Raptors. (Do not feel bad if you have blocked most of that season out of your memory, save for some unintentional comedy from Hedo Turkoglu. It was a painful one.) Journeyman wing Antoine Wright played 67 games for that team, including 10 starts. An even less noteworthy footnote to Wright’s Raptors career: He became known for hollering “Get up, bird” whenever the team charter took off, willing the airplane to work as designed.

For some reason, that phrase has stuck around the Raptors all these years later, even though DeRozan and Amir Johnson are the only commonalities that link that year’s roster and this season’s team.

The saying has made its way into the mouth of Valanciunas. Before every game, as part of his pre-game routine, Amir Johnson jumps up to hang on the rim, swinging back and forth. That is when Valanciunas shouts the line. The Raptors decided to repurpose it for arguably the least consequential moment of any given game.

“It has to do with the tip,” Fields said. “During the season, we’d been losing some tips. That’s not a huge thing for the course of the ball game. But, whatever: It’s just starting off on the right foot.”

“It’s kind of evolved. It went from Pat saying something first. He was just saying, ‘Get up! Get up, JV.’ And then I came over. And then more guys came. And it’s turned into a flying thing. It’s kind of a motivational team inside joke.”

Its powers seem to be limited. Valanciunas won only six of the 14 opening tips he participated in during March. Yet, it has added some pizzazz to the Raptors’ bench, with Fields deserving most of the credit.

It was Fields who added in the flying motion, a reference to Angels In The Outfield, the 1994 remake of the 1951 movie. In the remake, manager Danny Glover leads the California Angels, who seem to be getting a little help from divine forces, to — spoiler alert — a division title. (In hindsight, the cast was stacked: In

I looked over there one game, and I was like, ‘What the hell are they doing?’

addition to Glover, Joseph GordonLevitt, Christopher Lloyd, Matthew McConaughey, Adrien Brody and Dermot Mulroney all had roles. Also: Tony Danza.)

“That’s exactly where it came from,” Fields said. “It was common [in that movie] where they said, ‘ Oh, he’s got an angel with him’ when people in that movie do crazy things, like Matthew McConaughey floating through the air, flying. It’s kind of like that.”

“It ’s something to take [the routine] just a little bit further,” Stiemsma added.

As of Tuesday, Fields was not sure if Valanciunas had caught on. He noticed that Valanciunas sometimes looked over at them, but never said anything about it.

The big man has been paying attention, though.

“You’ve got to like it,” Valanciunas said. “You’ve got to like it, man. I like it. I love it.”

“When he does get [win the tip], we’re excited,” Fields added. “It’s like we earned the win for the first play of the game.”