CASEY AND LOWRY CAN’T BOTH SURVIVE.
For five seasons, Kyle Lowry has been the straw that stirred the Raptors drink.
He has been their best player, most indispensable player, leader on the court, and occasionally leader off the court as they have won more regular season games than any team in the Eastern Conference.
But the Raptors can’t bring back the pending free agent if they intend to bring back Dwane Casey for his seventh season as Toronto coach.
And the opposite is true, despite what Lowry said at the year-end player availabilities Monday.
If he is welcomed back as an expensive signing, then Casey needs to be replaced as coach.
It’s not that the two can’t work together. They can and they have.
It is for the Raptors to progress as a more serious playoff team, to get more in line with the newer style of NBA basketball, to become more efficient, to take another step forward, the combination of a singular, stubborn point guard and a non- confrontational defensive minded coach is simply repeating what happened this playoff season and last playoff season and the season before that.
You can win a lot of games with Casey coaching. And you can win a lot of games with Lowry as your point guard. But how many of them can you win with both when it matters most?
One thing has to change — either the person calling the plays or the person running the plays?
NBA teams like to talking about being focused to win championships. Isiah Thomas did that in the Raptors formative years. Masai Ujiri does that now.
The talk is earnest and forthright but the reality is something else coming playoff time.
No one in the East will beat Cleveland and no one in the West will beat Golden State and we know that with two rounds to go — while 28 other teams talking about winning championships.
Tyronn Lue, the Cavaliers coach, talked about that very thing the other day. Lue mentioned a long list of great NBA players who never won titles because they had to beat Michael Jordan in order to do so. Today, you have to beat LeBron James or the Warriors’ paid-for juggernaut just to get there.
How many games you win in the season — that’s become almost irrelevant — in the championship search.
The Raptors fell into the same trap many of us fell into during this season. They watched the Cavaliers’ regular season. They saw how vulnerable the team looked defensively. They figured if not now, when? The Raptors made moves to make their roster deeper and stronger.
Then the playoffs began. The Cavaliers first swept the Pacers.
Then in four games, the 51win Raptors were hammered by the 51-win Cavaliers: King James averaged 36 points a game, with special attention on him on defence. And worse than that, the Cavaliers scored 25 more points per game from the three- point line: 102 points in all.
The Raptors can’t do much about LeBron. No one can until age or injury catches up to him. The three- point shooting? They’ll have to address that in the off-season.
But the two games the Raptors competed best in were the two games at the Air Canada Centre that they played without Lowry, their best three- point shooter. They played three close quarters Friday night. They played 36 close minutes Sunday afternoon.
They played better without their best player than they did with him. Some of that is because they were at home. But in the 22 games, Lowry missed this season due to injury, not counting the two he missed in the playoffs, the Raptors won 15 of 22 games. That’s .681 basketball, or a 55win pace.
With Lowry, the Raptors won 36 and lost 24. That’s a 49-win pace.
If the idea is to get more playoff ready, you say goodbye to Lowry and try and find an alternative in the marketplace or develop your own. And if club president Ujiri determines he needs Lowry back and he can’t find anyone to compare to him, then he has to make a coaching change. Why? Because Casey’s style, both personally and professionally, has been to give Lowry all kinds of rope. He doesn’t get in Lowry’s face. He doesn’t call him out. He doesn’t sit him down on the nights when his play deserves a benching.
Casey has coached in 41 Raptors playoff game the past four years. He’s done remarkable work here, is as fine a man you’ll ever meet, but every coach has a shelf life.
The Raptors need to grow and thrive with either a new coach or a new starting point guard. You can have one. You can’t have both.