Raptors unfazed by Nets’ edge in playoff experience,

Paul Pierce has yet to utter his first playoff profanity. Kevin Garnett presumably won’t begin his annual post-season trash-talk-a-thon until Saturday afternoon at the Air Canada Centre.

But while the imposing stars of the Brooklyn Nets await the opening game of their first-round playoff series with the Raptors, the franchise they represent has already committed an act of deep disrespect toward Canada’s NBA team.

The Nets didn’t simply tank in their final couple of regular season games with the intent of drawing the Raptors in the first round.

There’s more than enough evidence to suggest the Nets weren’t even thinking about Toronto when they hatched their late-season laydown. Brooklyn’s Russian owner Mikhail Prokhorov didn’t spend approximately $190 million in salaries and luxury tax charges, the biggest such bill in NBA history, dreaming of conquering Canada in an epic bestof-seven. Prokhorov’s is a team that fancies itself built for the championship conversation. With that in mind, it’s undoubtable that the Nets, in their brash maneuvering to finish as the Eastern Conference’s sixth seed, were looking past the Raptors to what they saw as their best second-round matchup — the second-seeded Miami Heat. Though the Heat are defending champions, the Nets swept their four-game season series against LeBron et al.

In other words: The Raptors, when they play their first post-season game in about six years on Saturday, won’t simply be gifting a rare moment of electric exuberance to the citizens of a relative sporting wasteland.

They’ll also be confronting — or cowering to — a bully who’s identified them as an easy patsy.

For a team as young and untested as Toronto, such menace from a squad as credentialed as Brooklyn’s might be discombobulating. On Thursday, at least, the Raptors appeared mostly unbowed.

“We haven’t lost one — I know I haven’t and I can sense from the players — second of sleep worrying about the Brooklyn Nets,” Masai Ujiri, the Raptors general manager, said. “At the end of the day if we want to be a good team, we have to play good teams.”

There’s a reasonable case to be made that the Nets are a more-than-favourable matchup for the Raptors. The teams split their season series 2-2. Brooklyn’s veteran-heavy lineup, which includes the high-mileage likes of the 37-year-old Garnett and the 36-year-old Pierce, can’t match Toronto’s speed in transition. And for all of Brooklyn’s high-priced talent, if the 2013-14 season is the measuring stick, then the Raptors employ the best player in the series, point guard Kyle Lowry.

To that end Raptors guard Terrence Ross, in a moment of honesty in an online chat with fans last month, announced the team of his first-round desire: “I want Brooklyn, personally,” Ross wrote.

But on Thursday, with reporters hovering and Saturday’s big moment nearing, Ross backpedalled, saying he made the comment not because he sees the Nets as an easy out, but because he admired Pierce and Garnett and all-star guard Joe Johnson when he was younger.

“Getting a chance to play those guys would just be like an honour,” said Ross, 23.

Raptor fans can only hope he doesn’t turtle so meekly come game time on Saturday.

There’s no use pretending we’re about to witness the next chapter in an ancient rivalry — it’s tough for the Toronto roster to get angry about, say, the Nets getting more than the best of the Vince Carter trade a decade ago. But Brooklyn’s intentional grounding is reason enough for animosity.

“It should tick you off,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said. “But if it’s going to make you play harder, get back in transition a little faster, you’re in trouble.” Various members of the Nets might disagree: Garnett, especially, has experience converting the tiniest of perceived slights into edge-giving fuel. If Toronto’s marketing department is billing this playoff run as a Northern Uprising, it’s also going to coincide with some southern down-talking. That’s about the nicest way to describe the modus operandi of Garnett, who along with being the league’s active leader in minutes played, is also the undisputed master of on-court jabber-jawing. “Garnett and to a certain extent Pierce will try and get in the Raptors’ heads,” said one Eastern Conference scout. “It’ll be interesting to see if the Raptors let it bother them.” Sam Mitchell, the former Raptors head coach who mentored Garnett when they were teammates in Minnesota in the mid-1990s, said Garnett could yet prove a force in this post-season. “The legs may go, but the spirit’s there forever,” Mitchell said. “I think he’s rested.” It didn’t look that way in the opening couple of months of the Nets season, which weren’t unlike the early days of the Sochi Olympics. Russia-run and hyper-expensive, Brooklyn’s out-of-the gate struggles had the makings of a bigger debacle. But the team, like the Games, turned it around. While the Nets crossed into 2014 with a 10-21 winloss record, they put up the secondbest win percentage in the East after New Year’s Day. The turnaround coincided with a commitment to small ball, to shooting more threes, to using Paul Pierce at power forward — all this in the midst of the on-the-job education of rookie head coach Jason Kidd.

Still, as much as it’s easy to paint the Raptors as happy-to-be-here neophytes who’ll surely buckle in big moments — they’re the Las Vegas underdogs in the series for a reason — the Nets, for all their worldliness, carry the cumbersome weight of expectation.

“(Prokhorov) said before the season that it’s Eastern Conference finals or bust,” said Mitchell, an analyst on TSN and NBA TV. “If I’m Dwane Casey, I’m going to keep hammering that, so that Brooklyn’s players can start thinking about the pressure they’re under, instead of them trying to put the pressure on the Raptors.”

Indeed, nobody doubts that Garnett can still agitate without peer, but can he still run with Toronto’s fleet of 20-somethings? And even if the Nets are rested, what are the odds their veterans can simply flip a switch and find the post-season form of years past? The Nets had one eye on South Beach when they picked the Raptors. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Raptors, in games in which they out-defend and outrebound and out-run their honourable elders, pick the Nets apart. If they play it hard, if they pace it right, and if they chose confrontation over cowering, the spring saviours of Toronto’s sporting landscape could make the Brooklyn bully regret the choice of targets.