Broken Raptors try to put pieces back together
The bitterness remains, the emotions are still raw, the disappointment palpable as the Raptors put the lid on a season that held such promise and ended in such misery.
But those are reactions to the moment and free of context, and the job now is to avoid the temptation to overreact, to throw away consistent growth over years because a week went awry. It is time for tinkering, not imploding; for taking a step back from today to consider what is really needed.
Losing the way they did “sucks,” as DeMar DeRozan put it Monday morning, but what cannot be lost is that pieces are in place.
Some others are absolutely needed — a power forward, a consistent small forward, some experience — for a hard puzzle to be solved.
“It’s like a Rubik’s Cube,” DeRozan said. “You just got to find the right side to get everything else going and I’m pretty confident they’ll figure it out.”
Coach Dwane Casey, level-headed and confident in his abilities and his track record, knows that there will be calls for his ouster in the days after his team was swept aside by the Washington Wizards.
He is grown up enough to understand it, to take it for what it’s worth and to move on with the real job at hand.
“I say look at our track record as a coaching staff and we got better every year,” he said after conducting exit interviews with players at the Air Canada Centre. “Our record got better, our players got better, DeMar DeRozan has grown.
“Fans have the right to say that and should. We should all be account- able. I’m very confident, I know what it takes to build a winning team. We went from 30th in the NBA to 12th or ninth (from 2013-14 to 2014-15), I haven’t forgot how to do that.”
The trouble is that those defensive gains were given back in the justcompleted season when the Raptors fell to the bottom third of the league in defensive efficiency, a drop-off that somewhat soiled a franchisebest 49-win regular season.
It also put the glare of the spotlight on Casey, despite the fact team and league insiders insist general manager Masai Ujiri has no appetite to make a change.
“Coach Casey is definitely a guy who’s always going to tell it as it is,” Patrick Patterson said. “He’s not going to sugar-coat things and that’s what we needed for us, especially in the second half of the season. I think his message got through.”
Casey knows that some of the responsibility for the late-season collapse is his; he let the team basically run amok offensively and lose its focus on the more-important team defence that turns good teams into something much better.
“What I didn’t do a good job of was establishing an offensive style,” he said.
“That’s something we’ll go to the drawing board for and make sure we establish a tempo, a pace, a shot selection that helps your defence. I thought a lot of our defensive woes were connected directly to our shot selection, our quick shots. Make or miss, you’ve got to establish a style of play that will help get you back on defence.”
The job of filling the holes falls to Ujiri, but Casey and the players all know what’s needed. The Raptors, despite the success of the past two regular seasons, are basically a young team learning how to win in the cauldron of the playoffs. Some experienced hands will go a long way to solving that issue, something that was a constant during the post-season interview sessions.
Never mind finding a new coach and basically starting anew, find some players who have what the team needs.
“I’m very confident in the body of work that we’ve done here to take the program from where it’s been to where it is now and to go to wherever else we need to go,” Casey said.