The Raptors’ road still to be taken
The team is rebuilt after a late-season collapse, but how will the pieces fit?
If you look around the gym you can see the new pieces, in the bigger moving puzzle. Cory Joseph playing one-on-one with assistant coach Jerry Stackhouse, whose bald head shines. Bismack Biyombo shooting free throws, his body and hands chiseled from granite. Anthony Bennett shooting with Patrick Patterson, taking turns missing three-pointers. Luis Scola leaning against a wall. They say the big Argentine can curl more weight than any Raptor in franchise history. His beard is greying, and his hair is a mane.
At the far end is DeMarre Carroll. His team won 60 games last year, out of something like nowhere. Those Atlanta Hawks became a basketball symphony, full of trust. This Toronto Raptors team? Well, Carroll says they’re getting better, but nobody’s quite sure what the music will sound like.
“All of us hold back stuff during the pre-season, we don’t show everything, so we’re kind of going in blind with our offence,” says coach Dwane Casey, the day before Wednesday night’s season debut against the Indiana Pacers. “But we’re confident with our concepts, with our principles.”
This Raptors team is only trying to change nearly everything. A defensive team, instead of a team that sailed through with a devil-may-care offence. A team that passes, instead of the team where, as the Golden State Warriors scouting board said back in February, “much of what they do reverts to 1-on-1.”
They added tough backups, though in Scola’s case he may start. It could be better. But nobody, from general manager Masai Ujiri on down, has a feel for how it’s going to work, exactly. Carroll’s Hawks opened last season at 1-3, and then won 41of their next 47 games. Sometimes it comes together; sometimes it falls apart.
“You pick a road, man,” says Carroll. “I think it’s about looking at yourself in the mirror and understanding who you are as a player, and who you are as a person. A lot of guys . . . that’s when you see a lot of these guys who have all the talent in the world but they don’t turn up, because they don’t understand their role. You know? If you know your role and you can face reality — like Bismack, I’m going to be a rebounder, I’m going to try to get every board, I’m going to try to block shots. That’s his role.
“Scola, he knows what he is. Cory Joseph, he knows he’s a backup point guard. I think everyone understands their role, more than on my previous team.
“You don’t have no one trying to shoot every shot, trying to be LeBron James, Kevin Durant.”
But they don’t have a LeBron or a Durant, either, and that’s one reason the Raptors are entering a critical phase. They seem most likely to land in the mushy middle of the mushy Eastern Conference, which will tell Ujiri . . . what? Ujiri has been like a seagull on the breeze, waiting for the right moment to dive for a big catch, ready to move when the time and opportunity dictates. He, like every other general manager in the league, has to operate with the looming goldmine of 2016’s salarycap boost in mind. It’s all about creating an attractive situation, having flexibility, and striking when the chance comes, if it does.
So this team — well, there is more riding on it than the mushy middle. This isn’t a team with a fully stable foundation: Kyle Lowry is skinny and looks fantastic, but he is an unstable element, still. DeMar DeRozan has talked about staying here long-term, but unless his game evolves towards a more efficient future, he’s not an ironclad piece. Jonas Valanciunas got paid, but now Casey has to find a way to maximize the big Lithuanian’s talents, rather than waiting for him to fit a tailored suit that isn’t his.
But nothing is set for too long, not really.
Bruno Caboclo could yet become a trade chip. Anyone could. This team has hype down. It appears to have successfully defused the notion that Toronto is a basketball backwater, a place you wouldn’t go unless you were conscripted. We The North, Drake, Jurassic Park — they need a better name for that gathering outside the arena, which so beautifully reflects the city — all that is not unimportant. The NBA is about recruiting as much as anything now. Toronto as brand, Raptors as brand: that stuff isn’t just wrapping paper. But nobody knows how the chemistry will fit, how the transformation will work, how a team that collapsed down the stretch last season will reinvent itself.
It feels, as this 2015-16 season opens for the Raptors, that almost any future is on the table. Time for everyone to choose a road, alone or together.