Casey sees East final as chance to learn

Win or lose, Raps coach expects his team to grow from their experience

Dwane Casey talks about it so often that he’ll sometimes apologize for what he’s about to say before he say it for the umpteenth time in front a crowd that’s heard it time and time again.

It is a tenet that he holds dear to his heart, a belief that the process of developing a winning NBA team is a painstaking endeavour that is everevolving.

There is a natural progression that has to be followed and despite the fact Casey’s Toronto Raptors are at an unprecedented place in their evolution, the journey continues.

The team has made gigantic strides for a program that hadn’t tasted playoff success in a decade, a franchise that had never won a seven-game series until earlier this month but there is more to do.

The Raptors are good but not great, they are prepared but not fully ready, close but not quite there.

And their coach realizes it and reminds followers of that fact often.

An appearance in the Eastern Conference final is just another learning moment on a difficult journey.

“It is a new stage for us, and it’s a great step for us,” Casey said before the Raptors faced the Cleveland Cavaliers in Friday’s Game 6 of the bestof-seven series.

“It’s a great moment for us to learn from, to grow from, and a lot of teams have been here.”

Casey has seen first-hand how the process has to play out at its own speed and cannot be rushed no matter the talent at hand. He was the lead assistant for the Dallas Mavericks in 2011 when they won the NBA title by denying what many thought was a Miami Heat superteam comprising LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

You can’t equate those three with Kyle Lowry, DeMar DeRozan and Jonas Valanciunas on talent by any stretch of the imagination but there are parallels to Casey’s notion that things take time to percolate.

“They were kind of in the same (situation),” Casey said. “That was their first time together in that moment, and it was a big moment for them, and they grew from it, and that’s what we’ve got to do, we’ve got to grow from this.”

A perfect example to prove Casey’s point has been the Raptors’ inability to seize the moment. Toronto has been wonderfully resilient throughout the post season — Games 5 and 7 in each of their first two series, Games 3 and 4 of the conference final — but that has always been reactive rather than proactive.

It is to the everlasting credit of the players that they have won when they absolutely had to and have reached a level that few outside the organization might have ever imagined.

But the next step is winning when they should, not when they have to. Or at least not being overwhelmed by the moment. The case in point was Wednesday’s Game 5 against Cleveland, a 38-point blowout loss in which they were caught mentally and physically flat-footed right from the opening tip.

Casey knows they are a veteran player or two, or some first-hand experience away from being better able to handle that moment. Wednesday was a painful lesson but an important one in the grander scheme of things.

“I think this is new territory for our team, where we are, conference finals,” he said. “We are ahead of a process right now . . . so that’s new territory for us.”

The long-term benefits will likely be real. It’s impossible to predict what will happen next season or the season after that but little can now happen to this group that it hasn’t seen in this marathon of a playoff run.

“You probably really won’t realize how big it is until after we’ve done (and) get to sit back and look on it,” DeMar DeRozan said.