LeBron leaving Raps in ashes
What happens when good isn’t enough to beat the best?
It’s not common practice to start the autopsy before the patient has formally died, but that’s LeBron James for you. He can remove the heart surgically or brutishly, whichever suits the situation. He can help his teammates do the job, if necessary. And often before you die, you’re already dead.
With the Toronto Raptors down 0-3 in the playoff series with the Cleveland Cavaliers, it is already time to start sifting through the wreckage. The Raptors can extend the series with a win Sunday in Game 4, but when Kyle Lowry proclaims himself “doubtful” with a sprained ankle, yeah. It’s time.
“They’re the champs,” Lowry said. “He’s unbelievable. He’s a great player. He’s doing what his team needs for him to do.
“They’re the defending champs for a reason. He’s just been on another level, and he’s just raised his game. I know I’m not a LeBron, and DeMar (DeRozan)’s not a LeBron. We push our team, and do what we need to do to get our team wins, and we’ve just got to get better. Some how, some way.”
And with that, he cut to the heart of the issue. Nobody is LeBron.
Lowry is a top-20 player in the world, but LeBron is the best player by miles, and you can stuff your MVP vote in a sack.
Lowry and DeRozan have delivered the best era in Raptors history: the four winningest seasons in franchise history, the first four consecutive playoff berths, the first three wins in a best-of-seven series.
Then comes LeBron, and he turns it all to ash.
DeRozan said he thinks LeBron seems a lot faster and quicker this year, and that “him out there is much different from last year.”
Fifty wins, Kyle and DeMar, playoff spots, and LeBron makes it all feel small.
“I think he understands the moment,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said. “I think he’s chasing Michael (Jordan). I think he’s chasing rings. And that’s what a guy at his level does. We’re trying to get where they’ve been, to the championship. It’s not easy. They’ve been through some turmoil. He’s been through heartache and pain. You’ve got to go through that to get there. There’s no shame at all going through toughness and pain to get where to where you want to go to win a championship.”
With Lowry a free agent at 31, and Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker also free agents — you can already guess that Patrick Patterson has all but played his way out of the picture — team president Masai Ujiri is facing a fundamental directional issue.
Continue being good, with a ceiling?
Tear it down and try to rebuild your way to great?
A middle road, in which the mix could be altered but not as comprehensively, with either new players or new coaching?
Lowry isn’t young, and will only trend in the wrong direction. Ibaka’s performance in these playoffs have exposed some of his flaws. There is a rational case for not continuing down this road.
But what would the Raptors be had Lowry not had to undergo wrist surgery in February? What would Game 3 have looked like has Lowry not sprained his ankle on an unavoidable accident in Game 2? What was the real ceiling?
“That’s one of my biggest pet peeves, is the what-ifs,” DeRozan said.
“What if I hit the lottery? The whole dynamic of life would change if you just really played off the whatif all the time. I try never to think about it that way.”
“I think a lot of things would have been different if I didn’t unfortunately have a freak injury to my wrist, bones get caught in between the joints, Norm (Powell) lands on my ankle,” Lowry said. “Things happen. It just sucks when things happen like that.”
But Lowry, again, cut to the chase. He said of the Cavaliers, “You want to beat them. Every single year I come into, the last five years, (the goal is) is to win a championship. That’s all that really matters, nothing else. If you’re a competitor and you’re a winner, you want to win at the highest level. There’s no ‘aw, this is a good story.’ No. If you ain’t winning championships, tough.”
In a way, DeRozan cut to the chase, too. What if the Raptors hit the lottery? It’s far and away the most reasonable way to find the true superstar this team lacks. Anything Toronto does short of a rebuild is just putting off a rebuild, one day.
And that is where Ujiri sits. For all the variables he has to juggle — Lowry’s injury, the matchups, coaching — this team was not going to win a championship. No, this has been more about maxing out their ceiling, about forcing LeBron and the Cavaliers into discomfort, and that hasn’t happened. Maybe it could have, but it didn’t.
So now Ujiri has to figure out whether this team’s low-pass, slowpaced style of play, as coached by Casey, should be played in the current NBA; he has to figure out what being good — good, but not great, barring one more unlikely but possible move — is really worth. It’s not an easy choice; there’s no obvious road.
The Raptors are dead, and they have to decide the best way to go on living.
“If you’re a competitor and you’re a winner . . . there’s no ‘aw, this is a good story.’ ” KYLE LOWRY ON CHAMPIONSHIP GOALS