Living in a dreamworld
This global gang of Raptors imagined something great and then achieved it … together
OAKLAND, CALIF.— How did they imagine this? There was joy everywhere, in plumes and puddles and in so many people who had trouble finding the words to describe what was happening in their chest. The Toronto Raptors were NBA champions, down the hall from the remains of an absolute dynasty. It was hard for most people to explain what that meant.
“What am I gonna tell them?” said Kyle Lowry, on what he would say to his two sons about what had just happened. “Daddy’s a champion. And they’ll figure it out when they become one.”
The Toronto Raptors won. Lowry is a champion. Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green already were, and are again. Marc Gasol, Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam, Serge Ibaka, Norm Powell — they all played in Game 6, in which the Golden State Warriors fought with their whole champion’s hearts, but suffered their second season-ending injury of the past two games, and an absolute ruination. Steph Curry still had a shot to pull them back ahead, and he missed.
But the Warriors had already lost Kevin Durant to an Achilles injury, Klay Thompson to a torn ACL, and there was more beyond that. If there had been a Game 7, they barely had anyone healthy left to put on a plane.
So the Raptors won, and got to let it all out. Outside the Toronto Raptors locker room a champagne-soaked Gasol giddily FaceTimed his old teammate Mike Conley, with whom he toiled in Memphis for all those years without ever getting past the second round. Inside, Leonard danced, goggles on. Lowry sprayed a couple bottles but didn’t drink, because he doesn’t, not even now.
“Words can’t explain how I feel,” Lowry said.
He has always wanted this. He was magnificent.
They came from all over, the global gang. Serge Ibaka wrapped himself in a flag of the Republic of the Congo; Siakam in the flag of his native Cameroon. Chris Boucher had Canadian flags; Masai Ujiri’s shoulders held Nigeria.
“I think for me, when I look at everybody here, and I look at where everybody’s from, from all over the world in our organization, and I think it means something to the world to bring a championship to a team that’s outside of America,” Ujiri said. “And it says everybody can dream. And everybody can win.”
It’s easy to roll your eyes at dreamers, but who else does something like this?
This organization had been beaten up for so long, and so many of the remaining lifers — people like team travel director Kevin DiPietro, assistant trainer and massage therapist Ray Chow and equipment manager Paul Elliott, who have sacrificed their lives for this for over 20 years each, through all the bad times — were there. Chow in particular — a serene, smiling, spiritual man — was the one spraying champagne like he was a broken fire hydrant, cackling and howling.
Senior adviser Wayne Embry, 82, sat to the side resting his big body; he won an NBA title in 1968 as a player and another while in the Milwaukee Bucks front office in 1971, and then not again until now.
Embry said when it happened, he cried. He hadn’t cried in a long time, and half-jokingly said he wasn’t sure he still could.
This team was fearless. Ujiri replaced Dwane Casey, the man who would be coach of the year, with Nick Nurse, who wasn’t afraid to pull out a box-and-one against the world champs in the Finals, and it worked. Ujiri traded for Kawhi Leonard with no guarantee he will re-sign, and Leonard was a stone-cold killer.
At several points in Game 6, though, Ujiri couldn’t watch, and would walk outside into the parking lot, pretending to be on his phone, “because people wonder what the hell you’re doing here.”
But it was Lowry who came out blazing despite his mangled left thumb, carrying the offence to keep them in the game. It was Siakam who, with Toronto up 109-108 in the final minute, drove and pulled the ball away from a snarling Draymond Green and hit a tough, inbetween floater for the winning margin. A lot of guys believed in themselves on this team.
“I mean, it’s basketball, man,” Siakam said.
“I mean, I had a bad game last game, I missed a lot of shots, but my teammates always trust me … I think for me as a kid, I didn’t have the opportunity to dream about this moment. I didn’t think I could make it … And I think a lot of kids don’t think that it’s possible. Just me being able to be here today and telling them that, hey, look at me, I was a little scrawny kid from Cameroon and I couldn’t even think about this moment.
“But here I’m a champion. And I just want to tell them that it’s possible, and that if you believe in something, go out there and work hard for it. It might sound cliché, but it’s the truth. I’m the proof.”
And when Kawhi didn’t hit a shot in the fourth quarter of Game 6 and only accounted for three of Toronto’s 28 points, it was the undersized, undrafted VanVleet who hit three after three after three. Nobody on this team was drafted higher than Kawhi at 15. They were fearless.
“I think it’s just individual character. I think whatever a guy has within his chest as an individual, and then coming together collectively,” VanVleet said. “I just go out every night and play my butt off and try to be respectable and leave everything on the floor, and just be respectable and competitive and play my ass off. Hopefully some kids see that and respect it — I’m not dying to be a role model, but I understand that there’s some kids out there who believe in me. For me it’s mostly about my city (of Rockford, Ill.), where I come from, and a place that doesn’t have much opportunity, to see what’s possible.”
It was all possible. When the season teetered in Game 4 in Philadelphia, it was Kawhi who hit the monster shot over a monster player in Joel Embiid, before he repeated the feat in Game 7 in Toronto. They never really looked back after that.
“The little bubble and world that we exist in, the team, it never cracked,” general manager Bobby Webster said. “It never cracked. It was incredible. Freddie, tonight, I mean: my favourite quote of the playoffs was when Marc said, ‘He’s got a huge heart, I don’t know how he fits it in his chest.’ Knowing what Freddie’s overcome to be here, is incredible. But, same for everybody. I mean, Pascal. Kyle’s first quarter, incredible.”
Lifers and transplants, misfits and late bloomers, underdogs and success stories, Toronto’s team. It was hard to grasp the scale of the celebrations in the city and across the country. Jama Mahlalela is a Toronto kid of Swazi descent who coached the G League 905 this season and rejoined the bench as an assistant in the playoffs. He knows what this game’s place in the country has been, and believes in what it could be.
“We’ve finally arrived,” Mahlalela said. “It’s like basketball is here and the city is here, this country is here. So much work. We’ve all spent so much time: you look around at the people in this organization and they’ve been here 15 years, or more. And we fought through all the bad stuff and all the stereotypes and all the Canada-doesn’t-know-basketball, and we’re here, and we’ve shown the world we’re a basketball powerhouse.
“It’s leadership from the top. It’s Masai’s leadership, he’s incredible. Kawhi’s leadership, he’s incredible. Kyle put so much guts and gusto (in) because of the environment he was in. We were a different team than we’ve been before. This was a championship team.”
“I go back and forth between my own personal joy and the joy for the people who have been working here forever,” Webster said. “For the country, the city, (owner) Larry (Tanenbaum), everyone. The amount of joy you see in that lockerroom, and there’s a hundred stories of what everyone in that locker-room’s been through. Nick. I always say to him, when you were 40 years old and coaching in the British League, how do you imagine to get here? It’s crazy. Masai grew up in Nigeria. I grew up in Hawaii. It’ll be crazy in Hawaii. There’s no one from there who’s ever done this. It was everybody, man.”
Real life will come fast. Kawhi and Masai will both be pursued. But the moment was what mattered, the joy. The team and the families and the staff piled on the plane to go celebrate in Las Vegas; Masai had to run to catch a plane, still with the Nigerian flag around his neck, so he could make it back to Toronto for his 5-yearold daughter’s preschool graduation. “I’ll bring a bottle,” he joked.
They won. Earlier in the night two Warriors fans, a husband and wife, were leaving, and he was mad. “You think if Durant and Klay are healthy, the Raptors win? No way!” And his wife said, reasonably, “It doesn’t matter. It’s what happened.”
It really did, and the flag will fly forever.
How did they imagine this, each of them?
Together.