Defending champs confident
Players believe their experience will give them an edge on the court
The Raptors are confident but cocky, they know how good they can be and don’t have to crow about it. And the last thing they care about is how others perceive them.
They are prepared to resume defence of the NBA title on Saturday night carrying that wellhidden swagger with them.
“We believe in us,” Serge Ibaka said Friday after the team’s final practice before Saturday’s seeding game against the Los Angeles Lakers. “I think it’s our confidence, nobody can take that from us. We trust each other, we know what to do to win, so I think that’s important. “No matter what’s going around out there, whatever they’re saying, I think that’s one thing they cannot take from us ... our confidence, the confidence we have now, and how we live with each other, how we know how to play with each other.”
In these strangest of times, that familiarity, the shared experience, the trust that exists between championship teammates may be the greatest attribute the Raptors collectively possess.
They went through about 10 weeks of intense competition during their run to the 2019 NBA title, it hardened them, it taught them, it brought them closer together. They will most certainly draw on all of that for the remainder of this brokenup season.
“I mean it’s a good group of guys, and we’ve got some toughness and we love to play and we love to compete,” coach Nick Nurse said.
“We’re looking forward to being able to do what we do out there and we think we’re hard to beat.”
There are obviously legitimate contenders other than the Raptors and nothing is going to be remotely easy. The Lakers began their seeding season with a win over the Los Angeles Clippers on Thursday, the Milwaukee Bucks were in the midst of a historic regular season when things came to a screeching COVID-19 induced halt in March and teams like Houston, Denver and Boston have the same championship hopes the Raptors do.
The neutral-site aspect of the NBA restart evens things out, and all teams being healthy and extraordinarily well rested adds to the parity. But none of the teams have what Toronto has — a recent history of proving themselves under the most intense circumstances imaginable.
“I think we have a group of professionals that go out there and know their jobs and understand their roles, and I think that’s one thing I will say we have: true professionals and guys that want to win and continue to chase what we want to get again, and that’s to get a trophy at the end of this season,” Kyle Lowry said.
“For us, it’s about being us and continue trying to grow in these next eight games and pushing forward in the next months of playoffs.”
With no pressure to make the playoffs and with no real homecourt advantage for his team to play for, Nurse would like to ease through the eight seeding games.
He’d like to use them to ramp up conditioning and timing so the Raptors are at peak efficiency in about three weeks when the playoffs begin.
He doesn’t need them to hit the ground at 150 kilometres an hour.
To which Lowry says, yeah, right.
“You know it’s going to be too hard for me and players like myself and all pros to hold back,” Lowry said.
“Nick’s going to do his best for us and we trust him and what he’s going to do and we’re going to roll with the decisions that he makes and we’re going to go out there and try to get better and try to win every game.”
The Raptors will be the last of the 22 teams to debut at the NBA campus on the grounds of Disney outside Orlando, Fla., and they will be the last to stage any kind of pre-game protest against social injustice, systemic racism, voter suppression and police brutality.
Teams have been kneeling during the playing of “The StarSpangled Banner” before each game — a moving and “impactful” form of protest, Nurse said — and the same is expected from the Raptors on Saturday.
“This isn’t about countries, this isn’t about the borders,” the coach said. “To me it’s about continuing to shine the light on that we need to do better in the police brutality area, we need to do better in the systemic racism area.
“That’s not just Canada, America, that’s a lot of places so we treat that as one long song (Saturday).”