No shortcuts to the top of the standings
It is a constant fight against human nature that the Raptors wage.
Most nights they win that battle; they resist giving in to taking the easy route, they overcome the mental fatigue that comes in a long NBA season, and they give themselves an honest chance to win.
It’s what they pride themselves on, letting hard work — which is not much more than being consistently on point in the mental aspect of the game — define them, regardless of who the opposition is or who is available any particular night.
“I kind of would like to say we’d like to play up a tick or at a certain energy or effort anyway,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said this week. “I think that’s who we’ve got to be. That has to be our identity, whether guys are in or not.
“That’s really all that I’m after and the point that I’ve been making here for a week. When it’s time for the ball to go up, pull up our socks, dig in and go to work.”
For most of the last couple of weeks, during which the Raptors have turned around an atrocious start to the season, that’s what they’ve done. A disastrous performance one night against Miami was an outlier; in piling up five wins in a seven-game stretch, the Raptors have worked hard, played hard, done the hard stuff that wins games.
They’ve taken the extra quick step on defence, made the extra pass that turns a good shot into a great one, and played more like a playoff team than the group that stumbled to a 2-8 start.
But it is a constant battle, one the Raptors must be mindful of each time they step on the court because if they don’t fight it, if they give in to easy route, they will likely lose. They are not dominant enough athletically to make up for not playing smart and hard, the competition is too good to survive less than maximum effort and the reminders come constantly.
They came Monday in Indiana when the Raptors didn’t play poorly, the just played lazily for too long in a 129-114 defeat.
“I don’t know if it’s an effort thing in the sense that if you shoot a bad shot, you’re not trying,” guard Fred VanVleet said. “I think it’s just more so … that’s the shortcut route, that’s the easy route. Like, swinging it and playing next action three, four, five times is harder to do, it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of focus and fortitude to do that.
“So, yeah, coming up and shooting a pull-up three might be easy. And if you make it, it’s a big shot and a big three, but when you miss a few of those in a row it just puts you on your heels and kind of takes the flow out of the game.”
No one is suggesting the Raptors need to be perfect every night. But if they have learned one thing in this eventful season, it’s that consistent mental acuity will always give them a chance to win. And as the Raptors try to claw back into the upper echelon of the Eastern Conference, learning from the first 17 games of the season will be vital.
They know what they are but, most important, they are finding out what they are not and learning what the crippling points are in every game.
They will not make every shot, nor will they defend each possession with perfection, but if they use their brains, move the ball instead of taking easy shots, think where they need to be one more pass into each defensive possession before it’s made, they’ll be much closer to the 5-2 team they’ve been than the 2-8 team they were.
And with so much time to go in the season, that should allow them to climb the standings. Despite the sluggish start, the Raptors were just a game and a half out of sixth place and three games out of fourth place when play began Tuesday.
There’s ample time to get back into the thick of things. As long as they use their heads as much as their bodies.