Don’t let identity be losing
Raptors should take hard pass on rebuild of Pistons, on pace for 14 wins
It’s that time of year in Raptorland. The nightly injury report is getting suspiciously lengthy and you don’t need be a conspiracy theorist to suggest a not-so-subtle tank has commenced.
Maybe the best thing that can happen is what happened in Denver on Monday night. The Raptors’ 125-119 loss amounted to a valiant effort against the reigning champions, and it came with a thick vein of silver linings for the eternal optimists to mine.
R.J. Barrett’s 26 points and nine assists suggested he’s taking to heart head coach Darko Rajakovic’s demands that the 23-year-old’s penchant for maddeningly headdown drives morph more often into heads-up playmaking.
Gradey Dick’s 17 points and seven assists, in the rookie’s second straight start, continued to show signs that, though he’s still a scrawny kid a few months removed from teenagehood, he’s not merely a shooter. He’s showing the outlines of a heady all-round player with the ability to drive and dish and finish. Jontay Porter’s career-best 4-for-7 shooting night from three-point range suggested the scrap-heap pickup has the potential to be an effective role player if more such evidence can be provided.
And, for all that, maybe the most important part was the result: Nothing beats a moral victory in a season where losing can’t be considered a bad thing. Certainly it’s a thing the Raptors are getting the hang of, having lost six of seven games since the mythical pizza party that followed the season’s only three-game win streak.
And given that the Raptors went into Tuesday with the seventhworst record in the NBA — in a year they’ll need some lottery luck to keep the top-six-protected pick they dealt to San Antonio last season — piling up more losses in the final 17 games only stands to improve the odds.
Still, it’s sometimes hard to believe we’ve arrived here so quickly. As hard as it is to believe, the longesttenured Raptor involved in Monday’s game was Dick, who has been franchise property since he was drafted in June. Which goes to prove the NBA landscape can change in a flash — with the change of a management group’s outlook.
A little more than a year ago, a very different-looking Raptors team was defying expectations by becoming buyers at the trade deadline, acquiring Jakob Poeltl for that conditional first-round pick while declining to move on from the likes of Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam.
Team president Masai Ujiri’s justification for that counterintuitive move was memorable: “I believe in these guys. We believe in them,” he said. “We think growth sometimes takes a while … Hopefully we can have a little bit of patience.”
The belief, just like the organizational patience, only ran so deep. The Poeltl acquisition led to some better late-season basketball, sure, but also a one-and-done run in the play-in tournament. And a little more than a year later, the Raptors find themselves in a race to the bottom of the standings, and not nearly enough young talent in the fold.
Young talent is important because the Raptors, save for a handful of exceptions, have never been particularly skilled at acquiring the older version.
Consider this week’s retirement of Otto Porter Jr., the three-point specialist signed with high hopes 2022. When the Raptors gave Porter a two-year deal worth $12.4 million (U.S.), the logic seemed sound enough. At six-foot-eight with an above-average wingspan, Porter fit Toronto’s model at the time. And certainly he brought something the Raptors lacked — three-point shooting. That he’d been a starter in three of Golden State’s four wins in the recently concluded NBA Finals only gilded the deal with championship credibility.
That success, mind you, probably helped remove a certain amount of focus on Porter’s lengthy struggle with ill health. When he retired this week, after an injury-riddled tenure in Toronto, he had made a total of 14 three-pointers with the Raptors. Eventually, the belief and the patience run out.
Now it’s about selling hope and building a foundation. And there were parts of Monday’s game, when the Raptors pulled ahead by as many as 22 points, that suggested there were pieces worthy of being part of the bedrock.
For all that, there are perils in cherry-picking the positives from losing efforts. There are those who do it regularly in Detroit, where the Raptors visit Wednesday, and where those foretelling a brighter future for the bottom-of-theleague Pistons are happily pointing out the potential greatness that lies within the team that set an NBA record with 28 straight losses this season (and ended the streak with a win over the Raptors).
The evidence? Look at Cade Cunningham’s numbers. Look at Ausar Thompson’s talent. Young centre Jalen Duren just became the ninth player in NBA history with 1,000 rebounds, 200 assists and 100 blocked shots before his 21st birthday. It’s a list that includes the likes of LeBron James, Kevin Garnett and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
So a case can be made the Pistons have some impressive pieces. Which might be true. But here’s what’s undeniable. The Pistons are on pace to win 14 games this season. They won 17 last season, and 23 the year before that. Cunningham, the No. 1 pick in the 2021 draft, has been getting better. His team has been getting worse. It’s a developmental story arc that proves team building in the NBA is a perilous and precise business.
In other words, for some teams, losing can feel like winning. For others, losing becomes an identity.
The Raptors were in the former camp Monday, and fair enough. But let’s face it: The Nuggets were under the correct impression that they could get credit for winning a full game while actually paying attention for about half of one.
As Denver head coach Michael Malone said after it was over, speaking of the difference between the first half, when the Raptors built a big lead, and the second, when the Nuggets shot 65 per cent from the field. “The only thing that changed is we finally started playing hard.”
In other words, as Denver’s Michael Porter Jr., Jontay’s older brother, acknowledged: “We took our opponent lightly.”
That’s not necessarily something a proud franchise wants to hear in the wake of a loss. But such is the price of doing business for a Toronto organization abruptly changing course.