Raptors coach fired

Dwane Casey, named a coach of the year, was fired as Raptors coach after Toronto was swept out of the playoffs by the Cavaliers.

The regular season is irrelevant. That’s the message the Toronto Raptors sent Friday when they fired Dwane Casey, two days after his nowformer peers in the NBA said he did the best coaching job in the league this season. Casey led the Raptors to the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference this season, along with the second-best record in the league. He even got to coach in the All-Star game.

Didn’t matter. Swept in the playoffs, swept out of Toronto.

The Raptors were good this season. They weren’t great. And they can’t beat LeBron James, who has engineered the ouster of Toronto now in each of the last three seasons, the last two of them being sweeps. So Casey paid the price, and with that comes the reminder: Winning isn’t enough in this NBA. Coaches must meet expectations, regardless of how misguided they may be.

“In some ways I think the time has come,” Raptors President Masai Ujiri said Friday, a few hours after telling Casey that he was done in Toronto. “Sometimes these things come to an end, relationships come to an end. And we’ll figure out a way to move on, a new voice, just a new everything in terms of that position.”

Let’s be clear: Casey was flawed in the East semifinals when James and the Cavaliers won 4-0. There were some peculiar decisions late in Game 1 when Toronto fell in overtime, and no resistance in two games that became blowouts. Casey should have done better, and he shouldn’t have offered an end-of-series series assessment that essentially was him saying the rest of the East is helpless until James isn’t great anymore.

The National Basketball Coaches Association — the 30 NBA coaches — picked him as their coach of the year, in large part because of the way he took an already-good Toronto offense, changed it mightily and made it better. A high-risk move, and it paid high dividends. Casey’s peers clearly respected that.

The NBA coach of the year award comes out next month, after the Finals. Casey very likely will win that award as well.

Even Ujiri kept lauding Casey on Friday: Good man. Good coach. Classy person. Aren’t those tough to find? Dumping a coach after a top-seeded season is rare, but not unprecedented. Cleveland fired Mike Brown in 2010 and wound up losing James to Miami anyway a few weeks later. Rick Carlisle got Detroit to the No. 1 seed in 2003, then got fired and replaced by Larry Brown — who led the Pistons to the 2004 NBA title.

Others have left of their own accord: Pat Riley with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1990, Phil Jackson in Chicago in 1998, Larry Bird in Indiana in 2000. Bird also fired Isiah Thomas as Pacers’ coach in 2003, a few months after Thomas coached in the All-Star Game.

Ujiri will have good options. Jerry Stackhouse has shown the franchise plenty as coach of the Raptors’ G League team. Many around the NBA are thinking the time is right for Monty Williams to get back on the sideline. It’s only a matter of time before San Antonio assistant Ettore Messina gets his chance to run a club.

Whoever gets the gig in Toronto will surely understand the new reality. Good isn’t good enough anymore.