Kind of a feeling around the old Heroes Of The Hardcourt today, isn’t there?
Funny what getting a few legitimate, experienced NBAers in a rotation to bump a few others down a peg can do.
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Wonder where they could find a former rookie of the year and a veteran centre to add?
Doug, watching the Raptors wind down their season has been a frustrating and dismal experience.
I can understand wanting a better draft pick, but some semblance of integrity in the process seems to be in order.
Injuries and personal issues aside, the product put on the floor in the last few games has been dismal.
It is like watching second- and third-unit players competing against superstars.
LeBron James and Anthony Davis one night, Rudy Gobert and Anthony Edwards the next. It is akin to watching UFC fighters from different weight classes going head to head.
So, my question is: Do you feel tanking is a legitimate strategy when we are talking about professional players and professional organizations and fans paying high prices to watch this Raptor tank unfold?
Thanks for your thoughts on this rather dark and trying time in Raptor land.
I do not think it’s legitimate, nor should it be advised and, most important, it seldom works. Maybe, perhaps, possibly this OKC team is the outlier, but ask Detroit or Philadelphia or Washington or Houston how it’s been.
And your point of cheating the sport, cheating your fans, cheating the players on the roster is a whole rant I could go off on.
Could there be a better exclamation point to this truly weird Raptor season (cursed, as you noted in the Insider column) than Malachi Flynn dropping 50 points in a losing effort for the Pistons? Fortunately this basketball fan finds many other entrancing things to distract, none more than the NCAA women’s tournament. What Aaliyah Edwards has done as the only sizable player on a six-person team is both extraordinary and mostly anonymous in the shadow of her brilliant teammate Paige Bueckers.
Could she make a difference in Paris?
I am an unabashed fan of Aaliyah Edwards, have been following her story for years and know what kind of player and woman she is.
You might want to reserve April 15 to find out where she lands in the WNBA draft.
A Paris difference-maker? For sure. If you add her to a frontcourt that includes Kayla Alexander, Natalie Achonwa and Laeticia Amihere, that’s stacked.
What’s going to determine how Canada does, however, is guard play.
I know the Raps have been hurt by injuries and decimated by trades. Yet the results in the tag end of the season are so lopsided it causes me to wonder: Do the Raptors have a future? How do they come back from being so low, especially as this next draft doesn’t look all that promising? Thanks.
Well, since I don’t think they’re gonna turn out the lights and lock the doors in a week or so, I’d say they have a future.
And when they open camp next fall with the four of five starters they missed for more than half of this streak and with maybe six new faces on the roster, they’ll be fine. Maybe not great, but fine.
And this will be an ongoing discussion in the next couple of months, but I’ll start it by suggesting that everyone saying right now that the draft is going to be bad and horrible and no good is talking out of their bum because no one can judge a draft for at least two, probably three years.
Hi, Doug. Hope your eyes aren’t bleeding too badly from what is turning out to be a disappointing season (although Friday’s win was nice).
Just wanted to follow up on a question I and another reader asked two weeks ago. You had mentioned that a team that had only Canadian players on it would be a pretty good NBA team and would go reasonably far. So, if you, Doug Smith, were the GM, which Canadian players would you pick for the starting five, and the remaining regular four rotation players, for the best possible NBA (not international — given the differences in the games) team?
Man, that’s a hard one. Really, really hard, and I hope you’re only talking about today’s players rather than all history because that would be impossible.
OK. To win in the NBA you need shooting and defence, that’s my first premise. And you also need size, but GM Doug doesn’t have anywhere near enough of that at his disposal. So …
Primary second unit: Lu Dort, Andrew Nembhard, Shaedon Sharpe, Nickeil Alexander-Walker
Tough to cut Andrew Wiggins, and Bennedict Mathurin’s hurt or he’d make it. Chris Boucher would offer size, but he doesn’t have the physicality to go with it.
Hi, Doug. Congrats to you on surviving the streak! It’s not easy covering a team winning one game a month!
1) It’s clear, especially now, how important health is in determining a team’s success.
Was the loss of Christian Koloko the first domino leading to the eventual collapse? (No Koloko means you can’t trade Precious Achiuwa, then Precious gets injured too, tying Masai Ujiri’s hands in trades …)
2) Paul Watson Jr. (Raptors ghost of seasons past) had a 30-point game, and then zero the next game. Dalano Banton is still producing 20-plus point games this week … do you think he’s proven he’s a legit NBA player? (A Scottie Barnes backup?)
3) At least a couple former Raptors (Danny Green and Yuta Watanabe) have mentioned in interviews that they asked about returning to Toronto, but were declined. Given the team’s reversal of fortune, do you think that next season the answer could be different? (I know, both over age 25, but very affordable pricewise with length and three-point shooting.)
4) Speaking of our budget, you can’t get Gary Trent Jr. and Thad Young — like performance from G League players. Malik Williams can’t give you Thad Young numbers, at least not anytime soon. Can we keep our core without having a Dollarama bench?
Thanks for the insightful piece on scouting and Kyle’s hopes for the future. May he have them fulfilled!
A week left, still. And then the real works start.
No, they had low expectations for Koloko at the end of last season and he didn’t work the entire summer, so they weren’t counting on him at all.
As I said somewhere else here, I hope Dalano has a long and lucrative year. I think in many ways his game grew when he got out of Toronto, and coming back wouldn’t help.
Green’s career is over. Yuta really never had one. Been there, done that, time to move on.
Yes, they can afford a bench. What they did for a month or so was conduct on-the-job auditions and no one really passed with flying colours.
Much has been written on what Gradey Dick has to do to improve as a player, but I’ve never seen his dribbling/ball-handling mentioned. Do you think it is a less-than-stellar part of his game? He seems to lose the handle or get stripped of the ball more than he should.
It’s absolutely a part of his game that needs work, along with many other aspects. But in his defence, I can’t imagine he spent a lot of time as a major ball-handler in college and definitely not against legitimate defenders.
Hey, Doug. Did you see Dalano Banton’s last game against the tough Orlando defence: 26 points, 4-for-8 from three, 6-of-8 free throws, five assists, five rebounds, four blocks, three steals, one turnover, one foul! Nice stat line for a bench guy.
He almost pulled out the win for the Blazers in the last few minutes. They lost 104-103.
So happy to see the Rexdale kid finally getting a chance to play. He plays his heart out every game. Hope to see him with Team Canada soon.
I did see the stats and they were great — even though it came in what I believe was Portland’s 10th successive loss — and I’m glad for Dalano.
I hope he plays 10 years in the NBA and makes $100 million, I really do. It was not going to be in Toronto, and I think he and his advisers might have felt that when he decided to leave.
Was surprised you think this season is less easy to endure. I would have guessed the exact opposite. Everyone expected the 1997-98 Raptors to be better than they were the previous season, as you point out. The fall was dramatic. This is very different.
The moment — the very moment — we heard rumours of Kawhi Leonard going to the Clippers was the moment the talk of a rebuild here started. On paper, it seemed absurd to think otherwise. Leonard (and Danny Green) were gone with no return and we quickly realized there’d be no substitute addition, either. What team can lose that amount of talent and still think it can contend? The Raptors, though, saw that Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam had upside to their game. Kyle Lowry was still here. Marc Gasol, too. If Gasol and Lowry could maintain their play and we see strides from the other three starters, then all we had to do was find some backup players and we still might make a run. And sure enough, VanVleet, Anunoby and Siakam made those strides. And it’s clear with hindsight, their strides did not compensate for the loss of a talent like Leonard. But we were good enough to put off the rebuild.
With all due respect, I had to cut this down from almost 700 words (longer than a usual game story I write) to a more manageable length. I hope I kept in the salient pieces and, you know, the question.
And if you suggest they should have blown up the championship team because “what team can lose that amount of talent and still think it can contend?” and you fail to note that THE REMNANTS OF THAT CHAMPIONSHIP TEAM WERE SECOND-BEST IN THE NBA WHEN COVID BLEW THE WORLD UP, I have no answer.
Hi, Doug. Many thanks for your great coverage of our Toronto Raptors.
Something that’s become painfully obvious, as this disastrous Raptors season comes to a close, is Chris Boucher’s place at the far end of the bench.
I’ve noticed he doesn’t sit with his fellow injured players, the guys playing or even amongst the coaches. And it’s been like this for most of the season, even when he’s healthy. Your thoughts, please.
I am finished with talking about what happened with Boucher’s place in the rotation and why he lost his minutes.
And I’m not sure what game you were watching, but I saw him walk up the tunnel after the buzzer with the rest of the team for the last two games I was at here, and I’ve seen him on the practice court every day I’ve been at OVO for about three weeks, so he’s very much still around.
