Lockout aftermath

It was charming in a way.

The Toronto Raptors pushed to the very end of their three day, 144-minute basketball marathon. Leandro Barbosa was flinging Hail Mary triples.

Dwane Casey was having his guys foul to extend the game and somehow, someway squeeze out a win against the Sacramento Kings, even if most of the crowd of 14, 323 was more concerned with beating traffic rather than a miracle comeback.

It looked competitive. It looked fierce. But it was ice cream on … well, can't write that here.

It was a hard-fought NBA game in principle, but in practice it was a victim of process.

When the NBA and its players union agreed to end their 149-day lockout and crush a 66-game schedule into 119 days while cutting pre-season prep time in half, they knew there would be nights like Wednesday, when the spirit was willing but the body?

The body was playing five games in a week.

David Stern had to know he would be putting on a deeply discounted basketball spectacle at full price.

No one is kidding anyone.

"You watch the tapes and teams are making the same mistakes we are. It's ugly. We're ugly," said Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey.

And that was before his club shot 42 per cent and coughed up 18 turnovers while giving up 35 fourth quarter points in a 98-91 loss to the Kings, who earned their first road win of the season at the Air Canada Centre.

And before his best player, Andrea Bargnani, left the game with a strained calf that can logically be linked to his playing 45 minutes two nights ago against Minnesota, 30 minutes in Washington and then coming back for 28 minutes before leaving the game in the third quarter on Wednesday.

It was the Raptors only installment of the back-to-back-to-back set that has become part of the NBA's lexicon this season.

It's not the end of their crazy schedule: Their loss to the Kings came in their fourth game in five nights. Between now and the end of January Toronto will have played 11 games in 18 nights in nine different cities.

It's not a sports schedule, it's a concert tour. The T-shirts could read "11 games; nine cities; Ten-donitis". Advil could be signed on as a presenting sponsor. (Where is Richard Peddie when you need him?)

On one hand you'd like to think that superb athletes in their physical prime earning big bank could sustain their level of play under even these kinds of conditions.

On the other hand it's simply not possible:

Raptors guard Jose Calderon is a gamer and a veteran of countless international tournaments while playing for Spain. He helped his country to a European championship this past summer by playing 11 games in 19 days, but this isn't nearly the same.

"With Eurobasket you play 15, 16 days, but that's it. Here you have another 50 or 60 games to go," he said. "That's different, and you're travelling, you're not in one place."

American NBA players came up playing AAU summer basketball, packed like sardines in vans and spilling out to play five or six games in three days, fueled by Burger King and Mountain Dew.

But that was then: "You're older, the rest and rehab you require is a lot more," said Kings centre Chuck Hayes. "When you're a kid you can play five games in three days and eat cheeseburgers all day, but not at this level."

The NBA schedule requires teams to play an average of 3.5 games a week as compared to three in a normal 82-game season. It doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind 82 games in a typical 166-day schedule is considered cramped, with coaches bemoaning the lack of practice time and players gobbling anti-inflammatories all season as it is.

Now teams like the Raptors resort to walking through their sets on the floors of hotel ballrooms.

It's a tribute to the assistant coaches and to Casey that Calderon could call out the Kings' offensive sets as they were signaled in and get a quick response about what was coming and how to defend it.

But it's a physiological fact that as the game went on there was less their tired legs could do about it, as Kings power forward DeMarcus Cousins bulled his way around the paint for 21 points and 19 rebounds, meeting only token resistance from Toronto's bigs.

Casey and his players can say all the right things about the schedule being the same for everyone and not making excuses, but that's the problem: the schedule is the same for everyone.

The Kings, themselves playing for the second time in two nights and in the midst of a five-game road trip squished into six games, were hardly brilliant in shooting 37 per cent, but it was enough to win.

Did it entertain?

League wide scoring is down over last season by five points a game; shooting percentages are off by nearly four per cent; turnovers are up and the pace of play has slowed.

The NBA knew this was coming: The lockout-shortened 1999 season was a disaster, aesthetically and competitively as the league tried to stuff 50-games into a 90-day bag.

It was the most turgid display of basketball since the shot clock was introduced in 1954, with scoring reaching multi-generational lows and offensive efficiency the lowest the NBA had since seen since the three-point line was added in 1979.

And for those hoping for a flowering of playoff basketball, be mindful that in the 1999 post-season scoring declined even further. The best basketball, in other words, may not be coming.

But the league is open for business. Only 16 games were sacrificed in the name of whatever it was the NBA feels they truly accomplished.

And if the competitive integrity of the product was sacrificed a little along the way?

That's the price of doing business. The players can take Advil for the aches and pains but the fans will be needing something for their upset stomachs.

Michael Grange will provide insight and analysis on all the top stories in sports.