TORONTO – Two years have passed and in some ways not much has changed. The Toronto Raptors are playing Game 7 at home on a Sunday, a chance to advance to second round for the…
Yes, you know all that. Vince Carter, 2001 blah, blah, blah.
And yes, there’s a marathon slated to fill the streets of the downtown core, just like the morning of the Raptors Game 7 showdown against the Brooklyn Nets in 2014, although this time around the game is at 8 p.m., which will make for some groggy-eyed kids at school on Monday morning but should mean that Raptors head coach Dwane Casey won’t have to take the subway to the game to beat the traffic.
And the main characters in the Raptors first-round drama that seems to keep playing on a loop; like a GIF that always ends with the good guys getting the pie in the face?
They’re still here. The original core, albeit a core that has been augmented since by general manager Masai Ujiri. But he’s built on the foundation of Casey, Jonas Valanciunas, Terrence Ross, Patrick Patterson and most of all DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, the two all-stars who finished that Game 7 with DeRozan consoling Lowry on the floor after his improvised lay-up attempt after a bungled out-of-bounds play was denied at the buzzer by the fingernail of the Nets’ Paul Pierce.
In the NBA players age in dog years. Teams’ windows open and close in a blink, it seems. Lives and careers move so fast. Two years ago Lowry and DeRozan could still be called kids. Now they’re in their primes and in Lowry’s case, having turned 30, arguably on the back nine of what a player’s prime typically ends up being.
They’re at the same stage of their time being now, as in, Sunday.
And while Ujiri and the Raptors have benefitted significantly from preaching patience and continuity, who knows how that line of reasoning changes if Lowry, DeRozan and Casey fall short in Game 7 for the second time and fail to advance into the second round as the higher seed for the third straight year.
Two years ago the winning three playoff games was icing on an unexpectedly successful season. Now? Failing to win at least four would be tough to explain away.
“It’s a lot different,” allowed DeRozan. “Two years ago we were playing against the most veteran team [The Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce et al Nets] you could assemble versus a bunch of guys who never even tasted the playoffs. And you know we grew a lot from then.
“And this time around the feelings are different. We’re in a different position. But it’s a new challenge for us. It’s been a long six games of this series, now it’s an opportunity in Game 7 to put everything together that we probably were struggling with. Just put it all together. You know, them last six games don’t matter. Tomorrow night matters.”
It matters for all kinds of reasons. Casey’s contract is up and DeRozan will be a free agent this summer, one that could attract ‘max’ offers from multiple teams.
Ujiri went out of his way as the Raptors wound down their record-setting regular season and before their first-round series against the No.7 Indiana Pacers began to downplay its significance.
He said Casey wasn’t coaching for his job. He said his team was still growing, still taking baby steps. He suggested that as good as the Raptors regular season was, he didn’t feel like rest of the Eastern Conference feared them; looked on them as an insurmountable obstacle.
Even as far back as the trade deadline, offered the chance to trade future assets to bolster the roster for the short-term, he passed, his logic being that no single player that was available was good enough to vault the Raptors past the Cleveland Cavaliers, so why mortgage the future when this team is at the beginning of their best basketball, rather than the end.
But those were opinions shared when the No. 2 seeded Raptors seemed a good bet to advance out of the first round. They seemed almost designed to turn down the heat.
But now? Now that the Raptors are tied 3-3 and have arguably been widely outplayed for most of four of the six games, less the Raptors miracle comeback in the fourth quarter of Game 5? Now that Lowry and DeRozan are shooting 60-of-190 from the floor and are averaging 14.3 and 15.8 points through six games – 15 points less than their combined regular season average?
If the Raptors fall short again what follows will be an extraordinary test of Ujiri’s vision and patience.
Winning makes things easy. Winning means progress. Winning means one more series to determine if the biggest problems DeRozan and Lowry are facing are the Pacers’ Paul George and George Hill. Draw a different matchup in the second round and maybe – win or lose – the story changes. Maybe the Raptors cornerstones look like all-stars again, instead of just regular-season wonders.
So it’s hard to downplay that what happens Sunday doesn’t matter, even after the best regular season in franchise history.
“It determines a lot, what happens tomorrow,” said Lowry.
Said DeRozan, when asked if the success or failure of their season was hanging in the balance: “Yeah it is. Yes. If tomorrow don’t go, I don’t even want to put that negative energy out there. That’s not how we’re thinking. We’re going out there thinking we won our division, won 56 games for a reason, to have home-court advantage. We have to take advantage of it.”
If they do, everything becomes so much easier. They will have earned another line in the Raptors history books. They will have added another building block in the foundation of something the ceiling of which is yet to be determined.
Lose and the possibility looms of things shaking out differently. Lose and the future can fly by before you even knew it was here.