Raptors continue to prove why they’re the anti-Knicks

Eric Smith and Michael Grange discuss the Toronto Raptors dominating the New York Knicks in the final game of their home stand.

TORONTO — Every once in a while, when anyone with any kind of vested interest in the Toronto Raptors wants to do a reality check about where they are, where they’ve been and where they could be, all they need to do is gaze down the Eastern Conference standings and take a long look at the New York Knicks.

Or, as was the case on Sunday afternoon at the Air Canada Centre, on the mess before them on the gleaming wood.

What a joke. A historic franchise mired in decades of dysfunction with no clear signs of escape.

The Raptors don’t have the history or the New York City cache, but they have the ownership, management and coaching to find themselves on a steady, long-term, upwards trajectory. It played out in microcosm at the ACC. The Raptors won 116-101, in a game that was over midway through the third quarter when the Raptors built a 38-point lead on the strength of a 25-2 run to start the quarter. No matter what your rooting interest it’s never pretty seeing a professional team rollover. The Knicks looked like they did and once that seeps in it’s a stain that’s hard to remove, but that’s where the Knicks are.

The Raptors? They are getting rested and getting healthy as they extended their winning streak to three straight with a soft schedule beckoning. And their goals remain ever higher as they try to tighten their defence to match their top-of-the-table offence.

"We’ve got continuity from over the years, playing with each other, all that stuff adds together," said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey after the game. "We’re playing with a tremendous amount of confidence. Again, we’re not going to become defensive juggernauts overnight, but the way we started the third quarter has got to be our disposition, making people feel us. If we’re playing for something bigger. If we’re just trying to (go through) the motions, trying to win 50 games? Cool. But if we want to do something important we have to play like we did in the third quarter."

Toronto did it by committee. Six players finished in double figures, led by DeMar DeRozan with 23. Jonas Valanciunas grabbed 16 rebounds in his 28 minutes. More importantly DeRozan and Kyle Lowry played just 28 minutes, their night finished before the fourth quarter began. Toronto held the Knicks to 38.8 per cent shooting in the first three quarters — and 4-of-19 from the floor in the pivotal third quarter — before easing the gas a little in the fourth quarter as the Knicks did manage to win garbage time.

It’s been nearly 50 years since the Knicks won a pair of championships in the early 1970s, putting on display an unselfish, ball-moving, band-of-brothers brand of basketball that even now serves as the template for the way the game should properly be played.

Phil Jackson, the current architect of the Knicks’ latest slide into oblivion, was part of those teams, winning a title in 1973, and they formed the standard for team play that he successfully imposed on the likes of Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neill and Kobe Bryant on his way to winning 11 NBA championships as a coach.

But Jackson, in his third season as Knicks president, hired by unpredictable team owner James Dolan and given a five-year, $60-million contract to do a job for which he had no previous experience, has had no success turning around the club’s fortunes.

If anything, he’s made things worse, unwilling to oversee a patient rebuilding program and instead grasping at quick-fix solutions to somehow leverage the fading prime of Carmelo Anthony.

Disaster has followed. The Knicks came to the ACC having lost nine of their last 11, 25th in the NBA in defensive rating and two games behind Charlotte for the eighth and final playoff spot.

The Raptors are now 8-2 against Jackson’s Knicks over the past three years and have won six straight against New York. And their advantage is building, as the effort spent to invest patience in growing a culture is beginning to bear fruit.

"The way the team is run, top to bottom, is really good. They’re good at being organized," said second-year Raptors guard Norm Powell, who had 21 points off the bench on Sunday. "Everybody knows their roles to keep the wheels turning. I just like the feeling of it. Everyone’s really close, it’s a family-type vibe from coach Casey all the way down the line to Bruno [Caboclo] … and I think that’s what makes this team so good.

"It not only helps people like me, who are young, but the knowledge spreads and keeps you together. You see teams that are up and down, organizations that are still trying to rebuild and things like that and this team is really close and that helps [the young guys] learn. The flow of it is amazing."

The Knicks — and a lot of NBA teams — can only wish for such an endorsement. This season was supposed to mark the turnaround after Jackson was at least patient enough to allow the Knicks to linger near the basement long enough to draft Kristaps Porzingis fourth overall in the summer of 2015. The big Latvian has tremendous promise but missed Sunday’s game with a tender Achilles (the Raptors were without Patrick Patterson, out with a sore knee) and the Knicks don’t have nearly enough young talent around him, with none on the horizon.

The addition of a sliding, injury prone and personally erratic Derrick Rose to run point guard has proven a huge mistake. Signing a soon-to-be 32-year-old Joakim Noah a four-year, $72-million contract is another. Rose is a poor shooter who can’t defend, far removed from his MVP form of 2010-11. He spent the summer defending himself in an unsavoury sexual assault lawsuit — the case was thrown out, but Rose’s personal judgment remains forever tarnished.

Another blow came last week when Rose left the team and missed a home game without notifying anyone with the organization — nearly unprecedented behaviour — setting off a mild panic about his whereabouts and safety and raising more questions about his reliability.

Reports came out last week that he’ll be seeking a five-year, $150-million contract next summer. Coupled with his assertion in the summer that he, Porzingis and Anthony would form the NBA’s next ‘Big 3’ suggests he may exist in an altered state of reality.

Which brings us back to the Raptors, who improved to 27-13 on the season — they were 25-15 after 40 games a year ago — and proof that there is success to be had in the NBA for those patient enough.

It maybe be boring, but consider the alternative.

The Knicks have been through 15 coaches in the 16 years since Vince Carter and the Raptors beat them in the first round of the playoffs in 2001. Jeff Hornacek is the third Knicks coach who has worked for Jackson. They’ve made the playoffs four times in that time frame and fired the coach that got them there the following year three times. The fourth, Mike Woodson, they fired after making the playoffs for the second time in his tenure.

In Toronto Casey is in his sixth season running the club and with a new contract extension in place, a steady manner and consistent success, it’s easy to imagine he’ll be on the job for several more to come. His teams have improved every year.

There are all kinds of benefits to this. The Raptors are consistently drama free, which means they are free to focus their energies on the task at hand at any given moment.

"The game is about rhythm, continuity, consistency. Whether it’s your approach, your practice, whatever it is. We try to keep that the same," says Casey. "I’m hip enough to change too much. We try to keep things the same and be consistent with what we do. Boring is good, I think. I look at guys like Jerry Sloan [who coached the Utah Jazz to 19 playoff appearances in 22 seasons] he was boring for how many years and look how good he did. I think that’s the way you have to approach it."

The Raptors are boring, in a good way. They always choose patience and development over rash decisions and grasping for shiny things. They have a developing culture. They have a future.

They may not quite be Spurs North, which they aspire to be. But they are at the very least the anti-Knicks, and for now and seemingly forever, this is a very good thing.

When submitting content, please abide by our submission guidelines, and avoid posting profanity, personal attacks or harassment. Should you violate our submissions guidelines, we reserve the right to remove your comments and block your account. Sportsnet reserves the right to close a story’s comment section at any time.