TORONTO – Though taking place during the dead of summer, the Toronto Raptors’ restart training inside the Walt Disney World bubble hasn’t exactly had the kind of light and airy summer camp feel you may be familiar with.
Instead it’s been a surprisingly intense, trash-talk filled affair with guys going at each other hard.
“There’s a lot of juice in there, a lot of juice in the building, and high spirits,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse on a conference call Thursday. “it’s all good-natured stuff. I mean, it’s competitive-natured stuff, but it’s all been fine.”
As has been the case since their pre-restart camp in Naples, Fla., the Raptors are mentally ready to start playing again. When the team was allowed to finally start participating 5-on-5 after arriving at the Orlando NBA Campus, that suppressed competitiveness came bursting out.
This has been especially true of Toronto’s second-unit squad, which has taken pride in mercilessly chirping the starters during practice and pushing them to their limit.
“I was actually really happy and excited the way the younger guys were getting Fred [VanVleet] and Kyle [Lowry] and Pascal [Siakam] worked up, taking their intensity level even higher,” said Raptors forward Norman Powell. “The games have been really good when we’re getting after it in our in-team scrimmages and things like that.”
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Powell sees himself as a leader of this Raptors reserve unit and has conveyed the message to the bench to go at the starters with everything they’ve got because it’s not only to the benefit of them, but to the team as a whole.
“I’ve had multiple talks with Stanley [Johnson], [Patrick McCaw], Chris [Boucher], [Terence Davis II], all those guys about how they see me, how they feed off me, how they go as I go, and I definitely have taken a more vocal approach to it, talking to them, especially yesterday in practice, telling them, ‘We’ve got to go at these guys because we want their spot,’” Powell said.
“That approach just puts things in perspective for them, and that’s the approach we have to have every day. Every day you’re out here trying to prove something. Every day you’re trying to show why you belong. Going at a unit like we have here in the first unit, with a championship squad and all five being part of that championship run last year really helps us with our confidence. When we’re winning and beating them in drills and getting them frustrated, getting them mad at the coaches for calls that are not being made or whatever it is, I think it’s a confidence boost for us.”
Added Rondae Hollis-Jefferson: “I would say the first unit understands that this is a part of basketball, they know our job is to come in, push them and make them better. So, I feel like we’re definitely doing that, we’re definitely making it tough for those guys, that’s the only way we know how to do it. Just to make our team better as a whole, we know that we have to come in every day and just make those guys work so when they get out there it’s like, ‘We’ve seen it all day in practice so we’re ready for it.’”
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Perhaps the most memorable aspect of the 2017-18 Raptors season was the team’s vaunted bench mob, a group that was seemingly more than the sum of its parts because of a combination of defensive acumen, non-stop energy, a fearlessness that bordered on audacity and a clear identity.
There are similarities to be found between this season’s reserve group and that beloved 2017-18 iteration, most notably how unafraid and how ultra-competitive this 2020 second unit is.
This could potentially be a huge boon for the Raptors when the season resumes and in the playoffs. Having more depth is never a bad thing, especially depth that’s confident in its abilities and is ready and capable of contributing.
“I think we have our own unique feel and playing style and I just think we have a very hungry group of individuals that want to go out there and prove themselves, top to bottom,” said Powell. “We want to be able to go out there and make sure the coaches and the starting unit knows that we’re not going to have no dip-off of performance or intensity when we go out there and play and get ready for these games.”
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