TORONTO — The Toronto Raptors currently find themselves in a position that fans of the team will find both familiar and not — depending on how long you’ve been watching them for.
For those who hopped on board the train within the last seven seasons, the way this season has gone must be something out of a nightmare.
The thought of scratching and clawing for a playoff spot never even had to be entertained and the only real concern was how far in the playoffs the team could go.
For the diehards who have been cheering on the Raptors before this great “We The North” era, however, the roller-coaster of a season that Toronto’s been playing must feel all too familiar.
As these fans will no doubt remember, the Raptors weren’t always a juggernaut and have had their fair share of battles just to reach the post-season — most notably in the 2009-10 season when Chris Bosh missed the last five games with injury and Toronto ended up finishing ninth in the Eastern Conference, just one game back of the No. 8 seed Chicago Bulls.
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And so, as great as it would be to see the Raptors go on a run and become the kind of dominant team we’ve seen over the past few seasons, the reality is this was a team that sported a 17-21 record and 10th place in the Eastern Conference — a spot that would be good for the final play-in tournament spot — entering Sunday night’s contest with, coincidentally, the Bulls, who trailed the Raptors for 10th spot by merely a few percentage points.
So, as low-stakes a game a mid-March contest with Chicago might have appeared to have been in the past, Sunday’s game was a pretty high-stakes affair for the Raptors and they, unfortunately, came up short again, falling 118-95 for their fifth-straight loss.
And not so coincidentally, for the fifth straight game, the Raptors were without the services of Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby, Malachi Flynn and Patrick McCaw and the team struggled as a result.
There is some hope on the horizon, however, as Raptors head coach Nick Nurse said before Sunday’s game he would expect to have them all back sometime later this week, but that obviously didn’t help his team Sunday.
So, shorthanded as they were, the Raptors came out on the second night of a back-to-back in Chicago playing with far more energy and desire than they did the other night Charlotte.
Kyle Lowry and Norman Powell, in particular, were great for Toronto, finishing with 20 and 32 points, respectively.
However, the two needed some help as the Raptors struggled offensively, only managing to shoot 36.2 per cent from the field in the first half as they went down 58-49 through the first 24 minutes, and finishing the game having shot just 38.2 per cent from the floor.
“You can look at that box score and it tells the story,” said Nurse after the game. “They’ve got nine guys in double figures and I think our fourth scorer’s got six. And that was too bad too because I thought we were, kind of had them in a reachable zone there I thought. We were doing enough defensively, they were shooting really poorly, and we kept getting wide open threes and we just couldn’t make them.”
That poor shooting ended up being a major difference-maker in the contest as the Raptors had their chances. They entered the fourth quarter trailing just 85-75, but a personal 9-1 run from the Bulls’ Denzel Valentine midway through the frame pumped Chicago’s lead up to 18 and the Raptors couldn’t recover, particularly after Lowry got ejected after picking up his second technical foul for throwing the ball the length of the floor in what appeared to be a harmless action but was interpreted otherwise.
“I don’t ever talk about the officials but this is crazy,” said Lowry of the ejection. “I’m going to be very smart about what I say but I just want consistency on both ends. I really didn’t do anything. The first tech all I said was I was talking to my teammates, and I told ‘em we gotta play through the BS, just keep working fellas and I got one and the second one, I just threw the ball. It don’t matter, as long as I throw the ball to an official… But, hey…”
Because of the nature of playing in the midst of a pandemic forcing the team’s temporary relocation to Tampa, along with this situation of five players in health and safety protocols (three, of course, being key starters), there’s been a common joke going around Raptors Twitter and other social media channels that this season Toronto is playing is “fake.”
If only that were the case, though.
This season, whether you agree with playing it or not, is very real and the unfortunate situation that the Raptors are currently dealing with is simply their reality at the moment.
“I think that it’s such an odd year, I think, in a number of senses,” Nurse said before Sunday’s contest. “I was talking with (GM Bobby Webster) on the bus on the way over and I said the strange thing about this season, it feels to me, is that who you’re playing is like irrelevant almost. When the really, really good teams by record come to town, we take care of business. The records are like out the [window]. It seems so level once you get out there on the court.
“I mean, listen, I’ve kind of said this the last couple weeks in this scenario. We’re gonna have to somehow piece this thing together. I’m really hoping to pick off one of these games until the troops can get back. We’ve been unable to do that so far… So we’re gonna have to kind of recalibrate it, fight like heck to try to get in the playoffs, and then again, try to just build it and proceed and try to be playing a lot better and keep improving because there’s still a long way to go. There’s a lot of room for improvement with the team.”
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The halcyon days of the past seven Raptors seasons are behind them and the rougher days of yore where Toronto had to scrap and fight just to make the post-season seem to have returned.
There’s no doubt the Raptors are hamstrung at the moment because of COVID-19 protocols, and the pending return of those reinforcements can’t come soon enough with the team reeling and little margin for error.
“Us being down five guys and three starters is definitely different, right? When we get guys back we can play to a level that we know we can play to,” said Lowry. “I wouldn’t say there’s more pressure. Honestly, you want to be in sixth place so you don’t have to play in no play-in games, but we have to do what we have to do to get to that point where we’re where we need to be. If we’re eighth, seventh, we have to play a play-in game but we still get an opportunity to do something. But we’re not looking at that, we’re looking at making a run so we can get to that sixth spot or get to that fifth spot. We’re not too far back. We’re just in a tough spot with missing our guys, really.”
Added Powell: “I know as a team, speaking about the team, I know it’s important for us. We’ve got to get these wins. I know we’re shorthanded and so on and so forth, but we have to get these wins and find a way. That’s what I tell the guys. Find a way to win. We’re a good team, and we’ve just got to believe it.
“I know looking at the standings and the seedings, everybody’s talking about how close the East is. Win one game and you can be in fourth, and lose two games, you can be in 11th or something, but once we get our guys back, and those guys get back into the flow of things, I feel like we’re going to be a team that’s gonna be able to go on a huge run and collect some wins, hopefully, down the stretch. We’ve got a lot of time left. Not to hit the panic button just yet. Try to hold serve and give ourselves the best opportunity until these guys come back, and then once we get everybody back we blaze and lay it all out there.”
There’s a lot of confidence from the Raptors that when the cavalry returns the “blank-show” — as Nurse put it before Sunday’s game — will subside and they’ll be able to go on a run that will shoot them up the standings.
This sureness from the Raptors is understandable given how successful they were before COVID-19’s unwelcome visit, with the team looking to have finally captured momentum after its poor 2-8 start. However, the harsh truth of Toronto’s situation now is they’ve dropped five straight, are five games under .500 and are 11th in the Eastern Conference and could tumble even further down the standings, meaning that by the time they get back everyone who’s stuck in health and safety protocols it may not be realistic to think they could vie for one of the top four seeds in the conference.
From here on out, the Raptors will be in a battle for a playoff spot.
So, for fans who are perhaps a little newer to the team, let this be a formal introduction to who the Raptors have been for the majority of their existence. It may not be as exciting as chasing titles, but there’s still a certain charm to be found in the fight to make the post-season, where every regular season game played will be of the utmost importance.
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