The NBA season is long, and not always fun.
The Toronto Raptors know this firsthand. They’ve lost five of their last six games, have key players injured, are hosting the suddenly smoking-hot Brooklyn Nets on Friday night and started off a run of 13 games against teams with a .500 record or better with a heartbreaking loss to the Sacramento Kings on Wednesday.
They’re one-third through an 82-game season, and have reached the point where staying positive isn’t a mindset, it’s grunt work that requires some heavy lifting.
“Winning is the cure for everything,” says Pascal Siakam. “I always say people can hate you or whatever, but winning just makes everybody smile and everybody be happy … I think the harder thing is just trying to have a positive outlook on things when they’re not going right.”
Finding a way to stay upbeat even as the losses mount and the outlook seems bleak is a learned skill, one that Siakam has had to work on. “When I was a little kid. I hated losing,” he says. “I hated when things weren’t going my way. So I think as you grow, and you go through experiences you understand that however you act is not going to change the outcome of what already happened.
“Me being here and being sad and having a mood is not going to change the fact that yesterday we lost. Like, we lost. It’s over. There’s nothing I can do about that. But what I can do is go back, come in here first thing in the morning, work, watch film and go out there tomorrow and do it better, or at least try to do it better.”
One way Siakam makes coming to work fun even when it might not be is by keeping in touch with the kid within – not the sore loser, but the Cameroonian soccer star that never was because he grew too tall and left for America to pursue basketball.
Siakam’s inner child comes out every night about 40 minutes before the ball goes up, when he has a giant smile on his face and also puts a smile on the face of everyone watching. It’s a moment independent of what happened the game before or what might happen that night and has nothing to do with his point production or his pay cheque, and everything to do with being a little boy at home in Douala doing what he loved to do until his Mom called him inside, or until it was too dark to play anymore.
For about 30 seconds or so he’ll take a pause from being a highly paid professional basketball player with the fortunes of a franchise weighing on his performance, and touch base with his first love: soccer, or as they call it in Cameroon and everywhere else in the world, football. His pre-game warm-up isn’t complete until he finishes dribbling a basketball and starts juggling it at centre court, using his feet with more dexterity than most people can use their hands.
“I love it, I love it,” he said Thursday. “I grew up playing it. A football is the first thing you get when you’re a little kid, or even if you don’t get one, you find it somewhere on the street. That’s what you do.”
Siakam can’t remember when he added it to his warm-up routine or what prompted him to do it, but at some point in his career, he began mixing in some juggling, with it eventually becoming a little bit more elaborate.
Siakam’s pregame routine varies little. He comes to the floor promptly at 6:30 (for a 7:30 tip) and goes through every conceivable situation he could face with the basketball under the eye of Raptors assistant coaches Rico Hines, Earl Watson and Fabulous Flournoy. Siakam starts with mid-range jumpers off the catch and off the dribble; he goes through his endless menu of dribbling moves leading to lay-ups finished with either hand and off either foot; post-ups ending in jump hooks and fadeaway jumpers before wrapping up with three-pointers from all around the arc and then free throws.
At that point – about 15-20 minutes in and now in a full sweat — Siakam is finally ready.
That’s when a basketball is rolled out to him and he kicks it up to himself lightly on the first try, his size 16 sneakers no obstacle, and the ball stays in the air without touching the wood again until Siakam decides he’s done, as the 6-foot-9 all-NBA forward nimbly juggles the ball from his right foot to his left, off each knee and each shoulder and back down again. If he’s feeling it he’ll bring the ball to his forehead and balance it there before bouncing it up and starting again. Sometimes he catches it on the back of his neck before flipping it up for more keep-ups. After 15-to-30 seconds or so he sends a perfect half-volley off his right instep to Raptors shooting coach Michael Prenger, who is stationed by the basket. Prenger then lobs an alley-oop pass back to Siakam who finishes his warm-up with a two-handed slam.
“It’s pretty impressive,” says Raptors veteran Thad Young, whose warm-up slot follows Siakam’s, and has been watching his teammates’ soccer routine since arriving in Toronto at the trade deadline last year. “That takes a lot of coordination, most of us Americans, we didn’t grow up doing that kind of stuff.”
Siakam most certainly did. His soccer training was mostly informal. He played in local leagues he was young, but for the most part, his experience in the game was organic, as was common across football-mad Africa. He played in the streets, school yards and fields with his friends and then at boarding school – Siakam left home to go to seminary college when he was 12 – where it was how every spare minute of time was spent.
“We all played every single day,” he says. “There was no ‘let’s go play basketball’, that wasn’t a thing. The first thing you did was go outside and play soccer. That’s all we did.”
Is there part of him that wonders what could have been? Granted, 6-foot-9 stars are few and far between in professional soccer, but athletes gifted enough to earn all-NBA recognition in their eighth season of organized basketball – as Siakam did in 2019-20 – don’t come along very often either.
“I think things have worked out perfectly [in basketball],” says Siakam, who liked to play up front and – to hear him tell it – had a knack for scoring. “But if I really went with soccer? I can never put limits on myself if I really went with it. Like I don’t know. I believe I can accomplish – literally — anything that I want, so …”
The only problem for Siakam is that chances to play are rare. His most recent pick-up game was last spring when he went on vacation in the Maldives. “They had like, a court and I played with the workers,” he says, delighted by the memory. “It was the most fun I had in so long and I was so tired because it’s so hard, right? But I loved it.
“But I always said, if I could find a way to play [football] and not get hurt, I would do it.”
His football passion has served him well during the past month or six weeks as the World Cup has unfolded, a stretch that overlapped with Siakam missing 10 games in November with a groin injury and the Raptors’ December slump. Having football to watch has been a welcome distraction, even if Cameroon lost in the group stage. Siakam will be watching on Sunday morning when Argentina and France meet in the Final, before getting ready to go to work and take on the Golden State Warriors on Sunday night.
“The World Cup is the biggest event like in the world, for football fans, right? So watching that is always fun and for me it brings back memories, ” says Siakam. “It’s a passion and it can take you away from anything, really.”
For a brief moment before every Raptors game, Siakam lets his first love take him back, when sports meant playing with friends until it was time to go home.
And then he gets to work.