Before we get to all that, check out my talk with Tim Chisholm from TSN where we covered all the major issues that were up for discussion in the press conference along with some NBA playoff and TSN2 talk. And since Colangelo didn’t discuss Joey Graham we thought we’d do him the justice. You can listen by clicking the play button below or directly in iTunes. You can also download the mp3 file.

[audio:http://raptorsrepublic.com/blog/audio/2009-04-20-TimChisholm.mp3]

This was a pretty tame press conference which started with Colangelo giving a little speech before answering the press. His reasoning for a failed season were very simple: the Raptors didn’t execute a defensive plan, did not push the ball up the court and there wasn’t any ball movement. That’s it in a nutshell. It seemed to me that he’s really nostalgic about the 2006-07 season and wants the team to return to that style of basketball. When he made the Jermaine O’Neal trade he must’ve known (I hope) that he was acquiring a player whose game is counter to the one prescribed by the running/ball movement style of ball. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we didn’t push the ball up the court, that was mostly due to O’Neal coming in and the speed merchant Ford going out.

He then philosophized whether the success of the division winning team came “too much, too quickly” and perhaps he had done a “poor job of managing expectations”. In my opinion he didn’t do a poor job of that at all, what he did do a poor job of is not recognizing the needs of the team at the end of that season by inking Jason Kapono of all people. The success of that year had as much to do with our style of play as it did with the state of the Eastern conference that year. New York, Boston and Philadelphia had terrible years and New Jersey struggled with injury and inconsistency, sure, you don’t win a division title for nothing but those who thought that we’d improve the following year were ignoring the fact that the roster had gotten worse. A first round defeat at the hands of the Magic was a result that sounded about right and fair.

Colangelo’s very confident that Carlos Delfino will return to the Raptors and will add the toughness, grit that he admitted the team lacked. “We are too nice, we are too nice. Collectively, the group is too nice”, said Colangelo. The doubt I have is that Delfino’s too much of a nobody to light a fire under this bunch. As I recall, he wasn’t exactly impressive in his stint with the Raptors and frustrated me as much as anyone on the roster. His return will no doubt help the situation at the backup SF, but whether a player we let walk only a year ago is the answer to the wing woes is an entirely different matter. To his credit, Colangelo did reiterate that Delfino will not solve everything, “I don’t want to oversell Carlos Delfino. I don’t want to oversell Carlos Delfino”, said Colangelo. Based on that I’m hoping the toughness need will be filled through other channels as well.

He also revealed that Jose Calderon came up to him and suggested that Delfino’s toughness would help the Raptors. Colangelo pointed out that Parker had played the backup point guard admirably this year and that part of Delfino’s role could easily be to do that. As mentioned in my chat with Tim Chisholm, Sam Mitchell rarely took advantage of Delfino’s ball-handling abilities. I’m getting mixed messages here, from one end Colangelo’s saying that he doesn’t oversell Delfino but from the other he’s projected as being a major component of this team. Which one is it?

I was a bit surprised to hear that Roko could very well be demoted to third string duty next year. Chisholm thought that Roko’s to blame for that because of his rather selfish play coming down the home stretch of the season. Colangelo conceded that his biggest failing as a GM this year was not taking care of this position which only makes sense because he also thought that the biggest failing of the season was Jose Calderon not being 100% which in turn affected everything. Later on he even mentioned how Calderon has played a year straight of basketball which makes the signing of one Will Solomon even more perplexing. Colangelo knew that Jose would play a lot of basketball at the international level and also knew that this was his first starting job, yet he didn’t give us a backup ball handler and to make it worse, he let one who could handle the ball walk. I thought the Olympic groin injury should’ve been a warning sign that another deal needed to be made.

Colangelo described the O’Neal trade as “swinging for the fences” but then said he would pull it again if he had to because “it was the right thing to do”. I thought he was being stubborn and arrogant and brought this up with Chisholm who felt it’s a good kind of stubborn. He argued that you want your GM to have confidence in himself and not doubt his evaluation abilities even after a deal goes south. I disagree, it’s known to the whole wide world that the deal was bad for the record, bad for the franchise and bad for player development and I was hoping Colangelo would say something like, “I learned my lesson”. Instead he brought up the very debatable point that we are somehow financially more flexible after the trade. I don’t get that, I also don’t get how you equate something with swinging for the fences, fail at it, and then say you’d swing for the fences again.

His stubbornness surfaced again when he said that he still believed that this was the best team he had ever assembled. “I can honestly tell you today that on paper, I still believe, man for man it was the best team I’ve had since I’ve been here”, said Colangelo. I can’t even comment on the ridiculousness of this statement. I don’t know how he defines the words ‘best’, ‘team’ and ‘assembled’ but going into this year there were more questions about the roster than going into the previous season. Seriously, I almost blew up when I heard him say that. We all make mistakes, let’s just admit them and move along. I do think Bosh’s comment that it’s “not about the paper, it’s about the game” made him reflect about this and will influence his evaluation this summer.

As I said earlier, Jose Calderon’s injury and subsequent defensive struggles were, according to Colangelo, the chief reason why the season failed. It was still funny to hear him describe Calderon’s defense as “atrocious”. Through the law of transitivity, I agree with his assessment. Our biggest problem this year was defense, more specifically dribble penetration and Calderon was singled out by teams to be exploited and since he couldn’t defend the point-of-attack, our defense fell apart. Still, we can’t just throw our hands up in the air and blame it on a single injury. There are four other guys on the court who have the duty to step up and help out a fallen mate, but we couldn’t do that because the system and personnel to compensate for a beaten guard weren’t there.

We will get new rebounders. Colangelo admitted that Bargnani will never be a great rebounder and we will need rebounding from the shooting guard and small forward spots to make up the difference. He also said that he will try to get players with a mean streak who have some ‘dog’ in them. These two needs can be filled through the same player but I doubt that’s going to happen. If Rasho Nesterovic is deemed the answer to the rebounding problem, he’s definitely not bringing any meanness with him.

Colangelo described Anthony Parker as ‘invaluable’ and admitted that there were a few teams that had called up asking about his services at the trade deadline and in his own evaluation they wanted him in a bench capacity. He let Parker know that and encouraged him to expand his ‘scope’, seeing how he’s always been a starter and it’s not going to happen again. Colangelo was very clear on Parker: “I would very much like to have Anthony back, he’s been invaluable to the organization…As far as the role, I would anticipate that he’ll be coming off the bench if he comes back.” Could he be the backup PG that Colangelo’s looking for? I’m not a fan of that, we need a spark off the bench, a guy who can come in, attack the rim, create and score a few points. Parker’s going to do none of that and the only thing he’ll add to his game for next year is one year of his age.

Chisholm felt that Marion’s options this summer are very limited and that he doesn’t foresee the Raptors losing him. In his opinion, if that happens the successes of the last few weeks should be discarded because Marion was the primary reason for them. I think I have to agree with him here, Marion’s key to the style of basketball we want to play and is in many ways his talents are irreplaceable in the short term. Colangelo wants to bring Marion back but in case things don’t work out he seemed fairly confident that a sign-and-trade would bring something useful back. I hope it does because if Marion walks we’d have traded two first-round picks, T.J Ford, Rasho Nesterovic, Maceo Baston, Jamario Moon for nothing but Marcus Banks’ terrible contract.

None of the assistant coaches are under contract and Chisholm thinks they’re all done here. He brought up an excellent point regarding the feelings they might have towards Triano after being “passed over”. Chisholm thinks Iavaroni’s addition will help (Note to Dave – I asked him about your defensive concerns about Iavaroni) on the defensive end and that Triano needs all the experience he can get on the bench. Colangelo’s going to sit down with Triano in the next couple days and “interview” him. It’s a done deal, its boring but its true: he’s the head coach next season.

As for Bosh, he’ll offer him an extension because he believes he’s the best player on the team and is part of his long-term plans. “I will sit down and talk to him and his agent this summer about the possibility of signing an extension”, said Colangelo. Whether Bosh accepts anything less than max-money is going to be the road block in getting the deal done. If it doesn’t happen, he’s hoping that a sign-and-trade with a team that deems Bosh max-money worthy could be swung and if it is, it’ll be in the best interest of the franchise. Colangelo’s current valuation of Bosh is that he’s “arguably a top 10 player”. I strongly feel the Raptors need to resolve this issue before training camp because it has the potential to be a huge distraction during the season.

I found Colangelo to be of very positive mind when looking back at the post-trade part of the season. He doesn’t see this is as a 33 win team at all and feels that if this current roster was there from opening day, we’d be in the playoffs. So Bryan, why didn’t you make it happen in the off-season? Miami was looking for a point guard before the draft and we had T.J Ford, seemed like a natural fit. The playoff remark didn’t sit right with him, you can’t possibly extrapolate the success we had playing bad teams at home to the whole season. I fear that this kind of thinking could get this franchise in deeper trouble this summer. I’m hoping Colangelo evaluates talent for what it is and not what it once was, doesn’t use falsities as a basis for evaluation and once and for all makes this team more athletic and thus give it a better chance of defending people.

You can see the entire press conference or check out the summary presented in the live blog in case you missed it. Thanks again to Tim Chisholm for being a good sport. @raptorsrepublic. RSS Feed.

He dismissed the reason for not finishing the Denver game as entirely precautionary and said “I’m in pretty good shape” and went on to talk about practice. The first hour of which on Friday was spent entirely talking about defense. What I would give to be a fly on the wall in that room, eh? O’Neal admits that the squad hasn’t played good defense all preseason long:

“We haven’t played great defense, we’ve allowed a lot of dribble penetration, allowed guys to catch the ball in the low-post..we really didn’t look well defensively all preseason and we got a lot of work to do in a short period of time because we looked pretty bad..the emphasis for the next five days of practice is defense…we have to be a tough physical team”

He’s echoing the sentiments of a lot of the fans that have watched the preseason games and have felt that the squad is a bit disjointed and far from being a polished product. Nobody expects perfection at the end of preseason but what’s concerning is the lack of continuity and form in our offensive play. The shape of our offense was starting to look better as the preseason wore on and Jermaine O’Neal was finding his way into it and starting to produce alongside Chris Bosh. The other players were the real concerns, more specifically Jason Kapono, Anthony Parker and Jamario Moon. All three looked very unimpressive in the preseason and you have to think it’ll take some time before they get their act going (if they get their act going). Jermaine O’Neal and Chris Bosh have too much talent to be unproductive players and simply throwing them out there is halfway to netting some good offense, the challenge lies in integrating the other non-All-Star caliber players into the lineup and making them produce alongside the stars. That’s obviously where Mitchell comes in and we’ll wait and see how that goes.

Chris Bosh also mentions that the “pick ‘n roll defense and transition defense needs to get a lot better” and that they’re working very hard in practice to correct what we’ve seen over the past month. He’s also saying that the synergy between him and O’Neal will get better and it might not happen before the first regular season game because no matter how much you try in practice, you can’t simulate a real game. Understood and agreed. I’d say give this team 10 regular season games to get their act together and I think both O’Neal and Bosh understand that.

Bosh mentioned that every player needs to take upon themselves a defensive challenge each and every game for the overall team defense to get better. I love that approach, a player should be pissed off when the other team scores and should make sure it never happens again! That used to be the old Eastern Conference philosophy when the Bulls, Knicks and Heat were battling for supremacy and I’d like to see the Raptors return to that mindset. We might not have the personnel to replicate the defensive efforts of those great teams but what we do have the bodies to play a physical style of game, it’s just a matter of propagating that attitude from Chris Bosh and Jermaine O’Neal to the rest of the team. Again, that’s where Mitchell comes in and we’ll wait and see how that goes.

Speaking of Mitchell, he too spoke with the media after practice and here’s a hilarious quote:

“If I need more scoring…I’ll play Joey Graham”

That’s a serious quote in response to being asked who he’s going to play at small forward. There’s more on this staged race for a starting spot in the Sun today. I stay staged because as bad as Jamario Moon has been in the preseason, Joey Graham hasn’t been any better. He had one good game against Minnesota and threw down a couple big dunks here and there but that flash isn’t going to impress Mitchell. There’s no way Graham gets the starting nod on opening day, Mitchell loves Moon too much to let a bad preseason cost him his job. Mitchell went on to say in the post-practice interview:

” We aare faaaainn toooning and thais thangs we can dooo baater, we can doo this baater, we can doo that baater. We eksicuoooted on affense aand deefense a lat baater today…Aim going to be a reeeaall stikler abaout taking caare af da baaskatball. We turning daaon tooo maany open shats. To be aanest wich you I dint eeven no we played ar games en a spaace af naaain daze”

Hilarious guy this Mitchell character. There’s an article in the star where Dave Feschuk thinks that Mitchell’s a lot less optimistic about how the Raptors will fare on opening day than his two studs. I don’t see it, I think everybody acknowledges that there’s work to be done and that the things we set out to accomplish at the start of the preseason weren’t all accomplished. As O’Neal pointed out some of it does have to do with the games being congested and not spread apart properly but that’s not stopping anyone from being confident that they can’t fix the problems in the next couple weeks.

Hassan Adams left practice early because he felt soreness after colliding with a teammate. Apparently nobody noticed that he wasn’t there anymore.

That was the day at Raptors practice yesterday. We also found out yesterday that TSN2 will likely be part of the Rogers sports pack that already has TSN. In other words you won’t have to pay any extra money. Nothing’s official yet but all signs point to a deal being made very soon. As I said in a post a few days ago, this whole fiasco isn’t Rogers’ fault, its about a TSN executive who tried to get leverage for a brand new product by throwing some cash at MLSE and convincing them to port over the games. I don’t understand why people are making Rogers out to be the bad guy in this whole thing. They’re not obligated to carry a rival sports network, if they actually do add TSN2 at no extra charge, props to them and a big thank you!

There’s tons of links to articles from across the web on the front page and AltRaps will follow up with a post full of links. If you’d like an easy shot at winning free tickets to opening night, check this out and be sure to join us on Friday October 31st and Philthy McNasty’s on King St. in downtown Toronto for an All-Raptors party.