Barbosa, like most NBA players, has a shoe contract that, when functioning properly, provides him with footwear that matches his team. His deal is with Adidas.
But for whatever reason, and Barbosa grudgingly admittedly he hasn’t received one yet, he has yet to be supplied with any shoes that match his new team’s colours.
So for two games now, Barbosa has been wearing the sneakers he wore in Turkey representing his home country of Brazil.
Barbosa finds these shoes comfortable but would prefer to get something that matches the colour scheme of the Raptors. The blue and yellow stands out on a team of red and black.
Head coach Jay Triano, who was quick to mention this is the same team that beat Phoenix a few nights earlier by 51, doesn’t foresee scoring as one of his major issues.
Yes, he won’t have Chris Bosh’s 24 points a night to count on, but he thinks he’ll get it elsewhere.
“I just think it’s going to have to be a variety of guys,” Triano said of how he’ll fill that scoring void. “Sonny (Weems) and DeMar (DeRozan) are going to have to score a couple more a night. Andrea (Bargnani) can be a factor scoring-wise for us and he hasn’t yet. (Leandro) Barbosa, (Jose) Calderon, (Jarrett) Jack — I think it’s going to be a balanced attack.
“I won’t be surprised if we end up with one guy averaging 16 or 17 a game and a bunch of guys at 14, 13.”
Triano said the problems early in the Boston game were a little of what Boston did, but also somewhat self-inflicted.
“I knew we would eventually score,” he said. “Initially we went inside against a very big, very physical team and they blocked 10 shots. But we had some guys we don’t want trying to score inside trying to do that as well.”
Linas Kleiza, the Raptor newcomer who is being looked at to provide some of that scoring, averaged 10.5 points a night in his two most recent NBA seasons in 2008 and 2007. He isn’t sure you can say the Raptors have enough offence.
“That’s a good question, but you can’t really tell by now,” Kleiza said Monday. “We’re going to see when we really start playing how everything goes and where the offence is going to come from.
“We’ve got kind of an equal-opportunity offence. We don’t play a lot of isolation. A lot of guys will get a chance to play. There’s just some questions you don’t have answers to yet.”
Kleiza said the key right now is for everyone to familiarize himself with his teammates and their tendencies on the floor so that when the bell rings for real in a few weeks, the offence is ready to go.
Kevin DiPietro, the Raptors longtime equipment manager, says the average player uses about 30 pairs in an 82-game season. The Raptors’ locker room has an entire storage room devoted to maintaining sufficient inventory for the roster. And so deep is the potential attachment between pro and sole that Jarrett Jack, the Raptors point guard, converted a bedroom in his Atlanta-area home into what he calls his “shoe room.” He’s got 600 pairs of sneakers in there, and is currently having the place renovated with custom racks and lighting.
“Most people who know me, know I have an obsession with sneakers,” Jack said.
Against that backdrop of abundance, imagine DiPietro’s shock in the knowledge that a supply of the preferred on-court footwear of two of his team’s best players, Leandro Barbosa and Sonny Weems, has been elusive this October. For two pre-season games now Barbosa, the guard from Sao Paulo acquired in an offseason trade, has played in shoes bearing the yellow, green and blue of his beloved Brazilian national team — hardly a good match for the red, black and white colour scheme of his new team.
And Weems, who recently signed a one-year deal to endorse adidas, has been committing a shoe-industry sacrilege — he has been sporting a high-top model manufactured by Nike, the corporate rival of the company that signs his endorsement cheques.
What’s going on? Are below-poverty-line labourers slacking off in the world’s sweatshops? (And this is actually no joking matter, since the major multinational athletic apparel companies, according to a report last week in the British newspaper The Indepedent, continue to allow workers to toil for less than living wages.)
“(Adidas) is just having a little bit of a crisis right now. … It’s the first time ever,” said DiPietro. “I just thank God (Barbosa) had his shoes from Brazil.”
Said Barbosa: “I don’t know what’s going on with adidas. All I know is, they’re late.’
The Celtics returned to the TD Garden for the first time since Game 5 of the NBA Finals in June last night for an exhibition against the Toronto Raptors. The Raptors, in their inaugural season sans all-franchise-leader Chris Bosh, made a game of it, but in the end, the "Boston Bench Mob" pulled out the victory to improve to a meaningless 3-0 in the pre-season. Below are some highlights from the game, once again broken down by quarter.
