OK, so I watched the Bryan Colangelo presser (at least as much as I could stomach) and gathered that the Raptors are looking at an off-season where they’ll “dramatically improve” the basketball team. Well then, I’m certainly looking forward to this. These are some bold words by Colangelo, unless he’s just referring to adding two rookies to the roster, which he very well might be. From what I could gather of his speech, Colangelo’s counting on the existing mediocre talent to bloom into above-average talent. He’s specifically referencing Ed Davis, James Johnson, and Amir Johnson as part of the core going forward, and looks intent to holding on to Jose Calderon for lockeroom reasons.
With those guys seemingly mainstays for next season and two rookies coming in, it’s hard to see what he can add in the off-season to “dramatically improve” the basketball team as he emphasized he’d do. The mid-level exception was mentioned a couple times as an option for player acquisition, there’s always talk of trade flexibility and the often hyped but never used TPE, and he even touched on free-agency offering hope. The talk usually never translates to anything meaningful so I’ll just wait till he does something before before speculating on what he can do, and more importantly, cannot do because of his hands being tied by those plastic thingys that you have to get a sword made out of Valyrian steel to cut.
Colangelo explained how he decided that this season was no time to make silly moves and bring in long-term deals, he’d much prefer to do that business in the summer. He didn’t elaborate why, but maybe he just wanted to take stock of what the roster is all about before adding, subtracting or long dividing it. Sure, why not? Being crappy for a few more month isn’t going to hurt, maybe we’ll even get a high pick and…oh wait.
No surprise that wins and losses weren’t the key performance indicators for measuring success this season (gotta love that, eh?), and that “changing the culture” was the top priority after Jay Triano had basically impregnated every single Raptor with a strong seed of “not giving a f**k”. Casey was commended for the job he’s done, specifically for aborting Jay Triano’s creation and planting his own sauce called “let’s give a f**k for a change”. This has made Colangelo and every Raptors fan very excited as he, like us, only counted a handful of games where the team “didn’t show up”. And even that was because of the schedule.
Colangelo did spend some time talking about being below the cap, possibly going above the cap with trades and free-agency, and even mentioned how he might just not do anything and sing the same song again next season. All three ways work fine with me, I’m conditioned to losing, waiting, hoping, that the Raptors do something. Really, this is how I watch Raptor games:
It’s like my feelings for winning have been castrated.
He went on to talk about Bargnani, DeRozan, Valanciunas and so on…lot was said, some was meant, and most of it was lip-service. Really though, in the end he feels like “it all fell in line with the plan”, and the plan for this summer is to get that dramatic improvement going. So, on with it.
