This season has been an emotional roller-coaster ride. And that’s only in part because of the team. Toronto sports fans are some of the most passionate, loud, excited and emotionally invested human beings on the planet.
They are also some of the most irrational, eternally disappointed, insecure, preposterously quick to judgment and emotionally invested human beings on the planet. I love you guys. I am one of you guys. Let’s none of us pretend it isn’t true. Because as far as the dominant sports narrative around the city (and really the province) has been this year, the Raptors have somehow been the best team in the league or the worst team in the league, the greatest offensive team of all time or the worst defensive team anyone has ever seen, a group of loyal, eternally hard working players who really care or a bunch of overpaid bums who don’t play for each other and don’t care, reliable veterans or unproven young players, brilliantly coached or stupidly rudderless, and the most popular team in the country signaling the meteoric rise of basketball’s new dominance in Canadian culture or a passing bandwagon fad in a hockey-crazed country with a tiring Game of Thrones inspired marketing plan.
It’s been a lot to handle. I pity any new fan who naively ventured out into the unknown territory of a Raptors related comment section or forum lately, not knowing the kind of escalating, unending and oddly personal argument they were about to accidentally insert themselves into. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
But where is all of this coming from? Has the Raptors play this season really inspired this kind of all over the place overreaction? They’ve been very good, and they’ve been fairly bad. That much is true. But is that what’s causing Raptor’s nations’ response? The team is hardly behaving outside of reasonable expectation. Something else is going on. This kind of attitude and emotional vitriol has dominated the Toronto Maple Leafs fan base for decades. Now we’ve got it. It was inevitable with the team’s success causing massive waves of new converts.
There’s no inoculation for it. We’ve got Maple Leafs fanitis; where the immediate sports talk radio overreaction is the dominant storyline. If we win three straight games, we’re the best team ever and it’s an outrage that major US media outlets don’t give us credit for being the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s not exactly a subtle inferiority complex. And when we lose two games in a row, it’s time to trade everyone, because they’re overpaid bums who don’t play with heart, don’t want to be here and I don’t exactly understand what the rules are because this game is stupid, just like Phil Kessel. We are the North; but we are also the crazy.
I don’t know what to do about the crazy bit. My sports fan base psychology PhD only goes so far. But I think it’s worth noting, if we can take a few deep breaths for a moment, that managing expectations might be helpful here. The Raptors are not a bad team. In fact, they’re almost the same team they were a year ago, when they not surprisingly had nearly the same roster. And while they certainly have things they need to improve and get back on track, they’re far from in trouble in the Eastern Conference standings. John Hollinger’s projection system on ESPN still has the Raptors projected to win 50 games, finish in 3rd place outright and gives them a 99% probability of making the playoffs. The Las Vegas pre-season over/under on wins for this team was 48 ½, which they’re on pace to go over on. In other words, they’re still on pace to exceed expectations.
Take the Atlanta Hawks out of the discussion, and nobody else in the East is making Toronto look bad. The much feared Chicago Bulls have lost 6 of their last 8 games, and neither Derrick Rose or Joakim Noah have looked like themselves. Lebron and the Cavaliers are fighting to stay over .500. The Wizards, the other team ahead of Toronto, is on pace to slightly exceed their win projections by a similar amount as Toronto. Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh are on pace to miss the playoffs entirely down in Miami. But it’s not just that the Raptors are the brightest of all the dark spots. The Raptor’s SRS, a stat called Simple Rating System that combines strength of schedule with margin of victory, is still second overall in the East by a mile kilometer and sixth overall in the league. The may have struggled against some of the West’s top teams, but the advanced stats still have them as one of the more competitive overall teams on the year. There’s no cause to burn the house down yet.
I’m not ignoring the faults and concerns of the last six weeks. I’ve talked and written about them extensively. I’m just reiterating the importance of looking at them in the light of reasonable expectations. Did anybody think that this Toronto team would go an entire season without injuries, bad shooting streaks and team slumps? Even good teams go through these; it’s unreasonable to think the Raptors would have been immune. Next, what are your expectations as far as the players and coaching staffs ability to adjust and improve? Even if you don’t hold a high personal opinion of either, we’re talking about professionals who have risen to the top of their industry for a reason. It’s a lot more likely to expect them to adjust positively over time than it is to think that this is a steadily sinking ship.
In the last week, the Raptors have managed to bump up their defensive efficiency numbers a bit. The numbers are still bad, but they’ve moved a few points per 100 possessions away from Minnesota Timberwolves bad. The last month has seen the offense continue to wan, shooting slump, and curiously, their pace of play notably increase. For a bad defense that’s slumping offensively, increasing your pace of play is far from a helpful strategy. On the bright side, their defensive rebounding numbers have edged their head slightly back above water in the last few games. It’s nothing to celebrate, but improvement is positive, especially if it turns into a continuing trend.
No, this team isn’t playing the same way they were last year. That point conveniently ignores that they’ve been much better on offense this year than last season though. They’ve dropped 11 spots in defensive rebounding, they’re playing at a faster (which is different than fast) pace and they’re gambling for turnovers much more often while yielding a smaller number of them. Those little differences can make up the gap between the 22nd and the 11th ranked defence.
It’s also not mentioned when looking at expectations that yes, Toronto was a much better team after the Rudy Gay trade. But they were actually a better defensive team before that trade, and no small part of that is lineup related. Even so, this is still the team from the second half of last season that is perfectly capable of improving their numbers from this January’s efficiency to that of January 2014. Toronto wasn’t a better defensive team last season because it had an elite rim protector, lost a top defensive minded coach or changed the way that they guarded pick and rolls with their bigs. Amir Johnson and Jonas Valanciunas are still the key cogs in the middle. While Valanciunas is still not a great help defender and is slow to both recognize and then move into space when he needs to rotate or step into the lane, he isn’t a bad defender.
The Raptors are not the best team in the league. They’re not even close. But they’re a hell of a lot closer to the best team overall than they are the worst team. They’re probably the third best team in the East, somewhere around the tenth or eleventh best team in the league and they’re still both young and improving. That’s living up to a reasonably optimistic pre-season expectation. There are at least a dozen things this team needs to address immediately if they want to contend, but this is a season where close to a dozen different teams have a reasonable chance of making it to the finals. Things don’t look as outrageously bad on paper as they sound on sports radio. I know it’s hard, Leafs fans; I do. I grew up here too. But let’s try not to throw things, try not to expect the world, and see where this goes.
