The perceived challenge for any general manager in Toronto has always been the fact that Toronto is a far off place in a distant country with an obscure culture and an unknowable tax code. Toronto gets talked about as though it were some exotic land, even though it has more in common with New York and Chicago than Milwaukee or Minnesota has.
Of course, the problem with Toronto has never really been the city. The city has acted as a convenient scapegoat for the real reason that Toronto has had trouble attracting and retaining noteworthy NBA players: losing.
When it comes to on-court success, the Raptors have one of the worst track records in the NBA, highlighted again this week when they once more failed to win a seven-game series, instead succumbing listlessly to a lower-seeded Washington Wizards team in four games.
The fallout from that series is going to have far deeper repercussions than it seems like anyone wants to talk about right now. People are obsessed with using these Playoffs as a referendum on the past; this past season, Dwane Casey’s past transgressions as a coach and Masai Ujiri’s past decisions as a roster builder. The past, though, is in the past, and the real ramifications that Toronto’s postseason embarrassment will have is on the future — namely Toronto’s longstanding issue of attracting coveted talent to their beleaguered franchise.
After all, if you’re a popular free agent, or a trade target for multiple teams, what is it about the Raptors that would have you excited about signing up? What about that organization says that it’s worth a multi-year investment as a player over the several other options that they’ll have? One can crow about how poorly the Lakers have fared since Phil Jackson left, but that’s still a braintrust that has built Champions, whereas no one in Toronto has ever done so much as win a seven-game series (that includes Casey and Ujiri, by the way, in their respective positions as head coach and general manager).
Look at how readily the Raptors players cast blame for the failures of the club once the season unceremoniously concluded. No one was exactly selling the narrative that that was a locker room people should be clamouring to join. There was finger-pointing, there was coach-killing and there was a general refusal on anyone’s part to truly shoulder blame. They may feel like they are only a piece or two away from making some noise, but they did a terrible job of selling what they have on those course-altering pieces. Looking at the sniping coming out of that Monday afternoon would give anyone pause about signing up to join that foxhole.
Then there is the coach. Externally anyone can see he struggles with designing systems that thrive in the postseason. You can fault the roster construction all you want (and there is a lot of fault to put there) but the Raptors were ripped to shreds in two of their postseason contests and dispatched in two others. A fourth seed should not look worse than an eighth seed, regardless of the roster makeup, especially not when a good chunk of the problems came from tactical errors like where the team was getting shots from and how the pick-and-roll coverages would work.
Casey leaned hard on one-on-one isolation play on offence, insisting that his players were best suited to that kind of basketball. He offered that same explanation when trying to describe his decision making process that led to the abominable offence he had DeMar DeRozan and Rudy Gay executing early last season. On the one hand you can understand why a coach would want to play to his players’ strengths, but on the other hand if you don’t force players out of their comfort zone they’ll never grow, either individually or as a part of a unit. Against Washington his philosophy was thrown against a wall and beaten as the Wizards routinely coaxed the Raptors into taking terrible shots and the team had little-to-no viable structure lean on when the going got tough. Instead they’d react with a series of isolation opportunities for DeRozan, Lowry or Lou Williams — as though that was the great elixir that would settle down a fumbling offence.
That proclivity also begins to address the internal issues that Kyle Lowry hinted at as a part of his ‘read between the lines’ season-ended presser. The players were clearly not united in how Casey ran this club, and I’ve heard that most of that unrest came from a division between the guys Casey gave a limitless leash to on offence versus the guys that wanted to see more discipline and structure. Casey spoke about wanting to see more ball movement, but then did nothing to stop DeRozan from eating up entire possessions pounding the ball against double- and triple-teams. Casey is a guy that has a reputation for running a tight ship, but clearly by seasons’ end he had lost his power of influence, and if you want a reason why Ujiri may be forced to remove him from his position it’s that fact, and not his tactical errors. You can restructure a game plan, but if the players are disinclined to listen then there is no point. That’s what Ujiri has to figure out before moving on with his coach, and he’ll have to do it before July because potential roster additions will need to feel assured that whatever issues plagued the locker room recently have been corrected before signing on for a tour of duty with the Raptors.
Ujiri has done a good job of positioning the Raptors financially (a fact he was sure to point out at his press conference in Tuesday), but that won’t matter if the company he’s trying to sell people on looks too flawed to join. Last year the idea was that the Raptors were an ascendant team, one that could attract a star, or even a superstar, with the idea that they’d put the Raptors over the top. That narrative was destroyed by the Washington series. Instead they are a team with some money to spend (although it should be noted, not as much as several other teams) but a bad image to overcome. Ujiri wanted to avoid making short-term decisions when it came to contracts so that he had maximum flexibility when he was ready to spend, but he risk he took was that the product he was selling players on was going to remain an attractive one. He was always realistic about what the ceiling was for this group, but he seemed unaware of how far down the floor extended. Clearly this club plummeted far deeper than he ever anticipated they would, and it has made his job as a recruiter exponentially more difficult this summer.
Ujiri’s product is flawed, and is totally in keeping with the club’s history of an inability to build upon mild successes. That’s a hard story to overcome when selling your franchise on difference-making players. Yes, the Playoffs proved all the doubters right about what this team was last year, but the real damage is how it might prevent the club from getting better going forward. A lot of the euphoria over last year’s success was that it seemed like the Raptors were finally on an ascendant path, with new highs finally within sight. After the disaster against Washington the Raptors couldn’t have looked more familiar, and they’ll enter the summer — once again — as a club that has to do as much begging as selling if they want the kind of talent that will right the ship going forward.
