I will always wonder how close Masai Ujiri came to firing Dwane Casey last spring. After a humiliating sweep by the Washington Wizards that was preceded by a late-season swoon in on-court productivity, you know it had to have crossed his mind. The job of any GM is to map out every conceivable option and weigh the merits of it against all possible alternatives, so firing Casey was definitely on the table for some unknowable amount of time. Whether it was minutes or weeks, I’ll always wonder how close he came to doing it.
Keeping Casey was a non-trivial decision. It wasn’t one of those decisions that a GM makes lightly, one that can be easily explained away and shrugged off if it didn’t work. If Ujiri was going to keep him for another season, he was going to have to retool the roster in a way that suited Casey, if for no other reason than to justify keeping him around in the first place. Plus, Ujiri would have had to have made that decision not knowing if Casey was a coach worthy of having a roster shaped to his needs and liking. Bryan Colangelo, the man who hired Casey, raved about his defensive bona fides before stocking his roster with offensive-minded players, and Ujiri more or less did the same thing when he arrived. Casey had never been given the kind of hard-nosed, defensive assets that seemed to suit his coaching style, and so no one knew if having those players would improve the quality of his coaching. That was the totality of the scenario Ujiri had to grapple with.
It’s one of the lesser-discussed topics in Raptor-land, actually (and given the breadth of coverage this team receives, that’s an achievement). The Casey decision really wasn’t just one decision, it was two; an if-this-then-that continuum that, while obvious in theory, nonetheless took guts to execute in practice.
Think of it this way: keeping Casey was already a bold move. The “I’m sticking with my coach, warts and all” attitude is a big reputational gamble to take, and for many GMs they might’ve stopped there. It would have been easy to hedge at that point, to not overcommit the roster (or the coaching staff) to a guy going into the last guaranteed year of his contract. It would have been easy to keep the roster in tact, cite the 49-win season and say that internal growth could push the team the rest of the way. It happens multiple times a year in the NBA. If it didn’t work, he could lay the blame at Casey’s feet before cutting his metaphorical throat. Ujiri’s reputation would have taken a hit (for bringing Casey back at all) but at least he’d have mitigated the damage by not overcommitting the roster to an outgoing coach.
That’s not the route Ujiri took, though. Going back to the if-this-then-that scenario, Ujiri believed that if he was going to keep Casey, then he was going to have to arm him to the teeth with guys that could give him every chance to succeed. To Ujiri, there was no point in going halfway. If he was going to put Casey back in the line of fire, he was going to give him every chance to survive. It was a decision that tied a lot more of Ujiri’s reputation (and possibly his autonomy at MLSE) to Casey’s fate than the half-measure scenario laid out above, but at least Ujiri could not be accused of putting Casey into an unwinnable situation.
Through five games, though, Ujiri’s faith in Casey is looking well-placed, and his investments in Casey Approved® personnel look to have achieved their intended goals. The Raptors have yet to lose a game, and unlike their offensively-based strong start last year, they are winning this year on the back of smart defence, aggressive execution and a heretofore unseen level of mental toughness. Those are repeatable qualities, the kinds that Casey has always preached but hasn’t gotten his teams to buy into because he just didn’t have enough of the right players to push that mandate through.
Casey is not an offensive genius, and yet he was consistently saddled with rosters overstuffed with offensively-minded players. He had been criticized for a lot during his time in Toronto (much of it justified, some of it overblown), but the fact remains that he was brought in to coach one style of basketball and was given rosters designed for another kind of basketball. He survived it, but he seldom thrived.
This year, Casey is proving his defensive chops, partly by acknowledging what he has to work with but mostly by maximizing the new pieces gifted to him by Ujiri. By accepting Valanciunas’ prominence in the team’s future and redesigning the schemes in such a way as to acknowledge his strengths and weaknesses, he had made Valanciunas more useful and the defense stronger. He has unleashed DeMarre Carroll and Cory Joseph, establishing them as the club’s defensive linchpins (it is no coincidence that Carroll is leading the team in minutes and Joseph is leading the reserves in minutes). Joseph, in particular, has become the ‘sixth starter,’ a role that many thought Terrence Ross would inherit, but because of Joseph’s ability to create havoc on defence while smartly executing his role on offence he has become a favourite in Casey’s rotation.
It would be easy to say that given the hand he’s been dealt that Casey is simply making the obvious choices, but in sports the obvious choices only look that way when they work. It was not obvious to stick with Scola as a starter over Patterson. It was not obvious boost Joseph at the expense of Ross. It was not obvious to go small against Oklahoma City’s big lineup. These things have worked and so it’s easy to think back and assume they were easy choices, but when you’re the one making the choices, and you’re the one that will suffer if they are wrong, those choices aren’t that easy to make.
It should be said that fives games do not make a season, and the Raptors need to have that ‘once through the league’ trial before anything resembling a conclusive assessment of this team can be made (I mean, if last year taught us nothing else…). That said, so many of the positives surrounding the team right now have come as a result of last year’s success-then-failure path. You have to imagine, too, that the returning players are less susceptible to fawning over their own achievements than they were last year. They can be excited about the start to the season, but they learned the hard way how little it counts for when the Playoffs begin six months from now. They started last season like gangbusters and then let their own self-satisfaction torpedo everything that they’d felt they’d achieved.
After a season spent watching early successes devolve into bad habits, Casey has put the focus on repeatable, effort-and-intelligence-based principles, and the team looks a lot stronger for that focus. The players deserve a ton of the credit for executing all of this, but after all the flack he took for his game planning last season, Casey deserves some credit, too, for learning from what was broken last season and having a bull’s-eye-focus on fixing it this year.
Bottom line: Ujiri made a bold bet in keeping Casey, doubled-down by retooling his roster in Casey’s image, and Casey has justified that faith by starting the season 5-0. We may never know how close Ujiri came to firing Casey six months ago, but right now he’s probably feeling pretty good about the fact that he didn’t.
