They did it. The Toronto Raptors won a seven-game playoff series for the first time in franchise history, advancing to the second round for just the second.
In the oft-moribund 21-year history of the franchise, no iteration has reached such regular season heights – 56 wins, a pair of All-Stars, the number two seed – but that would have mattered little if Sunday’s results turned up even six points different. This Raptors team, and very likely this Raptors core, had everything riding on the line. A loss would have been disastrous, a declaration from the outside that this core isn’t good enough to make the leap, that the regular season meant nothing, that the team’s two pillars were not designed to compete in the playoffs, or at least do so together, and that this head coach wasn’t the one to lead them where they needed to go.
All of those thoughts – DeMar DeRozan walking in free agency, Kyle Lowry being placed back on the trade block from whence he was serendipitously removed by James Dolan more than two years ago, Dwane Casey being denied the option year on his contract – hung in the Air Canada Centre air before Game 7. The Raptors knew it. They were being written off in some circles, their claims that they were treating Game 6 like a Game 7 apparently being taken far too literally by some who glossed over the actual existence of a real Game 7 (though it’s hard to blame the reactionary and the passionate, given how poorly the Raptors played in Games 4 through 6).
The Raptors heard it. They read it. They undoubtedly internalized it.
“I think everybody wrote the Raptors off and gave us up for dead,” Casey said after the game. “But that locker room is full of fighters and scrappers…I read some of the stuff. I love that, because I think our guys used that as motivation, used that as fuel to fight, to scrap.
“I hope everyone continues to doubt us.”
The Raptors played hard all year to secure home court in a deciding game, but they didn’t expect to need it so soon in their playoff run. That they had it was huge, but that they needed it almost ironically threatened to negate the advantage, the energy in the Raptors raucous fan base decidedly anxious throughout Sunday. (It’s a cruel scheduling twist that the Raptors opened the post-season with the earliest possible slot and closed it with the latest, leaving a tortured and fragile fan base teetering for the longest amount of time imaginable.)
And so the doubt Casey mentions was palpable, but it wasn’t all-encompassing. From the moment Michael Ciufo turned the microphone to the crowd during the Canadian national anthem, the ACC buzzed, chanted, rocked, roared. Even the best efforts of the game operations crew to bogart spontaneous outpourings of support and affection with cliched chants and songs nobody needs or wants, were unable to take what’s become justifiably known as one of the best crowds in basketball off its game.
The Raptors spoke all through the first round about how much they relied on the crowd to lift them, and that crowd responded. It perhaps wasn’t quite the scene of the fourth quarter in Game 5, when the Raptors made the biggest comeback in franchise history, but it was substantial, and it was meaningful. The franchise that has struggled to gain a foothold on NBA success over the last two-plus decades isn’t just made up of the bizarre and far-too-lengthy list of Raptors to have donned the red and white and black (and gold, and purple, and pinstripes) and the staff who have consistently brought those squads together and quickly flipped them like so many Juan Dixons.
The franchise’s suffering falls on the fanbase, the lone guaranteed constant. It’s a fanbase that embraced an upstart team in a hockey city that maybe didn’t understand basketball, in a stadium designed for football and baseball, with a first star who didn’t quite want to be there. It’s a fanbase that quickly gave the sport a second chance when a high-flying phenom took up Damon Stoudamire’s mantle and threatened to make the Raptors the it team of the early 2000s. It’s a fanbase that lived through the cut-short peak of the Vince Carter era and talked itself into a 7-foot Italian sharpshooter who couldn’t shoot sharply. It’s a fanbase that saw the Andrea Bargnani trade as Step One of a massive teardown for a proper rebuild, only to embrace the unlikely success of the team that materialized when the puff of smoke into which Il Mago disappeared dissipated.
It was that initial team that brought the franchise, in its broader, non-corporate definition, to where it is today. The unexpected success of the 2013-14 Raptors led the organization to pull ahead the excellently executed and wildly successful #WeTheNorth marketing campaign, one that helped stretched the borders of the team’s reach, connect with fans across the country, push basketball fandom at a grassroots level, and, most importantly, turn the organizations’ biggest perceived weakness – being “the other” – into its biggest strength.
That season ended in the right kind of disappointment, where a fun ride ended a little sooner than anyone would have liked but still more than accomplished its goal. Casual fans were hooked, Raptors gear was being worn in the streets, blogger paychecks ballooned to near-livable levels, and with the city’s marquee winter sports franchise at its absolute nadir, the Raptors were important, and relevant, and growing in both measures. The 2014-15 instalment took a slight step forward in the regular season but a major step back in the playoffs, a fairly significant letdown and a severe threat to what Masai Ujiri had only half-intentionally built. It also laid out the blueprint for what needed to change, and in that sense, it may have been the step backward necessary to take two forward.
Ujiri set out to change the identity of the team last summer, and while he tried his best to manage expectations entering the Raptors’ series against the Indiana Pacers, the stakes were never opaque. Casey wanted defense, he wanted physical toughness, he wanted mental toughness, and the team desperately needed more experience. In came Cory Joseph from the Spurs’ playoff experience factory, Bismack Biyombo from the “nobody punks me” school of thought, DeMarre Carroll and his junkyard dog spirit, Luis Scola and the sagest of voices, and Norman Powell. And damn, Norman Powell. Those moves played out masterfully in the regular season, but declining ratings suggested this core had reached a “prove it in the playoffs” point, with an audience confident in 82 games but eagerly curious about just seven.
Those attributes Ujiri sought played an impact over the first six games of the series, allowing the Raptors to extend a series to seven despite playing maybe 10 complete quarters. They were playing expecially poorly over the last three games, save for an identity-affirming fourth quarter of Game 5, and so again, some doubt had set in. It shouldn’t at all be surprising that the organization that climbed to its current peak in popularity through the act of self-othering felt alienated by those on the outside, doubted by all but their realest fans, “left for dead,” in the words of their coach. To whatever degree that’s true matters little – it was a rallying cry for the locker room, and it was a rallying cry for those fans who still had enough left in the tank after years of disappointment and heartbreak to put it all on the line one more time.
Make no mistake, those fans had an impact. From the hoards that travelled to Indianapolis multiple times, to the full-square-in-the-cold Jurassic Park faithful, to an insane couple of games inside the ACC, both sides consistently remarked on the impact Raptors fans were having on the series. That’s not measurable or tangible, but when Powell says it altered his thinking on a dunk, when Paul George says it shifted Game 5, when Patrick Patterson consistently talks up the support, it’s not nothing.
“(The crowd) pushed them through and were the reason they were able to hang on,” George said.
Because this is the Raptors, they couldn’t make things easy, of course. And it shouldn’t have been easy – it was a Game 7, the Pacers are very good (and borderline criminally underrated by those who were shovelling dirt on the Raptors’ grave), and hard things are hard. The Raptors tested every last ounce of faith being put in them, letting a 16-point lead chip away to three with under a minute to go. Lowry continued to struggle with his shot, willing his way to making a fairly major impact despite 11 points on 5-of-14 shooting, his entire series an example of how to be a good player without being a good shooter, and how to, quite literally at times, drag your team one-armed where they need to go. DeRozan went off for 30, and though he took 32 attempts to get there, the team needed every last point, the ultimate inducement of cognitive dissonance, for which DeRozan seems to live to cause.
“He was going to empty that clip,” Lowry said of DeRozan. “My boy emptied that clip.”
DeRozan emptied the clip. The fans at the ACC emptied theirs, too. Every person in that arena, every person following along on Twitter, every person watching on TV, or at a bar, or in Jurassic Park, or too sick with nerves to watch in real time, was ready to leave it all on the floor. Game 7s are what every player plays for, the moment every star wants to take over, and they’re the games that promise the greatest highs of fandom. The biggest lows, sure, but what are we all doing here, 365 days a year, with our time and our money and our emotion and our energy and, sometimes, our sanity, if it’s not to roll the dice on feeling the highest of highs?
The importance of the win for the team can’t be overstated. Lowry and DeRozan were hardly their best and the team still got it done, that pair – of teammates, All-Stars, friends, brothers, both doubted and written off at multiple points in their careers, both with undeniable and indestructible chips on their shoulders fuelling them, both the perfect avatars for a brand built around being the underestimated outcast – breaking through in their third attempt. Casey turned in a strong coaching performance against a very good opponent in Frank Vogel. Role players stepped up. Second-round picks flourished. The home-town kid, Joseph, was perhaps the team’s most important player.
Fresh off of Drake, Marcus Stroman, P.K. Subban and more storming the area outside of the Raptors’ locker room, Ujiri made a cameo at Casey’s press conference, kissing the coach on top of the head. It was a fun moment, and a fun post-game atmosphere, even with the spectre of more work to be done immediately. Ujiri’s embrace of the coach he didn’t choose but the one he repeatedly stuck by was touching, and the tension released in that moment was nearly tactile.
All parties involved, from players to coaching staff to Ujiri, took the next step together on Sunday. This core has gotten over a hump few teams do. They took three tries, they didn’t look great doing it – issues for Tuesday more than here in the early hours of Monday morning – and a single victory maybe shouldn’t alter the future. But it does, both in terms of how it answers very real questions about this core and in terms of how the market may react to stagnancy or a doubling-down on that group. For a night, the future looks a little brighter, or at least the present looks like it can be built upon with a little more confidence. This core, this group, this identity, they made it past the first round, something no iteration within these walls had done in 15 years.
DeRozan’s been here seven years, Casey five, Lowry four. This win was for every film session, every summer day off sacrificed to play in the Drew League, every cartoon missed with Diar or Karter to get more shots up, every McFlurry they didn’t have, even for the extra shots the pair got up in an empty ACC late Saturday night. They deserve every ounce of that moment, and they’re the ones who went out there and earned it.
And so do the fans. It’s been 21 years. It’s been Stoudamire’s trade request, and Tracy McGrady’s departure, Carter’s missed buzzer-beater, Chris Childs’ internal clock malfunction, the Rafael Araujo draft pick, the Bargnani Era, the Ben Uzoh Game, the Mike James season, the John Salmons and Matt Barnes no-signs, the nearly franchise-dooming Carter trade, and so on.
This win likely meant the world to those directly involved. To the fanbase, it meant just as much. For everyone who’s bought in, for everyone who has a Jason Kapono or Jorge Garbajosa or Jamario Moon jersey, for everyone who talked themselves into Pape Sow and Pops Mensah-Bonsu and Mengke Freaking Bateer, Sunday night was a reminder why.
The Raptors finally broke through. They did it.
And because these Raptors won’t count their chips at the table and bask in this for more than a moment – because they’re at a new height but still not the one they want to ultimately reach – Monday will bring a new day, a new focus, a new series, and a chance to do it again.
