The Toronto Raptors love proving people wrong.
That much has been clear all season long, with head coach Dwane Casey consistently pointing to slights real, perceived, and imagined in order to motivate his team and continue to put them opposite the popular opinion. It makes sense. It fits the organization’s marketing ethos, with the Raptors branded as the other, the lone northern outpost and a team for those without a team. It fits the roster, which is full of guys that were given up on, passed over, declined qualifying offers, or doubted at every turn. Casey, himself, is unfairly on the receiving end of calls for his job after each loss and each season. If there’s a group and a fanbase that’s going to be riled up by being written off, it’s this one.
In that sense, maybe we all did the Raptors an enormous favor.
Because the Raptors were written off, full stop. Down 2-0 in their Eastern Conference Final series against the Cleveland Cavaliers, having lost by a combined 50 points in the first two games, Vegas took the series off the board, deeming the odds too insurmountable to be worth paying out so many pennies on bets on the favorite. Even before they fell into that hole, few but the most unguardedly optimistic were predicting a series victory. Hoping, absolutely. But predicting? The common refrain was that the Raptors had accomplished their primary goals, and if they could simply show well in the series, that would be a moral victory and a nice feather in this season’s black and silver We The North snapback.
“Nobody gives us a snowball’s chance in you know where to beat Cleveland,” Casey said after Monday’s win. “But we’ve just got to keep on churning, keep on working, keep on grinding to try to continue to win.”
This isn’t a strawman, either. I was guilty of this, personally, insomuch as there can be guilt for just being wrong. “I’m saying Cavaliers in 5, sadly, but I think those five games will be really competitive,” I wrote in the series preview. I doubled down on that same prediction after Games 1, 2, and 3, thinking the entire time that the Raptors would give the Cavaliers a fight, take one at home, and ultimately call it a season, the best one in franchise history.
“We’re in it,” Casey said of that same sentiment being shared in the media. “Someone mentioned that we were in it just to win one game, and I disagreed with them. We’re in it to compete for a championship. We’re here. That’s why we went through the season is to try to go as far as we could.”
I was wrong. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be wrong. I couldn’t be more happy that the Raptors probably love having proved me wrong (or some nonspecific version of me).
I also don’t feel all that bad for having been wrong. Like how you don’t want to evaluate teams and players and coaches by results alone over process (“Call it in the air”), I still believe in my thinking behind the prediction. The Raptors were entering the series tired, worn out, banged up, and having really not played their best basketball over the first two rounds of the playoffs. Cleveland, meanwhile, is a more talented team that came in well-rested and firing on all cylinders. Toronto was only one game worse in the regular season standings, but Cleveland never really had their foot on the gas, and now that they did, they looked mostly unstoppable. Through two games, I still figured the Raptors would take one, because the team has too much drive and too little quit to go out flat. After Game 3, I thought the Raptors had taken their best shot, that Cleveland wouldn’t play so poorly again, and that Toronto probably couldn’t ratchet it up even further. I still think those were reasonable ways of seeing things.
One of the hardest things about my job is trying to find a balance between being a fan, a blogger, an analyst, or whatever you’d describe what I do as. Raptors Republic is a fan site, with a smart, rabid, optimistic community that largely believes in a team that’s given them every reason to believe in them. When I made the prediction, I expected a bit of backlash and, as I wrote, would be waiting on the we-told-you-sos with open arms were they to come. It’s tough to want the team to win but watch the tape and analyze the matchup and not think they will. It’s tough to put analysis over rooting interest, particularly when I’m keenly aware that the latter is “better” from a self-interest perspective here. To paraphrase the global ambassador, “Tell me, am I wrong for what I’m saying? Is it wrong of me to tell these (readers) what they wanna hear?” In the end, I try to put my objective opinion above cheerleading. There’s no joy that comes from being pessimistic and correct. I’d rather be wrong and more pleased with the outcome. But again, I try my best to be objective, even if I don’t like what my objectivity suggests.
What it suggested in this case was that it wasn’t reasonable to think the Raptors could fight off fatigue and a fresh Cavs team. It wasn’t reasonable to just assume DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry would suddenly bounce back from their respective shooting slumps against a decent defensive team, particularly when both looked banged up. It wasn’t reasonable to expect them to shoot a combined 21-of-30 on contested shots in Game 4, or to expect Bismack Biyombo to grab 26 rebounds in Game 3, or to expect Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love to go ice cold in Game 3, or to expect Love to stay frigid and be joined by J.R. Smith in Game 4 (to the tune of a combined 5-of-16 on uncontested shots). After how the Raptors looked in the first two series and the first two games of this one, it didn’t look like they had much of a chance.
But if the Raptors had a dime for every time they got knocked down this season and didn’t get back up, they would have zero dimes. The Raptors took their two losses, they dusted themselves off, and they came back swinging.
“They hit us first,” Cavs head coach Tyronn Lue said of Game 4, and it could have just as well have been about Game 3. “They executed every time we made a mistake.”
The Raptors struck first, and the Cavs struck back. The Raptors bent. What was once an 18-point lead was whittled down to nine at the end of the third, to one less than two minutes later, and was traded between sides for the bulk of the fourth. With every push the Cavs made, the Raptors pushed back, the crowd right there with them in one of the most incredible in-arena experiences in Air Canada Centre lore. The Raptors wouldn’t back down, in part because their fans wouldn’t let them, but mostly because they couldn’t, and because it’s not in their DNA.
“When they punch, we punch back, and if they punch three times, we punch four times,” Lowry said. “We’ve got to continue to understand that they’re not going to lay down. They’re going to continue to go, push push push push.
“We ain’t laying down either.”
So no, you can’t expect things like unsustainable contested shooting nights or untimely opponent cold streaks or the team turning in back-to-back 90th-percentile performances, once again becoming the best versions of themselves, the versions that have been unfamiliar for large stretches of the playoffs until absolutely necessary. But you hope for them. You hope Kyle Lowry goes full KLOE in back-to-back games, that DeMar DeRozan wages war on his impending free agent price tag, that Bismack Biyombo becomes the stuff of legend, that this team just keeps finding a way.
“You know, honestly, we’ve been playing with our backs against the wall,” DeRozan said. “We never cared what anybody else thought. It was a challenge for us every single day. We’ve been counted out, and we like that challenge.”
It’s what they did all year, after all. After the fifth game of the season, I went off-brand a little bit and wrote a pretty emotional piece about buying in fully to this team, about all the reasons I thought they could be different than the 2014-15 version. They added pieces on defense to win when the offense wasn’t there. They added toughness and experience. There was a genuine sense – yes, that early – that there was a resiliency in this group, finally shaped in the image of its coach, of its general manager, and, corny though it sounds, a fanbase that has rarely given up on a team that’s often begged to be given up on. Through injuries, through rotation changes, through the highs of All-Star Weekend and Lowry’s game-winner against Cleveland to the lows of a late-season malaise and Lowry’s elbow injury, and through two grimy, difficult, beautiful playoff series, the Raptors kept finding ways.
It perhaps wasn’t reasonable to expect them to continue to do so as the odds got stacked even higher, the difficulty ratcheted up even further, but here they are, doing it again. That they’re doing it in these circumstances makes it all the more impressive, contrasting against the backdrop of narrative and expectations, the cognitive dissonance flowing colder than the new Chance introduction music, because how could you have doubted the team you spent all year learning not to doubt?
None of this needs to be sustainable. This series isn’t 82-games long, nor is it repeated over 1,000 simulations. Once the win is recorded, how it got there only matters for helping shape how a team tries to get the next one. Biyombo might not grab 26 rebounds again, but he did, and the series was 2-1. Lowry and DeRozan might not shoot 70 percent on contested shots again, but they did, and now the series is tied 2-2. Something else on the extremes of a normal distribution may happen in Game 5, and if it does, and the series is 3-2, well then that will have happened, too, and it doesn’t have to happen again.
“I always told this guy when we were struggling, it’s not about now,” DeRozan said of he and Lowry. “As long as we’ve got an opportunity to keep playing, we’ve got an opportunity to make up for this. And I think that’s where we’re at. Everything happens for a reason.”
The series is now a three-game sample on the biggest stage this franchise has ever been on, and no matter what happened before it or how they got here, it’s a chance to do something special. The Raptors are still underdogs here, an few will pick them to advance to the NBA Finals. Vegas has Cleveland as a -1000 favorite, and like the Raptors could remain confident after a 2-2 split with home-court advantage in the last two rounds, so, too, can Cleveland here. But winning two games in this series at all seemed improbable a few days ago. It only takes two more.
“People have their own opinions,” Lowry said. “We go and do what we do and that’s all we’re focused on is our team and what we believe.”
