Day One. Again. The Toronto Raptors set out to try to improve on the best season in franchise history tonight, with the Detroit Pistons visiting. Kyle Lowry’s in agreement with all of us that the anticipation has been building a little too long.
“It was long, it was really long,” Lowry said of the preseason at shootaround. “But it’s here, time to work and I think everyone in the NBA and the fans in the NBA, we’re all excited to just play basketball and I know the fans in Toronto are super excited and it’s going to be another great year.”
Lowry and head coach Dwane Casey echoed some similar sentiments at the morning session, pointing out that they have to start over at square one, that they haven’t achieved their ultimate goal, and yes, that they are still perceiving some disrespect from around the league. Yawn, but it’s nice that they can drum up that kind of motivation.
“Let ‘em know where they rank us this year,” Casey said of how to motivate his charges. “Nobody ranked us in the top three, four, five or whatever it was. Nobody is talking about Toronto. Someone said that one telecast didn’t even mention our names. That should upset you, that nobody’s even talking about us in the top two or three in the national media in the States. That should be a motivational factor. It shouldn’t take much to understand how the rest of the league feels about us. We feel like we did something last year. But I don’t know if anybody in the so-called media in the States feels that way.”
Enough of that talk. Let’s get the season going. You can check out the full game preview here. The game tips off from the Air Canada Centre at 7:30 p.m. TSN has both the television (all stations) and radio (1050) broadcast.
Raptors updates
Jared Sullinger (foot) and Delon Wright (shoulder) remain out long-term, and they won’t have Lucas Nogueira (ankle), either. The hope is that Nogueira will be able to make his season debut by Friday. In the interim, this means the Raptors will be leaning heavily on a pair of rookies in Pascal Siakam and Jakob Poeltl, and that the time is nigh for Jonas Valanciunas to shake off a rough preseason. Expect to see some smaller looks, too, in order to account for the lack of interior depth.
“I anticipate playing a basketball player,” DeMarre Carroll said of seeing more time at the four. “You can’t put a number on a basketball player, right?”
Patrick Patterson was the favorite to start, by the way, though Casey wouldn’t admit that’s the plan during pre-game availability. That’s because he reversed course and decided to start Pascal Siakam instead! Sneaky guy.
Here’s how things would shake out if Nogueira sits:
PG: Kyle Lowry, Cory Joseph, Fred VanVleet
SG: DeMar DeRozan, Norman Powell
SF: DeMarre Carroll, Terrence Ross
PF: Pascal Siakam,Patrick Patterson, Bruno Caboclo
C: Jonas Valanciunas, Jakob Poeltl
INJ: Delon Wright, Jared Sullinger, Lucas Nogueira (TBD)
For what it’s worth, Casey confirmed that Ross is ahead of Powell in the rotation right now based on a strong preseason, but there will probably be enough minutes for both with the team thinned out.
Pistons updates
The Pistons are in pretty good shape outside of the Reggie Jackson (knee) injury. They’ll line up something like this, keeping in mind that Stan Van Gundy will use his wings and forwards pretty flexibly. I’d also expect Stan Van Gundy to get tricky and throw some sizeable looks at the Raptors’ thin frontcourt.
PG: Ish Smith, Beno Udrih
SG: Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Darrun Hilliard, Reggie Bullock
SF: Tobias Harris, Stanley Johnson, Michael Gbinije
PF: Marcus Morris, Jon Leuer, Henry Ellenson
C: Andre Drummond, Aron Baynes, Boban Marjanovic
INJ: Reggie Jackson
Assorted
- Some additional reading:
- I previewed the season, explaining why running last year back would be a step forward, for Vice.
- This is from July, but relevant once again with Siakam set to play a big role on opening night.
- I took part in a Raptors roundtable over at The Athletic.
- I do a lot of writing/radio/podcasting outside of RR. If you want to keep up, you can like my Facebook page. Please like me.
- You could also follow me on Instagram for pre-game photos/videos (I’m not on Snapchat).
- Here is part one and part two of our staff roundtable here.
- And you can re-live all of our individual player previews here.
- You can see what everyone else thinks of the Raptors’ chances here.
- This, from Dave Zarum of Sportsnet, is a good look into the psyche of Norman Powell.
- The Raptors are giving our free white 3-D shirts and 3-D glasses for tonight. It’s something.
3D whiteout for Raptors-Pistons pic.twitter.com/NAsFPx3ALh
— Blake Murphy (@BlakeMurphyODC) October 26, 2016
- I could not do an effective job capturing the 3D-ness of the video.
The line
The Raptors are 7-point favorites at home for the opener, a line that’s nudged up from 6.5 in some places and reached as high as 7.5. The over-under is steady between 194 and 195, likely owing to both teams playing a bottom-10 pace last year. If you’re not going to be optimistic on opening night, when are you going to be? Raptors 100, Pistons 91.
