Morning Coffee – Mon, May 8

https://youtu.be/Pmk3a51g1qU Zach Lowe on Kyle Lowry, DeMar DeRozan and future of Toronto Raptors – ESPN It will be hard for Toronto to duck the tax if it retains Lowry and Serge Ibaka, even if its other two core free agents — PJ Tucker and plus-minus god Patrick Patterson — walk away. Salary-dumping DeMarre Carroll was…

Rick Madonik/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Rick Madonik/Toronto Star via Getty Images

https://youtu.be/Pmk3a51g1qU

Zach Lowe on Kyle Lowry, DeMar DeRozan and future of Toronto Raptors – ESPN

It will be hard for Toronto to duck the tax if it retains Lowry and Serge Ibaka, even if its other two core free agents — PJ Tucker and plus-minus god Patrick Patterson — walk away. Salary-dumping DeMarre Carroll was always the Raptors’ get-out-of-the-tax card, but Carroll’s decline has been so severe they would likely have to attach a first-round pick as a sweetener. Trading Jonas Valanciunas loomed as the alternate cost-cutting measure, but no one needs a center. The most likely Valanciunas deals would return someone else’s unwanted big fella.

Toronto could move Cory Joseph’s $7.6 million deal in a hot second, but that alone wouldn’t get it under the tax if both Ibaka and Lowry re-sign. The Raptors’ ownership group is flush with sweet, sweet hockey cash; it can afford going $5 million or more over the tax. But even that brings some roster-building restrictions, and well-run teams usually don’t pay the tax when there are easy paths to avoiding it.

Everything starts with Lowry, Toronto’s best player, and one of the most important in franchise history. Toronto can offer Lowry a five-year, $200 million-plus deal; rivals can offer only four-year deals starting at the same maximum annual salary of around $35 million. Ujiri has always erred on the side of retaining players, even if it’s just to trade them later — as he famously did with Nene Hilario in Denver.

 

5 scenes from a Raptors funeral – The Defeated

Nothing gets people angrier than when LeBron whines to the officials. It has the same effect on every fanbase outside of his team. Boos rain down harder on the King than anyone else because he is the greatest heel the NBA has ever seen.
It’s just below him. LeBron can already do everything on the court and he already gets a generous whistle — does he really need to ask for more? It’s just obscene. It would be like if a Republican dropped down to a soup kitchen and asked for thirds. They’re free to do as he pleases but damn, people are going to feel some kind of way about it.
That bit of whining, coupled with some inspired play from Tucker and Ibaka, really brought the building to its feet in the third quarter. I wouldn’t say it was hopeful, but the arena started to believe. The Raptors showed heart and traded punch for punch with the Cavs through three quarters and while we weren’t ever going to win the series, this was a game worth playing. And so we cheered them on.
My section hardly sat down in the fourth. We were too turnt to stay seated. Any bad call prompted loud jeers of “Ref you suck” and every one of DeRozan’s fadeaways drew loud screams of “KOBE” from Josh and I. When Tucker pounded his chest the arena did the same as if the whole building shared one heartbeat.
They were in this. They even took a lead in the fourth. Fred VanVleet gave them decent minutes. Valanciunas was left in a bit too long but he worked an awkward post-up into a basket. DeRozan was hitting shots. Tucker couldn’t miss from the corners. Norm Powell was relentless in transition.
All we ever wanted was this: to belong on the same floor as the reigning champions. We could swallow a sweep if all four games were like this.

 

Without Kyle Lowry, Raptors-Cavalier series was just a mirage: Arthur | Toronto Star

As one league source put it, “The problem with Kyle is he’s short, fat and slow.” As another said, “He’s a hell of a player.” He has clashed with coach Dwane Casey. He has intentionally extended his career by shooting more threes, which the Raptors want to do. He’s heading for the downslope. Lowry is the beating, inspiring, confounding, imperfect heart of this team.

So it’s not automatic, but it’s the same as it’s ever been: As Kyle goes, so go the Raptors. If he is re-signed — and the early sense is that remains the most likely option, though nowhere near a fait accompli — then you are trying to stay good, and accepting the risks that come with that. The organization believes it was the second-best team in the East, but Lowry’s wrist surgery and Lowry’s sprained ankle, though — they made everything difficult.

But if he’s back that may mean re-signing Serge Ibaka, too, though he showed heavy flaws: didn’t rebound, shot some awful two-pointers, doesn’t move as well as he used to. P.J. Tucker would probably stay in this scenario as well. He becomes the new Patrick Patterson, since the old one ended this series looking like a ghost, afraid to shoot. Patterson ended his reign as Toronto’s secret plus-minus king, at a plus-one for Game 4. But he vanished.

And if in the coming days and weeks Masai Ujiri decides that he can’t commit too much to Lowry — an early offer of four years and, say, $150 million to $160 million, a little more per year than DeRozan, might be the sensible play — or if Bryan Colangelo and Philadelphia steal him away, then the whole thing blows up. If Lowry doesn’t come back, then anything can go: coach Dwane Casey, DeRozan, Jonas Valanciunas, everything that defined the most successful era in Raptors history. For what that’s worth.

And that’s the question. What’s it worth? LeBron James is at the height of his powers, and he had another level of desperation and effort he saved, believe it. If you want a championship Golden State sits behind him with four of the best players in basketball. This era, title-wise, is largely spoken for.

 

Sweep at hands of Cavaliers sends Raptors down uncertain path – Sportsnet.ca

They’re someone else’s problem now. The Raptors have had two cracks at James and the Cavs in the playoffs and came up well short twice. Exactly what that means might be best answered by how Cleveland performs against either Washington or Boston in the Eastern Conference Finals.

What’s left is the post-mortem, where Raptors president Masai Ujiri will become the team’s most important player. He’s presided over the best years the franchise has ever had and one of the best runs any team in the NBA has had over the same period. It is the Raptors – not the Cavs – that lead the Eastern Conference in wins since Ujiri took over in the summer of 2013. A team without a 50-win season through its first 21 years has averaged 51 wins over the past four.

But now he’s faced with a philosophical question that the NBA almost uniquely forces you to make. It’s a league that doesn’t do flukes. An eighth seed has never made it the NBA Finals other than the New York Knicks after the lockout-shorted 1998 season. The best teams have the best players and because they’re on the floor for 90 per cent of the games, they tend to win. There is no such thing as a hot goalie or dominant pitching staff that can tilt the balance. Even in soccer, the very best in the world are just one of their team’s 11 players on the pitch.

James? On a basketball court he’s everywhere at once.

So executives like Ujiri – and he’s not alone outside the Cavs, Golden State orbit – are faced with deciding how much to invest in building a team whose best title hopes depend on James spraining an ankle.

 

Raptors GM Masai Ujiri must make tough decisions now | Toronto Sun

This isn’t just the end of the season in Toronto. This is decision time for Masai Ujiri. Every season ends with a team making some kind of determination on the future. But this time it feels different, maybe a touch more desperate, maybe a little more confusing and confounding for a team that won 51 games.

So much is unknown. So much is uncertain. What to do with the all-star Lowry, what to do with coach Dwane Casey, what to do with the important free agents, Ibaka and P.J. Tucker, what to do with the disappointing roster fillers Pat Patterson and DeMarre Carroll. It may be too soon for president Masai Ujiri to make any decisions. He normally takes his time, rushes nothing, evaluates everything. Then evaluates some more.

“This team is going to be what it is,” said Norman Powell, one of the improving young players on the roster. “I can’t focus on who’s going to be here and who’s not.”

The difficulty in any evaluation isn’t just that the Raptors lost, but how they lost. Especially how they lost the first three games. The fourth game was their best. Still it didn’t matter in the end. They were swept.

And it’s almost impossible to understand how they could have made it any different.

They had no answer for LeBron James, which no one in basketball really does. James scored 144 points in four games, averaged 36 a game. The best Raptor scorer, DeRozan, scored less than 21 a night. That’s a 15-point difference in any given game.

 

Raptors take step backwards with sweep to Cavs – Article – TSN

That’s the harsh reality many franchises have been forced to face over the years. From the Gilbert Arenas-led Wizards to the Celtics big three. From the Bulls to the Pacers to the Hawks, all of whom look very different than they did just a few seasons ago. LeBron is almost single handedly breaking up teams. Now what comes of the Raptors, who were very clearly exposed in this series?
In case there was ever any question, they’re not ready to compete with the best. They took their shot and, like a number of others before them, they missed. So, with several big decisions to make, they’ll go back to the drawing board. What’s the point of being good in an era where it just doesn’t seem feasible to be great, some will ask and it’s something Masai Ujiri and Jeff Weltman have to truly consider. Is the cost of fielding a second or third-place team worth it? Maybe.
After a dismantling like this, it’s easy to lose sight of how far the Raptors have come as an organization. It took them 20 years to win 50 games, something they’ve done in two straight seasons. They had never won a seven-game playoff series, now they’ve won three of their last five, with the only two losses coming to Cleveland. Do they really want to go back?
“It’s hard to break [up] a team that won 50-plus games two years in a row, with the core guys,” DeRozan said. “That’s on upper management. Us as players, we gotta be ready for whatever. The guys that are free agents, the guys that are coming back, we gotta understand, we gotta work on our game, become better, and leave it up to the front office to figure out everything else.”

 

A sweep shouldn’t mean the broom is out for Raptors’ Dwane Casey: Feschuk | Toronto Star

Dwane Casey has been here since 2011, which makes him the longest-tenured head coach in the NBA who hasn’t won a championship in his current post. In an instant-gratification universe, that also makes him overdue for the ejector seat. And with the Raptors clearly realizing that they need to rethink the way they play the game, maybe a change would make sense. Casey is, after all, a defence-first coach in a league where the best teams are winning with offence.

So, hey, fire a warning shot over the bow. Insert Jerry Stackhouse, he of the D-League championship 905ers, as a prominent assistant on Casey’s staff to keep Casey sharp (and to announce to the rest of the league that there isn’t exactly a better free-agent coaching option available to assume the helm).

All that said, if you’re of the belief that coaching is among the top handful of shortcomings here — well, you’re probably forgetting that Casey is the man who took a roster destined for destruction only a few years ago and had a major hand in turning it into the second-best team in the East. The Raptors have been in the playoffs four straight years now, a franchise-record streak. Over that span no Eastern Conference team has won more regular-season games, not even the Cavs. In the not-so-illustrious history of Toronto’s franchise there’ve been precisely two 50-plus win seasons — that’d be the most recent two.

It’s important to keep that stuff in perspective when you point out Casey’s flaws. “Cannot beat LeBron” doesn’t equal “cannot coach.”

 

Court Squeaks: Is this a step back for the Raptors? – Video – TSN

In the latest edition of Court Squeaks, Matthew Scianitti, Josh Lewenberg and Kayla Grey discuss the series sweep by the Cavaliers, ask if is this a step back for Toronto, touch on the dominating performance of LeBron James and much more.

 

NBA Playoffs 2017, Raptors vs. Cavaliers: Toronto channels its roots, but fall to Cavs, 109-102 – Raptors HQ

The closing moments were indicative of the identity crisis the Raptors are sure to face this summer. LeBron and friends are a behemoth of a team, and the Raptors are starved for realistic paths to walk en route to making up the talent disparity that so clearly separates Cleveland from the rest of the East. A free agency cloud will hang over Toronto for the next two months as the front office ponders whether or not it’s worth running back a core that is destined to fall just short.

At this moment, the Raptors are like a 40-year-old contemplating a mid-life career change. Do you accept simply being pretty happy, embracing the status quo and delaying the end result that the slow decay of time will inevitably produce? Or do you press reset, and hope for a rejuvenation while wading into waters wrought with uncertainty?

The last four seasons have provided the Raptors organization with its first taste of run-of-the-mill NBA happiness. There have been speed-bumps — Paul Pierce’s outstretched hand, Lowry’s various nicks, bruises and worse, Playoff Randy Wittman and the goddamned Game 1 curse have all threatened to veer the Raptors back towards its dark ages at different junctures since the Rudy Gay trade inexplicably spawned a respectable team. But four years of sustained relevance have a way of dampening the lows by producing a disproportionate number of highs, and 41 playoff games provide plenty of chances to forge unforgettable touchstones.

Even in in defeat, Sunday’s season-ending loss was proof that there are still moments of joy to glean from these Raptors, even in the face of an inevitable fate. P.J. Tucker’s buzzer-beating three to end the third quarter, Jonas Valanciunas’ post-up bucket over LeBron and Ibaka’s and-1 to give the Raptors the lead were all flashpoints in which Raptors fans couldn’t possibly feign apathy. They were instances that illustrated exactly why there is more glory in getting close to the summit and stumbling than foregoing your ascent altogether.

 

2017 Playoffs: Round 2, Game 4 – Raptors 102, Cavs 109 | Toronto Raptors

NCHING CLOSER

The Raptors came out of the locker room after halftime ready to put points in the board. Toronto shot 55 percent in the third quarter while holding Cleveland to 45 percent shooting. After giving up 10 3-pointers in the first half, the Raptors held the Cavs to three in the third while starting connect on some of their own, shooting 4-of-11 from downtown as they outscored Cleveland 31-24 in the third to trim a 12-point lead down to five, 85-80, heading into the fourth. DeMar DeRozan led the Raptors in the third with nine points, while Serge Ibaka added seven points. Cory Joseph had six assists in the quarter. The Cavaliers were led by 10 points from LeBron James.

 

Raptors lack of pure shooters evident in playoff exit – Video – TSN

As Nik Stauskas explains, the Raptors’ lack of pure shooters was very evident when watching the way the Cavaliers are built and shoot the ball from behind the line.

 

Raptors have decisions to make after another ousting by Cavaliers – USA Today

As far as what’s to come in the future, DeRozan unsurprisingly deferred all decision-making to the Raptors’ front office, including general manager Jeff Weltman and team president Masai Ujiri.

DeRozan agrees it may come across as illogical to do anything other than try to hold together what’s been one of the NBA’s most successful franchises in recent years. However, it’s clear the current version of the Raptors has almost no chance of knocking off the Cavaliers, and therein lies what will be the overshadowing narrative for the Raptors going into the offseason.

“It’s hard to break down a team that won 50-plus games two years in a row with the core guys,” DeRozan said. “But that’s on upper management. Us, as players, we’ve got to be ready for whatever. Guys that are free, guys that are coming back. We’ve got to understand we have to work on our game, become better and leave it up to the front office to figure out everything else.”

 

LeBron’s Cavaliers sweep Raptors aside – Video – TSN

The Raptors finished with the same record as LeBron James’ Cavaliers in the regular season, but come playoff time James took it to another level. Matthew Scianitti has more on a second straight playoff exit at the hands of Cleveland.

 

Kelly: Once again, Raptors find themselves wanting – The Globe and Mail

For four mostly fun years, that’s what the Raptors were best at – giving Toronto the thing it had been wanting. At the outset, it wasn’t a high bar.

If you’d been there for the whole Raptors gong show, simple competence was new and thrilling. The team gave the fans something more. If it wasn’t basketball played at the very highest level, then it was something so close as to be indistinguishable.

Apparently, the crowd has finally learned the difference. When it ended on Sunday, the cheers that sent the team off the court were tepid and grudging. They weren’t even really cheers. It was the applause you’d hear after the keynote of an especially dreary insurance conference – ‘Please, just leave.’ This was the Toronto audience losing patience with good-enough’ism. Fifty-win seasons are great. A couple of rounds in the playoffs can be vivifying for a bit. But if it’s not headed anywhere, it gets boring fast.

Right now, the Toronto Raptors are as talented as they’ve ever been. They’re also incredibly tedious – settled, complacent, unwilling to take offence at even the most obvious insults, lacking urgency or purpose. This is a team whose spirit animal is a shoulder-shrug emoji.

 

Toronto Raptors Face Tough Summer Questions – A Few Good Mics

3. Max contract for Ibaka?

The Raptors made the big splash at the trade deadline by acquiring Serge Ibaka. While he’s been inconsistent during his time with the Raps, he’s still a big time player, and you don’t trade a guy like Ross and a pick to let him walk in the off-season. A full season with Kyle, DeMar, Serge, and Jonas as your “big four” is still a very formidable lineup.

 

NBA Free Agency Rumors: Sixers will pursue Kyle Lowry this summer – Liberty Ballers

Lowry would theoretically be a big boost for the current Sixers, and he could serve as both an initiator and a release valve for Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. He shot nearly 42 percent on catch-and-shoot threes this season, which will help him retain value even as he goes through the usual late career downturn.

But paying a 31-year old point guard the maximum salary at this stage of the rebuild seems a little foolhardy. Point guards—particularly those on the smaller side—tend to age poorly, and although Lowry’s career trajectory and skillset could help him ward Father Time off for a while, history is not on his side. He doesn’t really fit with the Sixers’ timeline, and they’d be probably better off allowing the program to continue to grow organically by using stop-gaps to fill in around their elite young talent.

This isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last time you hear Lowry’s name this offseason. He’ll have a number of options on the table, but never count out the hometown team.

 

Kyle Lowry to Utah? – Reddit

I think lowry is the missing superstar that brings instant offense that Utah really needs. I know its a pipe dream, but free agents are looking for superteams, and idc if utah is small market, utah has a very good core that is missing 1 piece and I think lowry would give utah a very good contending chance vs GS if they stay healthy.

Did I miss something? Send me any Raptors related article/video to rapsfan@raptorsrepublic.com

Macro shot of A- on white results sheet. Extremely shallow focus.

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