So, are the Raptors fun?
It was sometime during the early fourth quarter of the game against Sacramento when this notion popped into my head. Pascal Siakam finds Jakob Poeltl in the corner, behind the arc, and not only did I find myself thinking he might take the shot, I was kind of rooting for it. Now, in years gone by, you root for that shot because it’s sort of silly. You’d root for it in the way that you root for a three-point attempt by Amir Johnson, as a peculiar sideshow subplot, but now you root for Poeltl’s three because it’s part of the team’s personality, and that personality is kind of fun — and that isn’t a word you’ve been able to use to describe the Raptors in a very long time.
Now, fun is different than good. The Raptors have been good for years. They have played a style of basketball that has allowed them to accumulate more regular season and Playoff victories than any iteration of this team has every attained. That makes them good, and there is a version of fun in being good. It’s that tortured sort of fun, though. That fun you describe having had out of obligation. That fun you had a friend’s wedding. Things that aren’t actually fun, but you call them fun because they should have been fun, or because you’re supposed to call them fun. The Raptors being good should have been fun, but it wasn’t. It was nice to see them be good, but good doesn’t have to mean fun. Watching the brutal isolation ball was not fun. It was effective, and it garnered wins, but it was not fun. Watching tortured Playoff series victories was not fun. They won, but it was not fun.
Poeltl’s three, though? That was fun. As were DeRozan’s nine assists. As were Lowry’s barrage of charges taken. As has been Serge Ibaka rediscovering the old Iblocka. Watching the good Raptors no longer carries that tinge of obligation. It no longer feels like eating your vegetables. Watching the Raptors now is like watching the game you love played in an entertaining way that also leads to winning. That’s fun. You no longer switch from a Raptors game to just about any other game on League Pass and think “oh, that’s how good basketball is supposed to look.” You get that from the Raptors now, and it’s fun.
The Raptors are second in the East, while possessing the conference’s best point differential at +7.8, and they are in the midst of a six-game winning streak. They are playing a wacky 12-man rotation (when healthy), one where they allow Siakam to create offence, a rookie to guard five positions, and Jakob Poeltl to shoot corner threes. Dwane Casey, long sneered at as a basketball relic that oversaw the club where fun went to die, has unleashed a brand of basketball on Toronto that not even his stanchest supporters could have imagined him overseeing. He’s embraced a level of chaos that seems totally at odds with the dogged, disciplined, “Pound the Rock” practitioner that Bryan Colangelo hired nearly seven years ago. Yet here we are, with the Raptors fifth in assists per game, seventh in secondary assists per game, sixth in three-point attempts per game, and eleventh in pace. All this while the team remains top-ten in defensive efficiency and top-three in offensive efficiency. So yes, the Raptors have been let off of the leash, but they are rewarding their coach’s trust with efficiency and wins.
It’s changed the tone in people’s voices when they describe the Raptors now. While no one is predicting that they’ll upset Cleveland (or even Boston) in the postseason, the sneering derisiveness about the team has abated. You can actually have a conversation about the Raptors without it devolving into a referendum on isolation basketball, or DeRozan’s lack of efficiency, or the club’s inability to retain free agents (remember those debates?). They can now just a be a team that probably won’t make the Finals, but be enjoyable to watch the rest of the time, anyway. It’s amazing how much a fun squad stops people from wanting to nitpick them to death. When you throw out an absurdly young second unit for long stretches, reduce the heavy minutes on your star players, pass the ball a lot, and let your centres fire away from behind the arc, the enjoyment level seems to quiet the need to dissect each of those characteristics to death.
Now, does it actually matter if a team is fun? Well, that’s the $64, 000 question. On the one hand, sports are only valuable as a fan-serving spectacle, and so entertainment value should mean a lot, especially considering how expensive it is to be a fan of professional sports. However, sports also have a very regimented pass-fail structure: you win, you pass, you lose, you fail. If you don’t ultimately pass, then you have failed. If that’s the lens that you want to view professional sports through, then fun is at best secondary, if it is a factor at all. In that paradigm, whatever it takes to win justifies itself, and if fun happens as a side-effect then so be it. If that’s how you interact with sports, then whether or not the Raptors are fun probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to your enjoyment.
For what it’s worth, I am not in that camp. I think fun has a value, even if you can’t quantify it in the same way that you quantify wins and losses. For me, it would be a lot easier to watch this team, playing this way, lose in the second round than it was to watch last year’s club do the same thing. If the result is the same regardless, I’d rather enjoy the journey than not.
