Last season’s Toronto Raptors will go down, until the franchise wins another title, as the unquestionable greatest Raptors team ever. The way it ended provided an incredible amount of joy to the fanbase and the city, and the playoffs included a lot of great moments as well. Despite that, if there was a tone to the season as a whole, it would be that it was a year of stress, and finding ways to find enjoyment inside of that. Ever game felt like it brought new questions about how winning or losing impacted the future free agency of Kawhi Leonard, and that doubled in the playoffs.
The weight of expectation was impossible not to feel at any point last season on the Raptors, and although those expectations were fulfilled with the Championship, it still changed the way we looked at each individual game. There were still some great moments, like the big win over the healthy Warriors at Oracle last December with Kawhi resting, on the second night of a back to back, but those were the exception. The national media focusing entirely on Kawhi’s decision, even after the Raptors’ biggest playoff wins, and pivoting back to that immediately after the Championship, definitely played a role as well.
This season feels entirely different as a fan, with no external expectation at all. Many major NBA pundits had the Raptors trading all of their veterans and potentially missing the playoffs this year, and what comes after this year is mostly still unknown entirely. It was definitely reasonable to expect that the Raptors remain a good team, but the questions of how legitimate a contender they would be were fair. When Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka went down with injuries eight games into the season, it was also reasonable to question how the team would survive a stretch without them, and whether that would impact the decision making of the front office on whether or not to trade away the older veterans and retool. The focus of the franchise is, purportedly, on 2021 free agency and bringing in another star to pair with Pascal Siakam to build another contender, and these two seasons in between are essentially playing with house money for the Raptors, between a year in which they took advantage of an unexpected opportunity to win a Championship and that opportunity.
Yet, despite all of that, all of those reasonable excuses for the Raptors not being great this year, they’ve been exceptional. Even the losses have been reasonable, losing on the road to Boston, Milwaukee, the Clippers and Dallas, with the Clippers loss on the second night of a back-to-back and the Dallas loss at the end of a long west coast road trip. They’ve had close wins over good teams, dominating wins over bad teams, and the combination of no weight of expectation and the team embracing their potential has been so much fun to watch. The Raptors believe they are a contender once again this year, and they keep making it harder to rule them out of that conversation.
Pascal Siakam made the unlikely jump, again, to looking like a true NBA superstar. OG Anunoby has established himself as one of the league’s great perimeter defenders and keeps expanding his offensive game. Fred VanVleet has taken the Lowry injury to establish his pedigree as a starting NBA point guard, and has had some great moments in the team’s big wins without Lowry. To add to that, when the team needed to find guys down the bench to fill minutes, Terence Davis, Chris Boucher and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson have each come through to deliver and help the team through some tough games.
Nothing is guaranteed in the NBA, ever, and it’s always possible that this proves unsustainable and the Raptors have tougher sledding ahead, and they struggle at some point this season. Lowry and Ibaka should be back sometime soon, and that might unlock yet better performances for the team, but still it could turn. And yet, it’s hard to worry too much about that possibility, even while acknowledging it. The Raptors are the defending NBA Champions, they don’t have the weight of big looming questions this season, and they keep delivering fun performances in games against good opponents. If last year’s Raptors was the best team we’ve ever had, this year’s team might be the most enjoyable, because they are performing nearly as well without any of the stress over what a loss might mean.
