Fan Duel Toronto Raptors

Morning Coffee – Sat, Mar 28

Serge Ibaka quits Raptors to become MLSE Chief Marketing Officer.

Serge Ibaka quits Raptors to become MLSE Chief Marketing Officer.

Raptors’ Serge Ibaka thanks Toronto Public Health for coronavirus response efforts | Globalnews.ca

“Everybody is appreciating what you have done and everything you have been doing — all your sacrifice,” Ibaka said in a five-minute video shared on the Toronto Raptors Twitter account Friday evening.

“Thank you for everything. Keep up your good work.”

The video shared on Twitter begins with Dr. Vinita Dubey, Toronto’s associate medical officer of health, asking Ibaka, whose love of scarfs has been widely-shared on social media, about his beloved scarf while thanking him for spreading the important messages of staying home, eating healthy food and staying active.

“You say the scarf is for art, but I’m actually telling you the scarf is part of public health,” she said, noting that if people need to visit a clinic they should wear a scarf over their face until they’re potentially given a mask.

“When you’re going to the clinic, you won’t give it to the rest of us. But when you’re done make sure you wash the scarf.”

Dubey’s tip prompted Ibaka to call it “more than art,” piggybacking on his signature reference to his style of wearing scarves as “art.”

“Health is always important, right?” he said.

Toward the end of the video, he spoke with Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, and asked what people can do to help as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

If the NBA Season Is Over, Who Deserves Sixth Man of the Year? – The Ringer

Brandon Clarke, Grizzlies; and Terence Davis, Raptors: My second- and third-place finishers in Rookie of the Year balloting were major net positives and two-way contributors for playoff teams in their first seasons. Their relatively narrow roles, though, kept them out of my top three.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jRzkAboZHE

A modest proposal for resetting the NBA postseason — and engaging lottery teams – The Athletic

The NBA just doesn’t have enough time to do anything normal with what’s left on the calendar. I agree with John that whatever the NBA decides to do to complete this season, it’s probably loath to dramatically change anything having to do with the 2020-21 season, including pushing everything back to start significantly later, such as at Christmas. A non-starter for networks, corporate sponsors and the like that have had enough disruption to their cash flow the last three weeks to last a lifetime.

A more palatable resolution could be simply pushing the start of the 2020-21 season back a couple of weeks, to the first week of November, when NBA seasons had started for years prior to 2017, when the league pushed the start of the season to mid-October to give players and teams more days off and fewer sets of back-to-back games or four games in a five-night stretch. But it would likely require the 2020-21 regular season to end a couple of weeks later – in early May as opposed to mid-April – in order to maintain the days off needed to eliminate as many of the back-to-backs/four-in-fives as possible. This, as just about everything else discussed below, would have to be subject to side agreements between the league and the players’ union.

Dwane Casey describes how the Pistons confronted the coronavirus

“We took him off the floor immediately,” Casey told ESPN. “We brought him out in the back to the locker room, away from the team, and finished the game.”

Information was still trickling in regarding Gobert and the Jazz, while the Pistons were simultaneously completing their game in real time. Casey returned his focus to the court and how to put the clamps on Sixers center Joel Embiid.

In the meantime, conversations continued between the Pistons’ medical staff, training staff and front office on how to proceed with Doumbouya, who insisted he was healthy. “When I took Sekou out, he looked at me like I was crazy,” Casey said. “So did Tony Snell, the guy I had taken out for Sekou, and then put back in for Sekou.”

At that juncture, Casey said, he wasn’t fretting about the possibility that more of his players — and himself — might also be at risk.

“To be honest, that didn’t enter my mind,” Casey admitted. “At that point we weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, this is huge, it means they’re going to cancel the season.’ In that moment, I was thinking, ‘This is probably an isolated case.”’

Doumbouya, who stumped to return to action, eventually reentered the game after much debate with 4:40 left.

“He wanted to play,” Casey said. “He had already been out there. I guess it’s easy in hindsight to question it, but at that time we had none of the information that’s out there now. We were in the middle of a game, and the player was telling us he felt perfectly fine, and we had no information that indicated that he was sick.”

African basketball players with NBA dreams face exploitation – Sports Illustrated

They stood at the makeshift podium atop the floor of Oracle Arena, cutting the familiar figure of the freshly minted sports champions, at once ecstatic, relieved, exhausted and slightly dazed by the occasion. The Raptors had just won the 2019 NBA title. And, as players, coaches and executives caressed the trophy and examined their gleaming reflections, it was another reminder: Just because you envision a crowning moment your entire life, it doesn’t mean it won’t kick your ass once it arrives.

Among the celebrants: Pascal Siakam, originally from Cameroon, who had just scored a team-high 26 points, cementing his status as an NBA star; Serge Ibaka, from the Republic of the Congo, who had put up 15 points of his own; and the team’s president, Masai Ujiri, who had grown up in Nigeria.

This title didn’t just represent a soaring achievement for a team, a city and a country. It also represented a triumph for an entire continent. The swell of African basketball players coming to the United States is one of the great migratory waves in sports; and it shows no sign of crashing. There are currently more than a dozen NBA players who were born in Africa, including Siakam and 76ers All-Star center Joel Embiid. And this doesn’t include the players—from Victor Oladipo to Giannis Antetokounmpo—one generation removed, born to African parents. In the 2019 NBA draft a record nine of the 60 players selected were born on the continent or to at least one parent who was.

Then there’s Tacko Fall. At 7’6″ the native of Senegal is one of the tallest human beings on the planet. With an irresistible personality to match his irresistible name, he has a celebrity force field—and Instagram following—to compete with any All-Star. Tacko may toggle between the Celtics and their minor league team in Portland, Maine, but he wins fans wherever he goes and was even used as a prop by Orlando’s Aaron Gordon, who leaped over Fall, at February’s NBA slam dunk contest.

Raptors 25-year lookback: The Colangelo Years 2006-2013 | Toronto Sun

Colangelo immediately changed the team’s fortunes in 2006 bringing in TJ Ford as well as Anthony Parker and Jose Garbajosa.

But in hindsight, his biggest move didn’t come until 2013, when he acquired Kyle Lowry from Houston. Lowry wouldn’t start out so good — he readily admits he initially viewed Toronto as a stopping post and made no effort to become part of the team — but that’s long-forgotten history.

That would all change pretty quickly and Lowry is now considered one of the franchise’s all-time greats, and really is Colangelo’s greatest legacy.

That he eventually supplanted fan favourite Jose Calderon speaks to his impact and importance on this team.

Player acquisitions were just one area where Colangelo left his mark. It must also be remembered it was Colangelo who first brought Masai Ujiri, the man who would eventually replace him, to Toronto.

Ujiri came in as the director of global scouting under Colangelo before leaving for Denver. His eventual return was orchestrated by Tim Leiweke, but it was Colangelo who brought him to Toronto initially.

On the coaching front, Colangelo inherited Sam Mitchell, but had the good sense to keep him around as Mitchell led his team back to the playoffs. When things started to go south for the team, Colangelo relieved Mitchell of his duties and handed the reigns over to assistant and Canadian native Jay Triano. When that didn’t work, Colangelo made his best coaching hire by bringing in Dwane Casey, who gave the Raptors a strong defensive identity and established a toughness that has served them so well throughout their championship season.

Toronto’s ability to develop talent has come a long way since Colangelo’s departure. The arrival of a G-League team has had a lot to do with that, but it was under Colangelo’s watch that Chris Bosh, a home-grown Raptor developed to the point of becoming an annual all-star.