The 25-day plan.
Who better to watch Game 6 of the @NBA Finals with than with the champ himself.
Best part, Coach will be answering any questions you have. Join us at 8pm and tweet Coach Nurse your Qs using #AskNickNurse. @LGCanada | #NBATogether pic.twitter.com/5Sdz783jum
— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) April 12, 2020
Sullivan: Armstrong playing waiting game, like everyone else | Local Sports | lockportjournal.com
“I would have been on the first flight to Toronto on March 14th,” Armstrong said Saturday, one month to the day after the NBA suspended the season. “We were playing the Pistons that night in Toronto. Then it was game after game, then the NCAA Tournament, Raptors games, the craziness of late March, early April, where you literally don’t have a day off.
“So I said, this is the only three-day break. After that, I’m going to be working every day now through the end of the playoffs.”
Armstrong went into a brief self-quarantine when he arrived at Delray Beach. The Raptors’ last game had been in Utah, the first team to have players infected (Donovan Mitchell tested positive a day after Gobert). So everyone from the Raptors was tested when they got back to Toronto to make certain they hadn’t been infected.
“I was in Florida, so our team doctor called me immediately and said, ‘You need to self-isolate,’” Armstrong recalled. “So I did for my first few days there. I said I was happy to be tested if he arranged it with the Miami Heat doctor. He said, ‘They’re not testing anyone in the U.S. unless they have symptoms.’
“So a few days later, Toronto Public Health called me and everyone (from the team) at that point had tested negative. They said basically, ‘You no longer have to quarantine. As long as you practice social distancing, you’re fine.’”
Jack had plenty to keep him busy at the condo. Armstrong does basketball commentary for TSN, the Canadian sports network. They’ve been doing hoop analysis and Raptors retrospectives. This weekend, they’re showing the last two games of last year’s NBA Finals against the Warriors, when Toronto won for its first-ever league title.
Sunday would have been the home finale against the Knicks at Scotiabank Arena. Then it would have been back to Florida for games at Orlando and Miami next Tuesday and Wednesday. The playoffs, with the Raptors beginning defense of their NBA title, would have begun next Saturday.
“It’s frustrating,” Armstrong said. “That last game in Utah was an amazing win, over a good team. Right now, they have the same record they had a year ago, with Kawhi Leonard.
“This has been as much fun as last year, maybe more because expectations haven’t been as high,” he said. “Every time you turn around it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’ There’s been so many fun storylines on a team that has been consistently overcoming injuries and truly playing like champions. I miss it.”
NBA has ’25-day plan’ to return to game action if season resumes: report | CBC Sports
According to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst on Sunday, the league has a “25-day plan” that would kick in after the league sets a return date from the coronavirus-induced layoff and would conclude with players ready to play regular-season games again.
“They’re spending a lot of time getting a back-to-basketball plan ready,” Windhorst said during a TV interview of what league officials have been working on in recent days.
“What they’re looking at is a 25-day return-to-basketball window,” he continued. .”.. An 11-day series of individual workouts, where there’d be social distancing for a period of time, and then hopefully … a 14-day training camp.”
The NBA halted its regular season on March 11. Commissioner Adam Silver has previously said the league doesn’t plan to make any decisions regarding the calendar until at least May 1.
The regular season had about a month remaining when it was suspended, and the playoffs typically take about two months to complete. The 2020-21 regular season typically would begin in October, although Silver acknowledged that could be affected as well.
Nick Nurse says he thought of quit coaching at the start of his career | TalkBasket.net
Nurse admitted on a Q&A with the Raptors’ fans that he was on the verge of quitting the proffesion at the the time he was coachibg in England.
“Sure. Coaching professionally in England – 15 or 16 games in & we were 8-8 & I was like I don’t know if I’m that good at this. I went home & wrote down 4 other things that I thought I could do & they all looked like sh!t to me, so I thought I’d better figure out how to coach.”
Admittedly, Nurse did something more than “figuring out how to coach” leading the Toronto Raptors in their first NBA championship.
The Kids Are Playing Basketball Through a Pandemic – WSJ
They also had a product called HomeCourt, which has been Apple’s most popular sports app for most of the past month, more popular than ESPN, the NBA or the NFL’s apps. Adults have Zoom. Kids have HomeCourt.
This basketball app turns any shooting workout on any rim into a trove of data. It’s powered by artificial intelligence and the smart premise that phones can be transformative basketball equipment, and it turned out to be prescient in a way that no amount of artificial intelligence could have predicted. The only places to play basketball these days are home courts.
Not long after schools across the U.S. were shut down, the company behind HomeCourt made the product free. It was around this time when the Blackfords installed the app, moved a tripod to their driveway and began shooting.
Morgan started on March 21. By March 22, she’d made 500 shots. She was up to 1,000 by the next day, 5,000 by the next week and 10,000 by last week.
The world is so weird at the moment that Morgan and her sisters are now shooting more than NBA teams. They shoot layups. They shoot from the mid-range. They even shoot 3-pointers after measuring their very own line.
“We had it in chalk, but it kind of erased,” Mackenzie said.
“Multiple times,” said Colleen Blackford, their mother. “And now we’re out of chalk.”
What is your least favorite Sixers goose egg? – Liberty Ballers
Joel Embiid: 0 points vs. Toronto Raptors on November 25, 2019
The Sixers were off to a strong 11-5 start to the season, and Joel Embiid and company were staring down their first shot of revenge against the Raptors club that had eliminated them from the playoffs the previous spring. Marc Gasol and the Raptors had other ideas, though, most significantly holding Embiid to a career-low zero points in a Toronto victory. The big man went 0-of-11 from the field, including 0-of-4 from 3, and 0-of-3 from the foul line. Joel’s poor performance led to the usual hyperbole from drama-driven ESPN personalities, some trolling from Drake, and I suspect got the ball rolling on the “soft” comments to come from the TNT guys a couple weeks later. Of course, Embiid is awesome, so he ripped off lines of 33 points and 16 rebounds, 27 points and 17 rebounds, and 32 points and 11 rebounds across his next three games, but I imagine the outing in Toronto still stings.
Biggest Takeaways From the NBA 2K Players Tournament – The Ringer
To be blunt, ESPN’s presentation of the 2K tournament sucked, spoiling an opportunity to potentially convince casual NBA fans to get interested in 2K and the culture around it. The gameplay was dull. The players are less skilled than pro gamers and less entertaining than pro streamers. I also could’ve used a third-party announcer to highlight the odd choices and funny mistakes players were making, and to liven up the dead spots when neither player was saying anything. (Plus, none of the games were particularly close—only two of the 18 games in the tournament were decided by five or fewer points.) And the interstitials were dreadful—I hope Ronnie2K is good at… whatever it is he does, because he’s the sleepiest person I’ve ever seen attempt to host a TV show.
But the games did deliver in one critical way: It was legitimately compelling to watch NBA players control virtual versions of their real-life teammates and rivals. An NBA player will rarely flat-out say “[X player] is trash” to the press, but we can see them play 2K and yell “WHAT?!?!?” when virtual JaVale McGee unleashes an effective post move to score in the paint.
There were dozens of examples of this across the tournament, but I think the most interesting instance came in the semifinal between Booker and Harrell. Harrell plays for the Clippers, but Booker played as the Clippers, one of the strongest teams in the game, forcing Harrell to reveal some of his opinions on how to defend his actual teammates. At one point, he says he’d live with any shot by a player besides 13 and 2 (Paul George and Kawhi Leonard), which, wow, huge self-own.
Knicks’ Moe Harkless reconnecting with his artsy side in New York – Sports Illustrated
The forward’s knowledge of the art world is continuing to expand. He is a self-described “new fan,” but when he rattles off favorite artists, he does so with ease, throwing out a half-dozen names. He’s looking to celebrate emerging artists and learn more about his budding passion. “It’s another way to express yourself,” he says of his growing collection.
The eight-year NBA veteran was traded to the Knicks on Feb. 6 in a deadline day deal that sent forward Marcus Morris to the Clippers. The move shipped Harkless from a club with championship aspirations to a franchise where victories are hard to come by. “It’s obviously tough going from a team where you’re expected to win most games, to a team where we’re struggling to win games,” he says. Harkless previously played with the Magic and the Trail Blazers, where he was a key part of last year’s Western Conference Finals team. He says he used to frequently exchange off-court ideas with Portland teammates Evan Turner and Al-Farouq Aminu.
But New York is home for Harkless. He grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and spent his lone collegiate season at St. John’s. As a child, Harkless first became interested in art. It was one of his favorite subjects in school—“not just ‘cause it was easy,” he jokes—and he enjoyed occasional school trips to New York City’s countless museums. He recently found a series of drawings of Looney Toons characters he had made in a high school class. His mom, Rosa, still has one of his old sketchbooks.
In the wake of the trade to the Knicks, he had initially planned on taking advantage of his off-court time by continuing to learning about the industry. He lives in Chelsea, where small galleries are seemingly as prominent as bodegas. He had compiled a list of galleries and museums that he was going to tour in the season’s waning weeks and into the offseason. Those plans, of course, changed, though it’s something he still intends to revisit when life resumes to normal.
With this being Toronto’s first title, a number of NBA players took to Twitter following the buzzer to congratulate the Raptors.
Tweets from: Evan Turner, Vince Carter, Thad Young, Kenrdick Perkins, Pau Gasol and more.
(Video)Game Thread: All-Time Knicks @ All-Time Raptors – 4/12/20 – Posting and Toasting
Today I’ll get to play as Mr. Easter himself, Carmelo Anthony, and the All-Time Knicks against Stingy and the All-Time Raptors. It should be a blast! Stingy’s gonna be saved the trouble of having to sub in a small-ball lineup, because by default he’s running out a frontcourt of Vince Carter, Kawhi Leonard and Chris Bosh against my Carmelo Anthony, Willis Reed and Patrick Ewing starting frontcourt. This should go well!
Game 5 was an emotional battle, to say the least.
Golden State’s All-Star forward Kevin Durant’s triumphant return from a calf injury was cut short as he suffered an Achilles injury after playing in just 12 minutes. In his absence, a visibly shaken Warriors team rallied together to lead by as many as 14 points in the second half.
Still, the Raptors found a way to respond within the game.
Toronto used a second-half rally of its own to lead by six points with under three minutes remaining and all signs indicated that it would capture the title, but the lead slipped away as the Warriors used a late 9-0 run to take the lead for good with under a minute remaining.
With each team experiencing heartbreak in Game 5, all eyes will be on the emotional response in Game 6.
The Warriors will again look to rally together and play for their teammate, who is reported to have suffered a very serious injury. In addition to Durant’s absence, Game 6 will be the final game played at Oracle Arena, and the emotions of wanting to give their home fans one final win will also fuel this team.
For the Raptors, the bitter taste of coming so close to a championship without winning is an emotionally taxing experience. Fortunately for them, they are still in command as they have yet another opportunity to close the series out.
Throughout the postseason, Toronto has not gotten too high nor too low, but the emotions from letting Game 5 slip away could be spun as a positive as fuel to take Game 6.