Emoni Bates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxkRxjEjOEg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXumpteUCOg
Defining Moments of the NBA Season: “What About Scarves?” – The Ringer
The full episode of Avec Classe is great, but what I really want to focus on is a sequence that lasts one minute and 49 seconds. It starts at the 3:34 mark, and ends at the 5:23 mark. It is iconic. The video I linked to above shows one minute and 34 seconds of the exchange, but not the 15 seconds prior to Ibaka’s London question. I think these 15 are crucial. The point of the episode is for Anunoby to build an outfit from the racks of clothes Holt Renfrew is providing them. Ibaka is then supposed to judge the look. Now, knowing that, and knowing what you saw above, we’re going to start 15 seconds earlier. I transcribed the entire interaction because it deserved to be written down.
Anunoby: What about these pants?
Ibaka: It’s nice. But remember, you have to choose. You cannot ask me, OG. I cannot help you.
Anunoby: OK. OK. You’re right.
Ibaka: You know what I’m saying?
Anunoby: I don’t want your opinion.
Ibaka: That’s the game, yeah.
Anunoby: I don’t even want your opinion.
Ibaka: So, it’s about how you put the outfit together.
Anunoby: Yeah, I’m good at that.
Ibaka: That’s how—you good at that?
Anunoby: Yeah.
Emoni Bates is the face of a coming basketball revolution – The Athletic
He has been regarded as the best player in high school basketball since he was a freshman a year ago. He receives some heady comparisons, and some have called him a Kevin Durant clone. On Tuesday, Bates became the first sophomore ever to win the Gatorade National Player of the Year award.
“It feels good,” he told The Athletic. “Man, it feels good.”
There’s immense hype around him, and so far he has validated it. So what is waiting for him in the NBA and how can he reshape the way the game is played?
Bates is already 6-foot-9, having just turned 16 in February, and so much about his playstyle and on-court mannerisms already mirror Durant. The sophomore averaged 31.6 points, 9 rebounds and 2.6 assists per game for Lincoln High School in Ypsilanti, Mich. His team was the overwhelming favorite to repeat as state champions with Bates at the helm before the national shutdown. He plans to be the first high schooler to make the leap to the NBA in nearly two decades if the one-and-done rule is rescinded in time for the 2022 draft, as expected.
But he is insistent that he doesn’t want to fall into any one paradigm, whether it’s comparisons to Durant, Tracy McGrady or Penny Hardaway. He appears to be a blend of all three, which is going to be a problem for the NBA.
The past decade has seen the role of on-court choreographer diffused throughout the NBA offense. No longer does the point guard run every single action to set up everyone else. The Celtics’ Jayson Tatum, the 2016 winner of the National Player of the Year award — who called Bates Tuesday with the news he won — has seen his star rise this season as he’s transformed into a pick-and-roll playmaker.
Choose your Toronto Raptors-themed isolation room – Raptors HQ
Room #1
04/13/19 vs. Orlando Magic — Game 1 (Augustin dagger)
04/01/01 vs. ORL (McGrady’s return)
02/12/00 All-Star Dunk Contest (Let’s Go Home)
05/15/16 vs. Miami Heat — Game 7 (ECF-bound)
It won’t take long to notice the formula here. In each room is a Gut Punch game, a Return game, a Regular Season all-timer, and a Playoff all-timer. For the first room, it’s fitting we start with the opener to the championship playoffs. After a season filled with load management, the anticipation of a Kawhi-led Raptors playoff run was at a fever pitch. A scrappy Magic bunch kept the game closer than many thought possible. When the two most important acquisitions of the season — Kawhi Leonard and Marc Gasol — botched a simple screen, it left D.J. Augustin wide open for a game-winning three. The more things change, the more they stay the same!In 2000, Tracy McGrady left Toronto via free agency because he was unhappy with the direction of the franchise. What could have been a dream duo with Vince Carter was no longer and Raptors fans were quite displeased. When T-Mac returned, on April Fool’s Day no less, he overcame the vitriol of the Air Canada Centre crowd and walked away a winner.
Speaking of winners, the Raptors, and especially VC, were huge winners in Oakland (heard that before?) on February 12, 2000. Up until a year ago, it was, and may still be, the most re-watched Raptors event in franchise history. Once VC threw down his reverse 360 windmill, the contest may not have already been over, but Toronto’s place on the NBA map was finally marked.
The final game in this room was an absolute joy to watch from beginning to end. The Miami Heat led for 39 seconds total, and, despite the experience of Dwyane Wade and Joe Johnson, never threatened the Raptors. Toronto’s first trip to the Eastern Conference Finals was a watershed moment for the franchise!
Vince Carter helped put the Raptors on the map in the U.S. – Sportsnet.ca
Former Toronto Raptor and current basketball analyst Matt Bonner joined Tim and Sid to discuss the Raptors potentially retiring Vince Carter’s number in the future.
Call of Duty beckons for Leafs’ Marner, Raptors’ Miller and rapper Zach Zoya | northeastNOW
Zinni and Marner are joining forces with Malcolm Miller of the Raptors and Quebec rapper Zach Zoya in a one-off “Call of Duty: Warzone” tournament Tuesday. The foursome will take part in the “Live From Warzone: Warstream” team tournament on YouTube, taking on other teams from around the world in online play.
Zinni met Zoya at the Ultra’s launch party late in October.
“He was a really cool guy. I’m excited to further my relationship with him on the battlefield,” said Zinni.
Warzone is a Battle Royale-style game with the winner the last team or player standing.
“I’m really excited for it,” said Zinni. “I’m grateful to have a job that allows us to stay in and work and keep busy during times like this. I’m happy we can do something for Toronto, especially (since) we have a player from the Raptors, a player from the Maple Leafs and an up-and-coming artist from Canada.
“I’m excited to put on a show (Tuesday).”
The four players’ streams will be carried live on Toronto Ultra’s YouTube Channel, starting at 7 p.m. ET.
The Warzone mode has been a popular one, helping “Call of Duty” draw in more players.
While the all-action mode may be tense for most, it’s a little more relaxing for Zinni than his normal “Call of Duty” responsibilities.
“It’s definitely a little different,” he said. “My skills still translate over. I’m still playing ‘Call of Duty,’ it’s just that the mode is a little bit different. When I play in the Call of Duty League, it’s a lot more intense, I’d say. I have four other teammates battling alongside me and we’re all screaming callouts and just trying to figure out how to manoeuvre the map in the best way to put us in a winning position.
On March 23, the Raptors announced that for the next 25 days they would run a daily game of the season poll on Twitter to allow fans to choose what classic game airs on NBA TV Canada at 6 p.m. ET, in commemoration of the Raptors 25th anniversary.
Each day would represent one season in the franchise’s history, beginning with 2019-20 and ending with the inaugural 1995-96 season.
Monday, the Raptors announced that rather than doing a poll for games from the franchise’s first four seasons, they would select the best of the best and play them all, beginning with the first-ever game played at the Air Canada Centre in 1999.
How our thinking about crowds and sports could change after COVID-19 – Sportsnet.ca
“I think that once we have gone back to a sort of regular seasonal disease [pattern] and this has gone from us, I will feel reasonably comfortable being in crowded places,” he said while taking a break from modelling demands for PPE requirements for frontline workers and other things more important than sports right now.
“It’s all about relative risk. … What will happen at some point in time — we don’t know when that is — but at some point in time, when we’re fairly comfortable that we have things under control, there will be a decision made whether or not the benefits of keeping the country in lockdown are outweighed by the risks and detriments.
“…It’s a complex kind of mathematical process we call decision analysis, but I kind of do it in my head and I say: ‘You know what, yeah there are infectious diseases always circulating around. There are ones that we pass on to each other when I play basketball.’ … But I say, ‘You know, I like playing so much. I’ll take that risk, knowing that, OK, I’ll wash my hands and when I go home I’ll go and shower immediately.’ There are ways that I mitigate that risk.
“The risk isn’t zero but it’s not like if I went to a crowd now — the risk of getting exposed to coronavirus in a crowd now is huge. But the risk of a life-threatening, majorly communicable infectious disease being acquired two years from now? You know, it’s pretty low.”
I was thinking about crowds and parades the other day because for the past 24 nights — ending Sunday night — the Toronto Raptors championship run was re-aired game-by-game like everyone’s favourite binge watch, except we all know the ending, so no need to be concerned about spoilers.
In fact, spoilers were almost the point.
Raptors’ 5 worst free agent signings of all time, ranked
3. Landry Fields
What makes the Landry Fields signing so intriguing is the fact that the Raptors never really wanted him anyway. It was all part of a ploy that backfired in the face of former general manager Bryan Colangelo.So here’s how it goes. In the summer of 2012, the player the Raptors were really gunning for was back-to-back MVP winner and Canadian national Steve Nash, who had become a free agent. Toronto’s main competition were the New York Knicks. Fields, then a coveted up-and-comer who also happened to be a restricted free agent, was a player that New York valued. The Raptors banked on this notion, and offered Fields a three-year, $19.5 million deal under the assumption that the Knicks would match the deal, and thereby not leaving them with sufficient cap space to try and sign Nash.
Well, the Knicks called their bluff, and they let Toronto sign Fields, who played three unproductive years with the Raptors before (forcibly) retiring from the NBA at just 26.
2. DeMarre Carroll
Even before DeMarre Carroll signed with the Raptors in 2015, he was already a bona fide NBA journeyman. Playing in five different teams in the span of five years, it was with the Atlanta Hawks where the 6-foot-6 forward would finally find relevance. After a breakout contract year with the Hawks where he averaged 12.6 points, 5.3 rebounds, 1.7 assists, 1.3 steals, and 1.7 3-pointers, Carroll instantly became a hot commodity in the free agent market.Toronto offered the former Vanderbilt standout a huge $60 million, four-year deal that summer, to which Carroll gladly obliged to. Unfortunately for the Raptors, Carroll’s production would dip in the two years he was with the team. In 2017, Toronto had enough of Carroll, trading him away to the Brooklyn Nets along with a first-round and a second-round pick for none other than Justin Hamilton.
With Social Distancing, No Basketball in NYC. Anywhere. (Well, Mostly) – Sports Illustrated
From Washington Heights to West Fourth Street, the steel rings have been unscrewed. All 10 rims are down at the Foster Avenue Park in Flatbush, where Rick Telander filled his notebook for Heaven Is a Playground, an ode to the outdoor game, with all of its native vice and grace. Any respectable athlete could clear the metal barricades that block two entrances to Holcombe Rucker Park on 155th Street in Harlem, but inside there are no rims to shoot on. Rusty chains are wrapped around iron gates at another entrance, a Master Lock resting atop the links. The lone sound emanating from inside that playground: a rope rattling against a flagpole in the wind.
These rims were built to last, constructed for the opposite of hasty removal. John Fitzgerald and his team of Parks Department blacksmiths forged many of them and affixed them to inimitable metal backboards, long before the era of prefabricated rims. Handmade with a hammer and anvil’s horn, these classic rims are a staple of New York City schoolyards and playgrounds, but beneath them the games vary. Three-on-three in the half court or five-on-five full court. Some play straight up on a miss; others require a take back to the foul line. One man’s game of “21” is known to another as “Animal.” Numbers are all that matter, and everyone knows the golden rule: Winners stay on.
Urbanites have long held love-hate relationships with these courts. Vagaries abound. There are rims with no backboards, backboards with no rims. Nets are considered a luxury, and shooters have to account for uneven asphalt, knowing which rims are bent or loose. To combat those concerns, a premium is placed on ballhandling. Aggressive drives to the lane are encouraged. Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, knew her audience when she chastised children still playing in her own city’s parks last week. She issued the trash talk on Twitter: “Your jump shot is always gonna be weak. Stay out of the parks.”
In New York, though, innovation thrives. It will take more than a wrench or a crack on Twitter to halt the launching of high-arching threes and running dunk attempts. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, milk crates with their bottoms cut out rest affixed to wooden planks on one block; alternate-side parking signs have been replaced by backboards and rims on another. In Crown Heights, a Hasidic family has hung a rim from its fire escape, over its building’s front door on Empire Boulevard; children in yarmulkes reach up for it as they come and go each day.
Kyle Lowry made the All-Star team and capped off an elusive championship with arguably the best game of his career in Game 6 of the Finals.
Pascal Siakam emerged as a Most Improved Player and was the team’s leading scorer in the games missed by Kawhi Leonard. Siakam’s production enabled the Raptors’ load management strategy to pay off in the end.
And yet if we’re looking purely at production… neither of these takes the cake. That championship banner is hanging thanks in part to a total team effort with that second banana title changing hands from game to game and moment to moment.
I’d still side with Lowry’s 2016-17 season in which he averaged a career-high 22.4 points per game to go along with 7.0 assists and 4.8 rebounds, the latter of which was also a career-high at the time. Nevermind the fact that the Raptors got swept out of the playoffs by the Cleveland Cavaliers, this was Lowry at his statistical and physical apex. It was a banner season alongside DeMar DeRozan who garnered All-NBA Third Team honours.
How efficient was Lowry that season? ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus pegged him as the 10th-most productive player in the league on a per-possession basis, sandwiched right between league MVP Russell Westbrook and new Warriors star Kevin Durant. Not bad company!
