Tin Cup misses his first attempt at the green, an iron swipe that seems great then rolls into the water. He could have laid up, but instead he goes for it. The crowd moans with displeasure. But rather than walking to the drop zone and attempting a shorter shot after hitting the hazard, Cup simply drops his ball where he stands, attempts the same shot, finds the same result. The water is thirsty, in all contexts really, but especially in this one. Again and again he plunges iron shots into the drink, his Masters hopes sinking deeper and deeper with each drowned ball.
“I don’t know what I’m feeling,” says the announcer, watching Tin Cup bang his head against the wall, over and over, refusing to make things easy for himself. “This is the most painful thing I’ve ever seen.”
It turns out Tin Cup had it easy in comparison to these 2022-23 Toronto Raptors.
The Raptors learn against the Milwaukee Bucks in the fiber of their being that it’s hope that kills you. They have the misses, sure, which hurts, but they pull themselves as close to redemption as physically possible, clawing their way to overtime. Only to lose.
“I don’t think I’ve seen one that weird,” says Nick Nurse after the game.
“That was an experience,” says Fred VanVleet.
The start is almost as painful as the end, albeit in a slower, crueler, less defined sort of way. Toronto hefts wayward shots at the rim over and again to open. Miss. The uncharitable observer might call the wounds, in part, self-inflicted. Miss. Shot. Miss. Shot. Miss. Fred VanVleet launches audacious pullup triples from far behind the line, well contested, going for it with every ounce of gusto in his heart, like Tin Cup before him. Cup’s second shot misses the green by 30 feet, and it is still closer than some of VanVleet’s would-be bombs.
Toronto opens the first quarter 0-for-15 from the field, a cavalcade of failures that would have made Kevin McCarthy blush. Cup didn’t even put 15 straight balls in the water. Toronto’s first points come more than halfway through the first quarter, a made Pascal Siakam free throw that drives the crowd into a mock frenzy of ecstasy, half relieved and half in on the joke. Siakam misses the next free throw.
“It’s worse playing it than watching it,” says VanVleet. Later: “The air in the building was just weird.”
When VanVleet makes a layup in transition moments after Siakam’s free throw, the crowd is driven further into rhapsodies of delight. They almost stand.
“I don’t really know what to say as far as the offence goes and not being able to put the ball in and not to look close a lot doing it on some shots.,” says Nurse.
To this point, the Raptors and Tin Cup have experienced similar levels of suffering. Not quite crowns of thorns and stigmata, but somewhere on the road to that. And after missing all his shots, plummeting down the leaderboard, Tin Cup doesn’t just reach the green, he puts the ball right in the hole. It’s the last ball in the bag. The crowd goes crazy. He even gets the girl too, because it’s the 90s, and that’s how movies ended then.
The Raptors? What happens after they slough and slog their way through a first quarter plucked straight from Dante’s seventh circle of hell (violence)? The Raptors do it all over again, missing six shots to start the second quarter, not connecting on a field goal for almost four minutes, piling Groundhog Day on top of Tin Cup, plunging from the seventh circle of Dante’s hell into the eighth — fraud.
The Raptors are buoyed — or at least joined in hell — by the Bucks failing just as miserably as they are. They paddle the ball around the court like they’re playing pickleball, and their collective efficiency only just outmaneuvers Toronto’s own misery from the field. The pessimist would call it a race to the bottom, which is actually unfair to a game that was truly an enormously impressive display of defense, but unfairness is hard to avoid with the Raptors playing like they are.
But the Raptors do play brilliant defense on Antetokounmpo. He sets a career high in turnovers. The process is helped by the Bucks lacking shot creators of any kind, but the job O.G. Anunoby and company do on the superstar is marvelous. Precocious. But for every step Anunoby takes to shadow the two-time MVP, every dig from his teammates, every sacrifice a Raptor makes in planting his suffering form in front of his hulking opponent, is undone by a missed jumper, a blocked layup, an errant pass.
In the middle of the second quarter, VanVleet hits a pull-up triple, standing for a long moment afterwards, holding his form, the relief of finally making one visceral in his pose. It has been a long road for Toronto’s embattled spiritual leader. The crowd is sympathetic, voluminous, wafting over him with appreciative love. For VanVleet, if not for the Raptors, it breaks down the dam. He plays great from then on, Toronto’s only player with a pulse until the comeback.
But Bobby Portis scoffs at the moment, throws in an uncontested layup in transition — after a made shot, as a reminder — to bring the whole charade back down to earth.
They replay the hits in the third quarter, too, not scoring for more than two minutes to open the frame. The crowd has lost its love of the plucky irony at this point, is still funneling in from the concourse. There’s little cheering now, little of anything. Humans can become acclimatized to practically anything, history has taught us, even the Toronto Raptors trying to play offense.
And the Raptors even experience a miracle. Not just experience: they enact a miracle. They turn a 16-point deficit into a tie game in 75 seconds. Historic doesn’t cover Toronto’s comeback to push the game to overtime. VanVleet hits a pair of triples. Trent does the same, including one make with a foul below the belt and another with 0.4 seconds left to tie the game. It’s a rush of emotionality to fill the building past its breaking point. But then, in overtime, the snake-bitten Raptors feel the serpent latch back onto their collective ankle. They don’t score for the first three minutes of the extra period, and the Bucks score just enough. Moral victories fled this team long ago.
“The start of overtime was a great synopsis of the game,” says Nurse. “We get three stops and two wide open threes, one wide open 8-12 footer and nothing to show for it.”
The Raptors, long ago, experienced the height of ecstasy in this building, against this opponent. When Kyle Lowry tossed a rugby pass back in transition to Kawhi Leonard for a fiendish dunk over Giannis Antetokounmpo, the crowd experienced a carnivalesque inversion. Time wavered, then.
How the mighty have fallen. Kyle Lowry and Kawhi Leonard are gone. There is no happy ending in 2023, at least not yet. For an instant, the team and the crowd — those that haven’t left the building — both find pride, joy, enthusiasm, success. It doesn’t last. It trickles away, slow then fast, fading into the constant rain of the last week in Toronto, the gray sky that won’t break, the monstrous death the team finds early only to find a yet more painful one late.
