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One would think that Raptors fans would have grown immune to ugly (or in this case monumentally horrific) losses such as last night's 112-103 defeat to the Golden State Warriors. With this franchise as it turns out, there is no such thing as immunity.
About 20 minutes after the loss to the Warriors last night, RealGM, reddit, and Raptors Republic spawned about 500 posts of straight frustration venting about this team and this organization (I was one of them) I thought it would make me feel better, but this morning it is possible that I am even more upset, hence the un-retiring of this blog. I honestly don't even know where to begin. I could talk about how our "best" player, team captain and fearless team leader, the one who is so committed to winning that he banned others from looking at box scores following games (the irony here is too much), is so universally hated by Raptors fans right now that its making the hate for Bargnani look mild. The player in question is an absolute laughing stock in the NBA analytics community, a perennial black hole on offence who constantly takes (and makes roughly 39%) such bad shots that even Kobe Bryant and Nick Young are laughing at him. A guy with the audacity to smile after losing a game in which his team held a 27-point lead in the 3rd quarter. You know what? Lets start things off by talking about this player, for those of you who live on another planet and have never heard of the sport of basketball, the players name is Rudy Gay.
The more we see the guy play the more we realize why Memphis gladly gave him to us. Its a wonder that people didn't put two and two together when this trade happened. An underrated Memphis squad that made a deep playoff run without Rudy Gay, then fizzed out in the first round with him, and finally traded him away and made the conference finals! This trade was Colangelo's last-ditch attempt to save his job, one in which he rolled the dice on a terrible shooter, ball hog, and career loser, a perfect fit for this franchise actually. Now don't get me wrong, I really like the Raptors and I really want to see them be a successful team. However, after almost 20 years of mediocrity (and that is being polite) where the highlights of this franchise have been: one playoff series win, a dunk contest, and free pizza when they score 100 points. This is a franchise that has created a culture of quality players bolting at the first chance they get, botching draft picks in laughable fashion, and overpaying decent players who wouldn't make half as much anywhere else. In all seriousness; try to come up with a list of top 10 moments for this franchise. Odds are that beating the 70 win Bulls will be on there and quite frankly, when a regular season win in a year that you did not even crack 30 games in the W column makes your top 10, something is very very very wrong.
There are a lot of things that need to change with this franchise in order to undo the mistakes of previous regimes. In the next few posts, I will outline the things that need to change and make no mistake these things will happen with Masai Ujiri in charge.
Up next. everybody's favourite coach: Dwane Casey who may get more than one post devoted to him.
Rudy Gay is bad, but not the biggest problem. I agree that his shot selection is brutal and all that. But when we lose (in almost double digits) when being up 27, its the coach's fault.
ReplyDeleteA month ago Raptors were down 2 points with 26 seconds left. The other team had the ball (forget who exactly) and they let the clock run out. The ball was shot with 3 seconds left (it was a miss - best thing for raptors) but nobody caught the rebound in time. It was not any player's fault, but the coaches.