TORONTO — The Toronto Raptors had an emotional start to their 2021-22 NBA campaign.
Playing a regular season game in the friendly confines of Scotiabank Arena for the first time in 600 days, there was a real electricity in the building.
“I thought it was a great intro celebration,” said Raptors guard Fred VanVleet Wednesday. “It was a playoff atmosphere in there for sure for Game 1, which is, other than the ring ceremony, that was like 1A, 1B. It was pretty close.”
But then the ball went up and a lot of that positive energy from the crowd didn’t seem to translate to a damn thing as the Raptors got leapt on by the Washington Wizards, trailing by as much as 29 points Wednesday night and, ultimately, falling 98-83 in a contest that saw the team shoot a dismal 30.9 per cent from the field.
That’s just what life is in the NBA sometimes.
However, for many players on the Raptors, that kind of experience was pretty new.
Toronto is a young bunch with 10 of the 17 players on the roster aged 24 and younger, meaning that there will likely have to be more teaching this season than there would’ve been over the last five seasons or so before.
“I think it’s pretty natural that they don’t feel like they performed very well, and that’s certainly with them coming into today,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse after the team practiced Thursday. “It was a fairly heavy film session — lengthy and long — and, obviously, showing both positives and teaching moments.
“There’s some things to get through there. But I think, on the other end of that, they definitely worked today and put in a pretty good effort today so we know it comes at you pretty fast in this league so you’ve gotta learn what you can and (as) quickly as you can and then you’ve gotta be ready to go. You’ve gotta wash that one off ya even if you don’t like it and start fresh and new and see what happens.”
Added Raptors veteran Goran Dragic, who happens to be the only Raptors player on the roster in his 30s at age 35: “It’s part of the business. It’s 82 games, we have to move on. Of course, we already watched the film to see what we did wrong and try to correct those mistakes for the next one.
“It’s not like Europe when you have one game a week and then you have seven days of practice and you can correct those things. Here it’s right away, you have to go to the next one and next opponent is Boston, first game away, so it’s going to be a really tough challenge for us. But I look at it this way, we couldn’t play worse, so it’s only going to get better.”
Yes, life in the NBA comes at you fast, with the next game coming Friday night against the Boston Celtics in Beantown, with first-tip at 7:30 p.m. ET on Sportsnet ONE and SN NOW.
That’s not a lot of turnaround time to put a bad loss behind you, but it’s an integral skill if you’re going to survive the 82-game grind of the season and something this Raptors team will need to learn how to do.
“I think we’ve gotta try to teach it,” said Nurse of how his young players can go about managing their emotions. “So the next time that we feel like one of those moments are coming on we’ll be a little bit more prepared for it or we’ll have a better game plan for it.”
Part of how the Raptors might be able to teach its youngsters how to stay even-keeled over the course of the season will be to just allow players to experience it — “Those young guys, they’re gonna realize that sooner or later,” said Dragic — and another way will be to turn to the sage advice from some of their older teammates.
“I’ve been through it. You just have to tell them to work on their craft,” said Khem Birch, who, at 29, is the second-oldest player on the roster. “Just focus on yourself and don’t worry about all the other stuff. In Orlando I was telling Mo Bamba, ‘Young guys right now are probably going to have more success than you, but spot the long run.’ In my draft class there are guys who got drafted before me but are not in the NBA anymore. So you can’t really focus on the now. You have to look at the longer picture.”
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Keeping your eye on the larger prize is also a good idea for any Raptors fans out there who might be overly concerned about how the team looked on opening night as well.
One game is a drop in the bucket in the context of a full season, and with Wednesday’s contest being the very first of the season there’s plenty of time for improvement.
“There were some positives,” Nurse said of his team’s performance Wednesday after having time to review the film. “I know it didn’t feel like it there, but we were plus-17 in field-goal attempts, we turned them over 23 times, we had 41 deflections, we were plus-12 in offensive rebounds, we held them to 41 in the second half. That’s a lot.
“It’s almost like to get blown out with all of those numbers you have to have a really, really bad area in something and we had a really bad shooting night. So that wipes a lot of that out, but I think that there was a lot more — especially 41 in the second half — there was a lot more effort, there was a lot more growth happening at the defensive end than what we started with.”
It’s cliché to say, but it’s all about trying to get better every day, and the Raptors will have another opportunity to do that against the Celtics Friday night.
The marathon that is the NBA’s regular season has only just begun for the Raptors, and while it started with an ugly-looking dip on Wednesday, there’s also bound to be some peaks along the way as well. As long as the Raptors are able to not get too high when things are going well and too low when they’re bad, they should be able to make it through the season just fine.
