The Toronto Raptors lost again Monday night, this time to the Boston Celtics, to bring their record a woeful 1-5.
It was an ugly affair, with the Raptors trailing by as much as 26 before making a spirited but ultimately meaningless garbage time comeback to eventually fall 126-114.
Things aren’t all right on the good ship Raptors right now and the team was brutally honest about it.
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“This is probably unchartered territory for most of us. Just speaking for myself I’ve never been a part of something like this,” said Raptors guard Fred VanVleet after the loss. “But we can’t hang our heads, no one’s feeling sorry for us.”
There’s little doubt the boat is taking on water right now and, unfortunately for the Raptors, it’s as VanVleet said: There’s no mercy to be had in the NBA, and they’re about to hit even rougher waters.
Starting Wednesday, Toronto will embark upon a four-game Western Conference road trip, where it’ll see the Phoenix Suns, Sacramento Kings and then do a back-to-back versus the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers.
Under normal circumstances, a team struggling as much as the Raptors have been might’ve welcomed the idea of a long road trip, but given they were forced to relocate to Tampa temporarily to play out at least the first half of this season — and because COVID-19 is still very much an ongoing threat — the traditional bonding that comes with a big trip looks like it’ll be lost. And as much as Toronto has tried to make Tampa feel like home, playing away games won’t be much different from being at home from a routine standpoint.
“It’s a little different. I think that you’re correct in that you usually get a chance to bond on a normal west-coast, early-season road trip,” said Raptors coach Nick Nurse. “But road trips now seem to be kind of their own bubble.
“Each city you go to a hotel. I mean, I literally haven’t left the hotel on our road trips yet. It’s like, you go to a city and you stay in the hotel. It’s not like we’re going out and doing a heck of a lot of bonding. Little bit different that way for sure.”
That doesn’t sound too encouraging for the Raptors as they continue to try to find themselves. Every team they are facing on this coming trip presently sports a record of at least .500, with the exception of the Kings, who are just one game below .500.
Struggling though they may be, there will be no respite on this trip and the fact the team looks like it won’t even get any sort of mental break while on the road — let alone having no real home-court advantage in Tampa — certainly doesn’t help things.
With that said, that still isn’t enough reason for the team to not perform, according to VanVleet.
“I mean there is a long list of excuses to be honest with you,” VanVleet said. “I mean, you can’t lock into that way of thinking. Like I said, we’re not moving, we’re going to be here in Tampa, it’s not our home, fans are going to cheer for the other team and that’s the reality of the situation. So you can sit around and cry about it or figure out a way to work through it.
“But I do worry about guys’ mental health as a brother and a teammate and a friend. It’s not an easy situation. I don’t want to discard that. But at the same time it’s a situation we’re in, and the season is not gonna stop. We can’t hang our hats on that. We’ve gotta find a way to get through it. It’s definitely different from being in Toronto, obviously, but here we are.”
Adding to this point, Kyle Lowry acknowledged that while the team is in a tough situation at the moment, put into the grander perspective of life, things could certainly be a lot worse.
“My life is based on basketball, my family. Life is fun in general. I get to wake up every day,” Lowry said. “That’s a blessing, and when it comes to, you know, what we had to do, I mean this is what we have to do for our jobs. Our job had to relocate. We relocated in a bubble and we were fine, we relocated to Tampa and guys go figure it out. We’re grown men. This is what we do. We’re paid to play basketball and if we have to relocate, we relocate. And off the court and stuff, just living your life is fun and we get paid very handsomely to be professional athletes.
“But my job is fun. I wake up, I’m alive, I have a beautiful family, kids, and I get to go do basketball for a living. That’s fun in general. You know things are different. Yes, we got a virus out there that you know no one knows how to check [for it]or stay away from it so that’s a little bit, you know, mentally stressful, but other than that you should be happy to be alive. That’s just how life is.”
Ultimately, what Lowry said is correct. Just because the Raptors have lost a lot of basketball games to start the season doesn’t mean life is suddenly ending. But, as he himself also mentioned, his life and his teammates’ still revolves around the sport, and right now, as VanVleet noted, the Raptors are “just not playing good basketball.”
The prospect of heading out west hasn’t seemed this foreboding and important for a Raptors season in quite a while.
“Somehow, some way this west-coast trip has to be the start of something,” said Lowry. “Because it could be a really bad trip if we don’t look at this first game, and look at all these games and see how we can get better.”
Forget the trip, it could spiral into a really bad season if Toronto continues its downward trajectory.
There are all sorts of reasons you can point to for why the Raptors have been bad, but the bottom line is none of that matters unless they pick up their play.
“We’ve got to play better, man,” said Nurse. “We’ve got to get these guys playing to their capabilities. I think they’re better players than that. So we as coaches, and our leaders of our team, need to play better, and get these guys together and get them playing. And we as coaches need to get them playing better.”
It’s just that simple, and it’s just that difficult.
Though it may seem over-reactionary to say just six games deep, a lot of this season could hinge on what transpires over the next four games.
