Toronto Star Referrer

Real ‘nightmare’ is Raps’ sked

Siakam can call team ‘dangerous,’ but it’s 1-7 against East’s top trio

DAVE FESCHUK TWITTER: @DFESCHUK

Call it recency bias. Call it delusional confidence. But with the Raptors back to .500 for the first time since early December, it certainly didn’t take long for Pascal Siakam to display the kind of swagger you don’t always see from the slumping best player of a disappointment of an NBA team.

“We’re going to be dangerous if we get in there in the playoffs, and that’s our goal,” Siakam told TNT after Tuesday’s home win over the Miami Heat. “We can be a nightmare, for sure.”

So much for the Raptors stealthily arriving in the post-season as an overlooked underdog.

Not that it necessarily matters. Toronto’s Masai Ujiri era, which began with the team president unleashing a public “F--- Brooklyn!” in the lead-up to the 2014 playoffs, has never made keeping a low profile an organizational priority. Which is largely a good thing. In sports and in life, projecting confidence can be a weapon.

The problem is that while Ujiri had plenty of reason for trash-talking confidence most of a decade ago, Tuesday’s big talk from Siakam isn’t grounded in much that’s tangible. The good news is that Toronto is in the midst of its longest win streak of the season. The bad news is that longest win streak of the season has stretched a paltry three games.

Which is only to ask: Is there any logical reason why the Raptors, eighth in the East heading into Wednesday, would actually be considered a matchup “nightmare” in the playoffs? Would anyone, beyond performative platitudes, reasonably consider them “dangerous”?

Maybe so if all of Toronto’s games could somehow be played in Toronto. As a home team, after all, the Raptors owned the fifth-best record in the East. Alas, if the Raptors make the playoffs, they’ll need to start a best-of-seven series on the road. And Toronto ranks 25th in road winning percentage.

That tells you something about the year-over-year fall-off of a franchise that was expected to be far better than a ho-hum 38-38 at this point. A season ago, don’t forget, the 48-win Raptors ranked fifth in road winning percentage and earned a fifth seed into the post-season. A season ago, the Raptors, fully healthy, actually seemed dangerous.

But whatever gritty resilience the Raptors carried around 12 months ago, they’ve rediscovered it only sporadically this season, when almost every sign of life has been promptly negated by the arrival of another stinker, like last week’s loss to the Pacers or the 1-4 road trip at the beginning of March.

Given that lack of consistency, it’s hard to imagine any of the teams at the top of the East losing serious sleep over Toronto. Coming up on the four-year anniversary of their only championship, the Raptors have won precisely one playoff series since they raised that banner. And the odds of them winning another next month are long.

There’s parity in the NBA, sure. But lately it’s been a parity at the top. Since the NBA initiated the play-in concept in 2020, play-in teams are 0-for-10 in first-round series. None of those 10 teams have so much as taken a series to seven games. Only three have gone to six.

The Raptors started Wednesday deadlocked in eighth place with the Atlanta Hawks, who’d hold the tiebreaker should it come to that. And while it’s true they were also only 2 ½ games behind sixth-place Brooklyn for a chance at avoiding the play-in tournament that includes seeds seven through 10, the road ahead is rough. In their remaining six games, the Raptors are facing the toughest schedule in the East as measured by the combined winning percentages of their opponents.

Two games in Charlotte, on Sunday and Tuesday, will be the only respite from a home stretch that includes two more in Boston against the second-place Celtics, plus one each against the thirdplace Sixers and first-place Bucks. Only the game against Milwaukee is at Scotiabank Arena.

Call Toronto a nightmare matchup all you like, but so far this season in a combined eight games against the East-topping trio of Milwaukee, Boston and Philadelphia, the Raptors are 1-7.

That’s not to say upsets can’t happen. The NBA is in the midst of an injury epidemic that, if it strikes a particular player or two, can reduce any franchise from contender to pretender. And in a league known for creating dominant juggernauts, this year there are plenty of good teams but no real great ones.

And nobody’s saying it’s unfathomable that Raptors might belatedly figure things out.

Seen as they are, though — as a flawed team that lacks shooting and bench depth and playmaking and, on a lot of nights, any semblance of actual chemistry — winning the games that matter doesn’t figure to come easily. There’s a reason Toronto owns a 4-10 record in games decided by three points or fewer. Bereft of a legitimate closer, bycommittee attempts at clutch offence are often misadventures in questionable decisions and feeble execution. Which isn’t exactly a recipe for reeling off playoff wins.

Maybe there’s another gear in Toronto’s locker room. Maybe there’s a surge in the offing. Maybe Nick Nurse’s bag of tricks has some fresh magic. But if the Raptors are going to go around claiming to be a “dangerous” playoff team, it wouldn’t hurt to start closing games like one.

Extending the current win streak to a season-high four on Friday in Philadelphia would be a promising step. And if Siakam is serious about his team being a “nightmare” matchup, it wouldn’t hurt for him to start terrorizing opponents more consistently. He’s been better of late, but Siakam’s numbers have dipped considerably in the 17 games since the all-star break. By a lot of measures, March has been Siakam’s worst month of the season. That doesn’t exactly seem like a harbinger for a Cinderella rampage through the Eastern bracket. It certainly doesn’t bode well for Siakam’s all-NBA candidacy.

It’s great to dream big. It’s a Ujiriera tradition in Toronto to talk big. But to announce Toronto’s team as “dangerous” and a matchup “nightmare” for an Eastern leader? Seventy-six games into the grind, it sounds more like faint hope than a serious statement of intent.

Let’s face it. Until these Raptors prove otherwise, they’ve been dangerous to nothing but Ujiri’s reputation. In a year in which everyone expected better, so far the nightmare has been Toronto’s very own.

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2023-03-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thestarepaper.pressreader.com/article/282235194919241

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