Raptors need to shake old habits as team embarks on new era
It's easy to slip into familiar habits, but the Raptors need to break away from their past in order to move forward.
LAS VEGAS — It’s admittedly strange to see a basketball court in a hotel ballroom and think, "This looks familiar," but if you’ve paid attention to the Toronto Raptors since their 2019 title, then hardwood laid over low-pile, tastefully patterned carpet has become commonplace. This is, to a degree, by design.
Toronto first utilized the setup out of necessity in the NBA’s Orlando bubble, alongside the other NBA franchises that made it into the restart of the divided 2019-20 season.
The following season, due to Canadian border and social gathering restrictions in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the Raptors relocated to Tampa, Florida. The Raptors played their games at Amalie Arena, but held their practices, meetings and training sessions at Tampa’s JW Marriott, converting an entire floor for the team’s use. Both of these arrangements were out of necessity, accelerated by the league and second-party production partners.
For the team’s Summer League practice facility this year, the Raptors intentionally went with something different, based on what they now know so well.
Ensconced in a private, less-trod wing of the enormous Wynn and Encore hotel and casino complex in Las Vegas, Toronto took over a giant, connected ballroom to lay down two full-sized NBA courts, with a stage and seating at one baseline and gym at the other. Dotting the room was team signage — some new and some repurposed from the team’s year in Tampa — banners and decals. These niceties were to make it look “Raptorized,” said Teresa Resch, the Raptors' vice president of basketball operations.
“It’s been interesting because a lot of these guys are free agents and rookies, so they haven’t lived through that experience like we have,” Resch told Yahoo Sports. “They weren’t part of the bubble, weren’t part of Tampa. For them, it’s kind of like 'Okay, this is how you do things?'”
The Raptors have built a practice facility here at the Wynn Hotel in Vegas. Pretty good: pic.twitter.com/JfRwMfE2JA
— Michael Grange (@michaelgrange) July 5, 2023
Convenience was a big factor in the team repurposing another ballroom to be a basketball court. Typically, they’d travel to a high school 20 minutes from the Vegas Strip for workouts and practices, but the thought was to cut travel time down to an elevator trip. The team, Resch noted, also had the ability to access the rooms at any hour of the day, an invite the front office extended to Raptors veterans not part of the Summer League roster but who came to town during the tournament to show support. Initially, the Raptors front office had asked around to other teams, in case any wanted to split the space since so many stayed within the two hotels. Ultimately, they decided to build it themselves.
“[To] invest the time, energy, resources and see if it works. Because if it’s something that works, and is valuable, then why would we want to share it?” Resch said.
What the Raptors did for their Summer League roster was undoubtedly special. They treated a group of hopeful athletes, all vying for a spot on an NBA roster, to what might have been the most NBA-adjacent lifestyle they’d had up to that point in their careers. They did post-practice team yoga under massive chandeliers, sat with media the space was just as convenient for, and then headed up to their hotel rooms. It was thoughtful, down to the custom court decals.
What was hard to escape, especially given the unknowns surrounding the franchise as Summer League went on, was the less-desired parallels the team opened itself up to in its repetitions.
A day before most of the Raptors got to Vegas, it was announced that Fred VanVleet, a cornerstone member of the team, would sign with the Houston Rockets. VanVleet got his start playing with the Raptors as part of their 2016 Summer League team alongside Pascal Siakam, Norman Powell and Jakob Poeltl. In an interview after his first Summer League practice with the Raptors, VanVleet was asked what he was trying to show.
“That I’m an NBA player, and I’m good enough to do it,” VanVleet answered, calmly as ever.
VanVleet would go on to be part of the Raptors' 2018-19 title team, growing up alongside Siakam, Powell and O.G. Anunoby as the next-gen core-in-waiting after DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry. From raw prospect to storied vet, undrafted to historic contract, VanVleet’s bildungsroman is his own as much as it became the Raptors’. His upward trajectory was proof of the team’s intact and successful developmental system, their eye for skill and ability to read their roster correctly, knowing how to accelerate and support player growth.
For a time, Toronto seemed to be able to bank on harnessing basketball anomalies to be a dozen steps ahead of the competition in drafting from the middle, team building, chemistry and cutting ambition — most notably in the trade that leveraged DeRozan and Poeltl for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. At the end of the 2022-23 season, almost every facet of that outsized identity had all but evaporated.
Yet, in what’s bound to be the most formative season to come for the team under Masai Ujiri and Bobby Webster’s tenure, what early moves there have been strangely mirror what's worked in the past.
Firing Nick Nurse then overhauling the coaching staff and hiring an internationally experienced coach into his first NBA head coaching job holds echoes to Dwane Casey, no matter how deep the disconnect between Nurse, his staff and the players was reported to be. By all accounts, Darko Rajakovic has hit the ground running to establish and repair relationships. He hosted team dinners in Vegas inclusive of all staff and players, and hired back some wellsprings of franchise knowledge and needed positivity, like Jama Mahlalela.
Removing Nurse came to feel necessary given how stagnant the team had gotten by February of the past season, but the talent and competitive drain can be traced all the way back to letting Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka go, just because both wanted the security of two-year — instead of one-off — deals. The thought seemed to be that one would decide to stay, and it didn’t necessarily matter who. It was a fundamental misreading of intention that continued into the departures that followed, all the way up to VanVleet. While some (Leonard, then Green) seemed inevitable and some were with hands tied in order to do right for a pillar of team history (Lowry), there was still a lopsided return.
Acquisitions were made in haste to fill empty positions. Young players were drafted or picked up and expected to develop when the attention to the pipeline between parent club and G League team slackened. In attempting to operate the team based only on the fading blueprints of what worked before, banking on anomalies becoming formulaic just because they’d worked so well in the past, the Raptors have been locked into a situation that seems impossible to succeed in or move on from.
Markquis Nowell, a surging spark plug that’s been compared by the team to VanVleet, has some similarities in story and drive, but it feels like a slippery, treacherous slope to pin a total franchise turnaround on lightning striking exactly the same, or even more impressively, a second time.
It’s hard to keep a franchise buoyant — let alone successful — in the riptides and swells of the NBA, but even the teams that tend toward consistency and slow building don’t add indecision willingly into the mix. Denver had been tinkering for years, perfecting its role players by cutting and trading without losing sight of the core duo that made it a competitive hammer. The Heat, mercurial as they have been, rely on their system of lesser-known, do-it-all grinders as the bedrock, and invest in stars that fit the system instead of the other way around.
When the Raptors had to make decisions over the last few seasons, they bought time. Where it was better to double down on who they had in the roles they had them in, they opted for a brand new style of play made necessary by their roster gaps. The coaching and communication breakdowns followed, the disconnect deepened, stars walked and the team reverted to old habits.
Now it’s all come due.
The difficulty — and hesitation — now comes in making new decisions. Decisions rooted in all those fundamental, thoughtful franchise qualities, and for once, completely free from the prototypes of the past.
