5
Halfway home and not even their head coach knows exactly what to make of the Toronto Raptors, circa 2007-08.
"I don't think our team has established itself right now, as far as how we're going to win," Sam Mitchell mused yesterday as his team geared up for the 42nd game of the season tomorrow night, (wed) against the Boston Celtics. "We've only won for one season, so we haven't established our identity as a team — who and what we are, at the core. We're still finding ourselves that way."
See what happens when a team gets a day off? Even an Action Jackson like Mitchell can get all existential out of nowhere.
But you can't really blame the guy. On one hand, his team is 22-19, a mirror image of its record a year ago and 21/2 games out of the same No.ƒ|3 seed they had going into last season's NBA playoffs, despite an improved Eastern Conference.
Related Information
On the other, what was supposed to be a breakout season, where the surprising gains from last season were consolidated and built on, has been predictable only in its unpredictability.
Is it fair to call a team that's 22-19 underachieving?
Maybe. With 41 games in the bank, the Atlantic Division defending champions have conceded their banner to the 33-6 Celtics, so there's one preseason goal out the window.
As for the franchise's first 50-win season — or even setting a franchise record with 48 — well, that's looking like a stretch.
They need to go 26-15 to surpass last season's banner-raising 47-35 mark, and there's little about their herky-jerky first half to suggest there's that kind of consistency in this group.
Sure the current edition of the team that Bryan Colangelo built has a three-game advantage over last season's model, but it was at exactly this point last season the Raptors transformed themselves from a patchwork of players brought in en mass by Air Colangelo into one of the hottest teams in the NBA, as they rode a 28-13 finish to the No.ƒ|3 seed in the Eastern Conference.
As good, decent, disappointing, bewildering — pick your adjective — as the current Raptors have been so far, they have always had the benefit of pointing to their record and saying that they're better than they were a year ago at this time.
That's a suggestion that will sound more hollow as the season wears on unless this group can match last season's second-half surge. Fall short of getting red hot and the Raptors run the risk of bearing the weight of unmet expectations, fair or not.
And the players have expectations of their own. To a man, they think they're better. They just haven't quite played like it.
"I think we're a more complete team this year," said Chris Bosh, who has done his part this month to get the Raptors rolling in the second half. "We play better defence and we're more built for winning this year. We just have to be patient with ourselves and just keep believing."
Don't think expectations can weigh you down?
Consider the sophomore plight of Andrea Bargnani.
He blossomed in the second half of last season — a big reason the Raptors started rolling — yet is now in a season-long funk that only seems to be getting deeper, based on his new-found aversion to even shooting, the one mainstay of his basketball arsenal.
Any meaningful contribution from Bargnani seems like a bonus right now.
Somehow it seems more likely the boon could come in the return of a healthy and aggressive T.J. Ford and, now 19 games removed the from the lineup, with information on the progress of his rehabilitation assignment in Houston scant at best.
While Jose Calderon has played all-star quality point guard in Ford's absence, he hasn't been forgotten.
"[When do we miss him?] every game, man, when Jose is out there clutching his knees," Bosh said.
Who is the best Raptors point guard is now more of a debating point than ever, but there's no question that without a guard the quality of Ford or Calderon playing backup minutes, the consistency of the second unit has suffered, robbing the team of one of its prime assets.
If the Raptors do take a step backward in the won-loss column this season, their redemption will have to be earned in the playoffs, where a spot in the second round would make the season a success by any measure.
By that time, Ford should be back, and the great Toronto point guard debate likely in full throat.
Ford? Calderon?
For the Raptors to get where they did last year or beyond, Mitchell is surely thinking both.
