After an offseason so uneventful that no sane person would ever host daily podcasts throughout, we’re here. Opening night. Raptors. Cavs. Vince Carter on the call. Purple threads. Nostalgia oozing from the ears.
And, most refreshingly, a complete lack of creeping existential dread about the direction of the franchise.
HEEHAWW!
That’s right. These Raptors, for all the roster building stumbles along the way, come into the franchise’s thirtieth season as a Normal Basketball Team, committed to letting their young dudes blossom, and primed to add another set of young dudes to the mix in the draft next summer. This year, the team’s best player isn’t being awkwardly iced out of his confoundingly built team while the public gawks. Instead, the new number one, Scottie Barnes, has been given the keys in earnest, paired with a supporting cast that, while thin, befits his many talents.
We get to watch a coherent-ish basketball team play a real season this year (or at least we will when half the rotation is out of the infirmary). Sure, it could very well end in a late-season tank, but what’ll set it apart from last season is the typical beats and rhythms of hope and dejection and joy and anger that dot the many cold months between here and there, of which we were robbed entirely last season. Mired by indecision and the painful process of letting the past go, the 2023-24 Raptors simply weren’t worth the time sink. There’s nothing good to be gleaned from a team that leaves you begging the nightly question: who are these guys?
Mercifully, their sabbatical from being the entertainment product they’re supposed to be is seemingly over.
Outgunned by the league’s true heavies as this year’s squad may be, we go in knowing that most of the key players figure to be here for more than a cup o’ joe. It’s a starting line of sorts; a clean slate, a fresh base upon which to build the kind of irrational attachments to grown men tossing leather through a hoop that make this whole thing worth investing half the calendar year into.
I don’t know exactly what’s ahead for this year’s Raptors. The possible outcomes range from cutesy sixth-seed flirtation to 12th, maybe 13th in the tanktastic East, with somewhere in the lower-middle of that continuum probably being the final landing spot. But I don’t think it’s especially audacious to predict it’ll be a way more fun road to travel than it was a year ago.
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Speaking of, today on the podcast I’m joined by The Score’s Joseph Casciaro to fire off bold predictions about the Raptors for the second straight year. Last year we ran the gamut from “pretty much bang on” to “Jalen McDaniels will be a plus-minus darling,” so by tuning in, you’ll guaranteed either prophetic analysis or something to hold over my head for eternity. That’s a win-win, baby.
Enjoy the pod, enjoy the opener, and thanks for hangin’.
