After an offseason so uneventful no sane person would dream of hosting daily podcasts throughout, we’re here. Opening night. Raptors. Cavs. Vince Carter on the call. Purple threads. Nostalgia oozing out the ears.
And, most refreshingly, zero existential crises about the direction of the franchise.
Yep, there’s a sense of renewal around here. The Raptors are once again a Normal Basketball Team, primed to give space for their young guys to blossom, with a couple more TBD prospects slated to join the team at next summer’s draft.
These greener, Scottie Barnes-centric Raptors won’t be good. But they do project to have a lot more purpose than last year’s squad, mired in a too-long goodbye embrace with the past that left team and fans alike suspended in grim stasis.
You can certainly quibble with how they got here, but tonight marks a clean slate; a return to playing basketball worth giving a damn about. A year removed from awkwardly icing their best player out of a confoundingly built team, the Raptors hand their freshly anointed leading man a supporting cast that, while thin (and currently extremely injured), befits his many talents.
Even if this thing is ultimately headed for the tank, the Raptors are primed to get back to entertainment after a year-long sabbatical. And with that should come all the beats and rhythms that bring us from here to there, of which we were entirely robbed last season. The 2023-24 Raptors were quite frankly not worth the time sink, bereft of the hope and dejection and joy and anger that make this whole thing worth devoting half the calendar year to. They were impersonal. What is there to be gleaned from a team that begs the nightly question: who are these guys?
There’s no such concern with this group. Most of the important figures on the 15-man are here for more than a cup o’ joe. Plenty of space for irrational connections, flags planted, and a compelling chapter in the years-long arc this group is merely wrapping the prologue on.
I don’t know exactly what this season holds for the Raptors. The possible outcomes range from cutesy sixth-seed flirtation to 12th, maybe 13th in the tanktastic East, with the lower-middle of that continuum likely being the final landing spot. But I don’t think it’s audacious to predict that regardless of the endpoint, the road this team takes will be a more fun to travel than the potholed disaster we all trode a year ago.
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Speaking of, today on the podcast I was joined by The Score’s Joseph Casciaro to lay down some bold predictions about the Raptors season, our second annual such show. 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’re guaranteed either prophetic analysis, or a bonehead take or two you can hold over me for eternity. That’s a win-win, baby.
