There’s certainly a place for dread in sports. In fact, it’s the through-line of like 90% of the experience of following a team. Each year begins with hope, yes, but beneath that, an understanding that the world is cruel, only one team wins, and you’re probably gonna wind up some degree of sad. Watching sports is the Eating Arby’s of hobbies.
I wrote a couple months back in this very newsletter about how this season was supposed sit in the rare, delicate pocket where low expectations and entertaining basketball converge to create the Bliss Zone, where the wins are fun, losses boost the future and sparse are the reasons for depression. For a while, even with a hellish run of injuries, the Raptors upheld that promise.
And then December happened, and everyone kinda lost their minds for a hot second. Losing streaks make folks question everything, even if the reasons for them are pretty explainable, as they were in the case of the Raptors’ near 0-for month. This certainly doesn’t apply to the whole fanbase, but I interact with enough Raptors sicko factions to pretty confidently say Raptors-related despair was as ratcheted up as any point in the last few years during the hell week the team spent getting destroyed by a bunch of bona fide contenders and also the Atlanta Hawks.
As much as it’s kinda corny and arbitrary to mark fresh starts and new beginnings with a simple flip of the calendar from one month to another, it doesn’t feel like such a reach in the case of these Toronto Raptors. You can safely store the last month in some inaccessible corner of your mind palace and let yourself believe again going into the new year.
Day one of 2025 brought tangible change to the complexion of the team. Immanuel Quickley’s back, meaning the expressed goal of this season — figuring out what the hell this team’s got — has begun in earnest. RJ Barrett, presumably, will return from illness sometime soon, restoring the core that hasn’t suited up together since Dune: Part Two hit theatres. The low-stakes, high-entertainment promise of October can finally be fulfilled, as long as the basketball gods chill out on the injury front for a bit.
My advice: enjoy this. Yeah, there will be some important info gathering in the year ahead, and not all of it’s gonna be rosy. Decisions will be made, players will assert their place in the long-term plans or they won’t, and the fallout moves may upset you depending on your allegiances. But in the grand scheme, this next stretch of Raptors basketball is a time to let go and take it all in, knowing another high pick and a long runway for most or all of the team’s young pieces lie ahead.
There will be a time to fret. It comes along in every team’s growth cycle right around the time winning becomes the priority; contractual drama saps some of the fun, too. We’re a ways from either of those things in these parts, though. And as much as wallowing is integral to doing sports fandom right, so is having fun on the ride up from the ground floor.
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Today on the podcast Katie Heindl joined me for the first Toxic Positivity Friday of 2025, where it didn’t really feel all that toxic now that Immanuel Quickley’s back. Enjoy the show, and have a great weekend!
