Like a lot of pre-season games over the last couple of nights, Friday’s Raptors/Grizzlies contest wasn’t televised in either team’s city, and the only way you could actually follow this game live outside of being there was on Memphis radio, so it’s kind of like a Raptors fan’s equivalent of the whole “if a tree falls in the forest with no one around” shtick.
The overall direction and eventual landing spot of the current Raptors’ rebuild has been on my mind for much of the summer, as I know it has been for some other Raps diehards, too. Whether you want to call it a rebuild, a retooling, or simply a build, as Bryan Colangelo now refers to this stage, it’s obvious that Toronto is in Year Three of some sort of plan, and that the Raptors will head into training camp next month with what is unquestionably the best post-Bosh roster yet.
In a recent piece for NBA.com, John Schuhmann doesn’t necessarily seem sold on the idea that the ceiling for this Raptors team is very high but he does seem to like the general direction of the franchise in his column titled “Raptors moving steadily along in their rebuilding phase.”
This brings us back to the question of what exactly the Toronto Raptors are building towards.
It’s not as exciting as the announcement of the regular season schedule, and it’s not as interesting to discuss and debate as ESPN’s “Future Ranking” of the franchise, but in case you missed it, I thought I’d pass along the news that the Raptors’ pre-season schedule was released on Thursday.
Kyle Lowry blowing by Steve Nash is something we hope to see at the ACC on January 20
In one of the more anticipated days of the summer for basketball junkies, the NBA announced its’ 2012-2013 schedule on Thursday, and as usual, there are some games that obviously stand out from the rest.
While I doubt the Raptors are featured in many, if any, of those games for the casual NBA fan, we’re here to cater to Raptors fans. And with that, here are the games we think you should circle on the calendar:
The lifting of the NBA’s moratorium as of midnight today means that all signings, re-signings and trades that went down before July 11 can finally become official, which means a guy like Kyle Lowry should be an official Raptor soon enough (if he isn’t already by the time you read this) and the Knicks will now have three days to match the three-year offer sheet to Landry Fields.
One of the new developments that emerged almost immediately after midnight is that Jerryd Bayless has agreed to a new contract with the Grizzlies.
