On Monday I attended the season ending media conferences for Dwane Casey and Bryan Colangelo, which you may have watched yourself live and can still watch for yourself in its entirety at raptors.com. While we can go through every little thing that the Raptors’ coach and General Manager said, I chose instead to highlight the parts of the pressers that stuck out to me. Below, you’ll find those talking points and my thoughts on some of those points.
First up was Dwane Casey…
In the season finale of RaptorBlog Radio, Drew, Oliver and I look back on yet another disappointing season in Raptor land and look ahead to what we hope are better days to come.
If you thought Wednesday’s season finale meant things would be slow in Raptor Land, think again. On Thursday, Bill Simmons published Part 1 of his annual list of the NBA’s top 50 most valuable assets, which included Jonas Valanciunas at No. 44 (just ahead of Enes Kanter and Andre Drummond, just behind Kenneth Faried).
More importantly, Simmons included this tidbit…
With the final game of the season upon us and many fans already looking ahead to what they hope is a prosperous off-season and next season, I figured I’d shake things up over here tonight.
On that note, in lieu of a Game Thread or Thoughts On the Game post later tonight, I’m going to just add some random thoughts I have throughout tonight’s game to this post.
The Raptors have closed out their disappointing 2012-13 season in seemingly impressive fashion, as they head into Wednesday’s season finale against Boston on a four-game winning streak and winners of six of their last seven games. In addition, the last four victories have all come against Eastern Conference playoff teams seeded fourth to sixth, and April 2013 now marks just the second winning month for the franchise in the Post Bosh Era (February of this season was the first).
With a win against the Celtics tonight and a Milwaukee loss, Toronto will finish just three games back of the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, which would mark the closest they’ve been to eighth since early January. Regardless of tonight’s events and how the standings finish, the Raptors as an organization (except for Dwane Casey, who told it like it is on Tuesday night) will likely spin a tale of how encouraging the season ending streak was, how indicative of how good this team can be it is, how if only the season was a little longer they could have caught eighth or how if a few of those early season losses had gone their way, they’d be getting ready for the playoffs.
And I really hope that true Raptors fans aren’t naive enough to believe it all.
