The NBA, in a breathless, self-aggrandizing press release, has dubbed this "Green Week," complete with recycling blitzes in the arenas and organic-cotton shooting shirts on the benches.
The seriousness of the initiative wasn't driven home until Toronto's team bus was observed idling outside an Orlando gym for the entirety of the club's 11/2-hour practice the other day. But one understands why the bus must run. Global warming is a problem humanity might be able to conquer in the coming decades with ingenuity and co-operation. But player warming - now, that's a problem that can be conquered immediately, with a turn of a key and a flick of the a/c! When you're criss-crossing the continent, travelling 12-to-a-jetliner, what's a sixth toe on your carbon footprint? Speaking of well-meaning-but-futile drops in the bucket, the Raptors' win streak ended at six games last night, and with it their faint hope of a playoff spot. Toronto's 112-103 loss to the woeful Knicks at the Air Canada Centre meant the Raptors missed the post-season for the ninth time in the franchise's 14 seasons - albeit for just the first time in three years. And it also reminded its witnesses of an inconvenient truth: The Raptors, with 30 wins and just six games to play, aren't very good.
"Would I like to be (in the playoffs)? Of course. It's the best Basketball in the world," said Chris Bosh. "But this year we're going to have to watch, so I guess I'm just going to have to be a student of the game and see how I can get better by watching other teams."
If they're going to be better next season, improved defence wouldn't hurt.
The Raptors, bottom 10 in the 30-team league in opposing field-goal percentage this season, allowed the Knicks to shoot a gaudy 51 per cent from the field last night, including a whopping 52 per cent from three-point range.
So while there was giddiness in the locker room during the six-game winning streak, the truth is the Magic were the lone over-.500 team the Raptors beat during their late-season moment of prosperity. Toronto's other five victories came against teams with an average winning percentage of .376. Beating bad teams hasn't been a problem for the Raptors this season; they're .588 against teams below .500. They've played .220 against teams with winning records.
So late-season rationalizations based on a six-victory sample - last night's assertion by Shawn Marion that the Raptors would be in the playoffs if he'd been here all season; and the oft-parroted line about how everything would have been different if Jose Calderon had been healthy and Andrea Bargnani's early-season production hadn't been stunted by mean, old Sam Mitchell - are as admirably hopeful as they are dubious.
"I don't think you can overstate a (six-game) win streak at this point in the season," Bryan Colangelo, the GM, said before the streak ended. "But I continue to point to the things that I think are a reason for optimism in the future. I think there's a lot of scenarios (for next year's roster) that could include all of the current players, (most) of the current players, or some of the current players. There's a lot of be optimistic about."
Colangelo, if you examine the arc from 47 wins in 2006-07 to 41 wins last year to this year's sub-40-win plummet, clearly needs to nix "all of the current players" from the option list. Reusing most of the current players, Green Week aside, sounds dangerous enough. Clearly this team, if everything went perfectly for it, would have a better record. But the separation between the East's best teams and its bottom-four playoff teams is wide enough now that the short-term goal of winning a playoff round seems farther away than it did a season ago, when the Magic dominated the Raptors in a five-game disposal. And if the old cliche applies - that the true test of a team comes in how it responds to tough times - this squad failed horribly.
