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Toronto Raptors Reflect on the 2014/15 Season

By Kevin Nimmock

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In the last few days, GM Masai Ujiri, head coach Dwane Casey and several key players from the Toronto Raptors had the chance to speak to the media about their season, the disappointing playoffs and what lies ahead. These end-of-year media sessions help us understand the perceptions those within the organization have of the 2014/15 campaign in general. Let’s look at some of the thoughts shared during the interviews to better understand what this summer will look like for the Raptors. All of the following quotes are courtesy of Holly MacKenzie of Raptors.com.

“We worked ad nauseam at the beginning of training camp to be better offensively to play with a little bit of pace, probably too much pace for my liking or for your defence’s liking,” Casey said. “I thought our defence suffered from it, from us getting better offensively.”

Casey touched on a common theme throughout the media sessions: defence. Last season, the Raptors were a defence-first team, which was supposed to be Casey’s calling card as an NBA strategist. This year, they regressed to having the 23rd best defence in the league. It’s hard for any team, regardless of how potent their offence is, to find success in the playoffs with a porous defence.

“I feel like our coverages weren’t that crisp [this year],” Amir Johnson added.“We were on a string last year defensively, where everyone was moving.”

“I don’t think it was mostly on coach Casey, but mostly, maybe on injuries which happens to every team,” Ujiri said, weighing in on the team’s defensive struggles. “Now we have to go back to the drawing board and decide, now that we can maybe bring in a couple players, how we want to play.”

Indeed, the team suffered from its fair share of injuries this season, with All-Stars DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry missing time. Still, the defence was bad at the start of the year when the whole team was healthy and they were winning. It’s much easier to ignore problems when the team is still triumphant, so it wasn’t like the defensive woes began when DeRozan went down on Nov. 28.

“Sometimes when you’re close with somebody, sometimes when a situation happens you’re timid to yell at a friend or something small like that,” DeRozan said. “We’ve got to understand that if we’re close off the court, no matter what’s being said to one of us on the court, it shouldn’t matter.”

Many players spoke in length about the team’s chemistry, and how it might have actually posed a problem for them. The general thought was that the team communicated so well off the floor, but was not able to translate that communication to the court. DeRozan suggested that this was because players were nervous about calling each other out in tense situations, thereby hurting their interpersonal relationships.

“We communicate so well off the court,” Patrick Patterson said. “We’re around each other, we’re a family, we’re a brotherhood and when we’re off the court it’s all jokes. It’s just when those lights turn on and that ball is thrown up in the air, for some reason, we don’t talk nearly enough.”

Moving forward, many of the players noted that Ujiri will likely change the roster quite a bit to respond to the disappointing series sweep against the Wizards. The changes are necessary if the team ever wants to have a chance of advancing deep into the playoffs, but will still be hard for a squad that was left mostly unchanged last summer.

“You look around at these guys as your brothers,” DeRozan said. “You do everything with them every single day. They become your family and the reality of it was just tough knowing that it was over and some guys may not be back.”

This should be an exciting summer for Raptors fans, full of questions about roster changes and coaching adjustments. Defence and chemistry will be key issues to address as the Raptors look to shift from good to great next season.

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