TORONTO — The Toronto Raptors accomplished plenty this season.
After a hard-fought seven-game series, the franchise affirmed its identity as a top-five defence, unveiled Scottie Barnes’ stardom and hit multiple developmental checkboxes along the way.
Enough to even deem the season a campaign, right?
Nope.
“I don’t know about successful, said Barnes at his end-of-season media availability. “I felt like we went out there every single game and just got better. Found out more about ourselves … we worked really hard and didn’t leave anything on the table.”
Okay, so if a 16-win jump year-over-year and pushing the Cleveland Cavaliers to a do-or-die finale aren’t enough to be considered a success, what is?
According to Barnes: “Sticking to our standard, sticking to the way we play, and I felt like we did that.”
Wait, so the season was a success?
Still nope.
“I wouldn’t say it was successful because we felt like we could have done better and went pretty far, further than we went,” Barnes concluded.
The franchise forward’s feelings weren’t exclusive.
Just about every Raptor who spoke on Monday felt a sense of gratitude towards an undoubtedly positive season, many referring to it as a “step in the right direction,” but none felt satisfied by the ending.
Jakob Poeltl said as much: “We felt like we had something, we felt like we had a chance … we could have gone on a run here.”
So did RJ Barrett: “Always the end goal is to win a championship, you know. I think from where we were last year, till now, has been a huge jump for us, so it’s successful in that sense.”
But even in Barrett’s more glass-half-full spieling, the hometown hero couldn’t help but let the competitive edge slip out, recounting Game 5 of the series as “the one that hurts,” as it was a missed opportunity.
Even youngsters, like Jamal Shead, felt like “we could have done a lot more.”
And that may just be it. The subjective line between success and failure is often blurred.
The Raptors, in many ways, were successful. Especially when it came to controlling the “work,” which was head coach Darko Rajakovic’s ultimate message all season.
“We are not focusing on a win, ever,” Rajakovic explained before Game 6 of the Raptors first-round series against the Cleveland Cavaliers. “Because we don’t control wins. There are so many things that you can control, and then the outcome of the game is win or lose. We cannot think about, ‘oh, we want to win,’ and then get lazy … and we’re not doing what we’re supposed to do. We just have to focus on a very high level … to control everything that’s in our power.
Rajakovic has been consistent in that mindset, going as far back as December, when he told me the same thing: “We always talk about (wanting) to be a winning team, we want to win every single night, we want to compete every single night. But if you put winning as your primary objective and goal, then you’re losing focus on the details that really lead to winning or losing games. You want to have your focus on execution, on preparation, on things that you really control. Winning is not in your control.”
And yet, despite making many strides in establishing “championship habits,” the players are right in feeling that still wasn’t enough to deem their season as successful.
Why? Because the NBA is, above all else, a results-based league.
If it were more about theory and potential, Gradey Dick would’ve been on the court in the playoffs and not Jamison Battle or A.J. Lawson. Them’s the breaks. Results matter, even if it’s a coach’s job to tell players they don’t.
Players are wired to care, and it’s often what pushes them to get better.
Hence why, after just about every Raptor expressed displeasure with how the season ended, they immediately followed it up with mentions of their off-season goals to improve.
Barnes spoke about learning to maintain his aggression, Ja’Kobe Walter referenced strength training and Sandro Mamukelashvili noted his focus on quickness, as a couple of examples.
There’s an appetite for improvement that can’t be satiated by platitudes and feel-good sentimentality. It’ll require winning.
And the hope is that all the accomplishments — and shortcomings — along that path to the top are simply “steps to success,” as a famous Greek once philosophized.
