The Toronto Raptors opened the season on Wednesday night with a 116-104 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers. The team will face the Boston Celtics in Toronto on Friday, Oct. 19 at Scotiabank Arena.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Okay folks, move along. Nothing to see here. Check back in a month or so.
That is usually the mantra for NBA teams in the infancy of a season, when games are for working out the kinks, establishing player chemistry and integrating newcomers to a new system.
For the 1-0 Raptors, the stakes have already been raised a bit higher, facing the talented Boston Celtics in Toronto on Friday night at Scotiabank Arena.
The game pits two teams that are anticipated to be engaged in a season-long, knock-down, drag-it-out battle for supremacy in a wide-open Eastern Conference.
And even though it is only the second game of the season for both teams – and the first of four against each other – there is an opportunity to earn early bragging rights.
“Good teams look at these games as statement games,” Toronto backup centre Greg Monroe, a former Celtic, said on Thursday after practice.
The Raptors opened the season on Wednesday night with a 116-104 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers, a ragged affair befitting an early-season tussle.
The Celtics also have one win after beating another team viewed as a strong contender in the East, the Philadelphia 76ers, on Tuesday.
It will not be an easy weekend for Toronto. After the Boston game, the Raptors will fly out for a Saturday night tilt in Washington against the Wizards. The Raptors beat the Wizards in six games in the opening round of last season’s playoffs.
“I haven’t looked too far down the schedule very often,” said Nick Nurse, Toronto’s new head coach. “I did this morning and it’s not very easy when you look through the whole month.”
The Celtics, who came within a hair of winning the East last season before getting bounced in the conference final in seven games by the Cavaliers, have improved.
Explosive point guard Kyrie Irving, who did not play in the postseason following knee surgery, is back directing the Boston offence. And the Celtics are further fortified by the return of forward Gordon Hayward, who is back in the starting lineup. A gruesome ankle injury in the first game of last season sidelined him all year.
When you factor in 6-foot-10 centre Al Horford, perhaps the game’s most versatile big man, and ever-improving 20-year-old guard Jason Tatum, who scored 23 points in the win over Philadelphia, the Celtics are deep and a load to handle.
“It’s a great test, it’s a challenge,” Nurse said. “And it is a little bit more important than playing a team from the West. We hope that we’re in this chase.
“I think everybody up and down the league is in agreement that [the Celtics] are the best team in the East. Everybody keeps saying that they’re picked to go to the finals and all that kind of stuff. And we hope we’re in that race with them.”
“Good teams always want to play good teams,” Monroe said. “It’s a good test and they probably feel the same way.”
The Raptors are still looking to jell as a unit with a new coach in Nurse and the additions of forwards Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green, who arrived in the big off-season trade with the San Antonio Spurs.
After missing almost all of last season with an injury, Leonard played well in his first game with his new team, scoring 24 points off 9-for-22 shooting with 12 rebounds. However, the rust from his long stretch of inactivity was evident.
“He’s far more ahead than I expected him to be,” Green said of his long-time teammate. “But I still think it’s going to take him at least a month to get back to his old self and get into a rhythm. You might see spurts of it sooner than that.”
As for taking on the Celtics, Green is not putting that much into it being a statement game so early in the season.
“Not that important,” he said. “Obviously, we want to win and you want to continue to grow. The biggest piece for us is to try to grow, to learn to get better. This is a great challenge for us early in the season, to gauge where we’re at, where we may be and where we want to be.
“But we know that these early games, in the first month of October and most of November, are still very much like preseason games.”