In the midst of pandemic chaos, the Raptors are still exciting

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In the late going of the Toronto Raptors’ home loss to Phoenix on Tuesday, Suns star Devin Booker angrily pointed out the only spectator in the building – the Raptor.

The Toronto mascot had been making a spectacle of himself behind the basket as Booker shot free-throws. It’s hardly his fault he’s fire-engine red and has a head the size of a carry-on bag. Plus, he was just doing his job. And he does live in the arena (I guess), so a dinosaur should have the right to do what it likes in its own home.

But the officials unjustly sided with Booker. The Raptor was sent to the naughty corner of the bleachers for the remainder of the game. Toronto lost.

You know things are rough when the guy dressed in head-to-toe velour is making enemies.

“I was just trying to get him out of the way,” Booker said afterward. “It worked.”

Booker was speaking from the dais with two teammates. Initially, two were maskless. Booker arrived with a mask on and took it off, whereupon the guy sitting beside him, Chris Paul, pulled the collar of his hoodie up over his nose. Either this was good manners or the representatives of America reading the Canadian room. Our ways must seem strange to them.

Because of that divergence, you could reasonably argue that no sports team in the world has faced a higher degree of difficulty over the past two years than the Raps.

When coronavirus first hit, everyone in the NBA had to bubble. But only the Raptors had to stay in Florida once the first wave ebbed.

In Florida, time doesn’t work like it does elsewhere. A week in Tampa is like a month. A month is like a year. And a year is too awful to be contemplated.

Memos recently reported on by the National Post showed federal agencies took a keen interest in the Raptors’ travel plans in late 2020. They didn’t like ‘em. That scuppered any chance of coming home early.

In the States, it’s not as though anyone at the CDC was interrupting crisis Zooms to wonder, “Hey, what’re we gonna do about the San Antonio Spurs?”

When they were allowed back into the country, the Raptors faced the tightest pandemic regime in what had become another loose pandemic league. Rules that applied here did not do so elsewhere in the NBA.

COVID-19 hit the Raptors and every other team last December, but only Toronto was doubly jinxed. The guys who had COVID-19 couldn’t play, but the guys who’d sat beside the guys who had COVID-19 couldn’t play either.

Absenteeism was so rampant that, for a moment, the Raptors weren’t really an NBA team any more. They were just a bunch of basketball-adjacent nobodies who happened to fit into the real players’ uniforms.

I suppose this is what sports people mean when they talk about ”adversity.” Adversity gets a good rap these days, though it shouldn’t.

Athletes talk about it like they discovered the concept. Like they were the first people on Earth to have problems at work. Annoyingly, they have a tendency to act as though everything that doesn’t go their way is a grand conspiracy meant to thwart them from their destinies and turn them into grade-school gym teachers.

You got cut from the varsity baseball team and somehow managed to become a first-round draft pick? Well, this lady over here works two jobs and isn’t sure how she’s going to pay next month’s rent. Her adversity doesn’t just beat your adversity. It pushes your adversity out of a moving car.

Sports adversity is not real-life adversity. It’d be closer to the mark to call it disruption. Anything that disrupts the normal flow of things in sports is adverse. Usually, that adversity is bad. But occasionally, it has the opposite effect. The most common instance may be a very bad team firing its coach and suddenly becoming a much better team.

Just recently, the Raptors have become a major beneficiary of positive adversity. Two months ago, they were unwatchable. Nowadays, they’re a steady winner.

They’re not a contender. No amount of adversity can make a mediocre team talented, especially in the NBA. But while the world around them disrupts, they have gone from a sad, mediocre team to an exciting, mediocre team.

The key reason for that turnaround is Fred VanVleet. VanVleet is the sort of athlete who makes a mockery of all the metrics that professional sports teams cling to like secular gospel. To look at him, there is nothing that suggests VanVleet should be an elite basketball player. Every scouting department in the NBA agreed with that assessment, because VanVleet went undrafted. And yet he is elite.

Back in a less computerized era, VanVleet is what they used to call a winner. Which is not to say he wins all the time, but that winning is the thing most often on his mind. Despite all the talk about it in the sports context, that’s a rare sort of person.

With VanVleet running the show, Pascal Siakam having accepted his second-tier status and a rotating cast of undervalued and/or castoff pros backing them up, the Raptors have become fun to watch.

They are a less artful team than they were the last time lots of people paid attention, and that’s part of the attraction. This doesn’t seem like another, slightly lesser version of the Kawhi Leonard-Kyle Lowry Raptors. It seems like a brand new thing.

A month ago, Toronto was contemplating the sort of post-season that happens on a Caribbean beach. Now the Raptors are slugging it out in the NBA’s newish play-in group – teams ranked seventh through 10th in each conference.

“That’s usually what the playoffs look like,” VanVleet said after the Phoenix game, in reference to the unrelenting man coverage he faced. “That’s good for us to see.”

Back before COVID-19 shook the league out, you’d have said that anything that looked like the playoffs was pointless for these Raptors to see. But once in a while things go wrong in just the right way.