A few days ago, Toronto Raptors coach Dwane Casey pointed to one of his late-season additions on the practice court and began to muse on him.
"Now P.J. Tucker, he will fight you," Casey said. "A lot of guys in this league will pretend-fight you, but he will fight you."
Tucker is the size of industrial fridge, has a stare that bends spoons and, most important, has the history. You are inclined to agree.
"No, no," Casey said, in rebuttal to some imaginary demur. "He will actually fight you."
For a horrible second, you imagine that Dwane Casey is talking about you in particular. Well, okay, fine. Your long-term disability insurance is decent. And a few weeks in hospital would be a sort of vacation. Just as long as Tucker doesn't spend too much time on the face. Orbital bones don't always heal right.
During his six years in Toronto, the will to combat has been Casey's overarching and as-yet-unachieved theme. He gives passing praise to reliable shooters, passers, ball-handlers, hardwood thinkers and the like. But it's the unglamorous plodder and enthusiastic belligerent he most appreciates. If Casey ran a Fortune 500 company, the janitor would be employee-of-the-month every time.
He's never had that sort of lineup in Toronto. The defining players of the Casey Era are DeMar DeRozan (tentative), Kyle Lowry (brittle) and Jonas Valanciunas (stubbornly shy of both hard contact and progress). To differing degrees, all of them have fight, but none of them are fighters. There's a difference.
They proved it again on Thursday night, handing back every bit of a 25-point third-quarter lead that turned the final seconds into a panicked scramble. They were saved in the end by poor decision making from Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo, who opted for an uncontested dunk in a situation where only a three-point basket had value. At the very end, the Raptors didn't beat the Bucks. The Bucks did that for them.
As such, it may have been the most unconvincing win since the Dunkirk evacuation.
Having escaped with the series and, more important, their dignity, the players were leaning hard on the up-and-at-'em clichés.
"Ready for the next one. Ready for the next one," DeRozan said, though I'm not sure what about a near-miss like Thursday's proves you are 'ready' for the defending champions.
Casey returned to his frequent invocations of the Jake LaMotta School of Tactics: "We've got some fighters and scrappers …We make it hard on ourselves sometimes, but at the end of the day we're going to go down swinging."
One wonders if there is something Freudian about Casey's suggestion that it's better to lose the right way, even when there is still a chance of winning.
If you were to sum up what has defined the Raptors during this recent run of success, it is that ability to absorb punishment. If all professional athletes are fighters in the general sense, this team is the wrong sort. They're the one who stands in the middle of the ring, arms dangling, daring you to swing freely.
Everything is difficult for the Raptors, especially the easy things. No lead is safe (from themselves). No two players can be in form at the same time. Every advantage must be quickly surrendered.
Every once in a while, they will string together a nice run of regular-season wins that suggest they've finally figured it out. Then the playoffs start, and you're reminded how little the regular season matters. Other top teams lean into the postseason. The Raptors fall headlong into them like quicksand and begin trashing about in search of a vine. This time it was Norm Powell. That trick probably won't work twice.
Nothing about the way they beat the Bucks suggests a change in that core identity.
After three previous successive seasons of playoff dithering, that will have to happen now.
The accepted line is that the Raptors have no chance against a Cleveland Cavaliers team running at full power. More than any other league, the NBA is prone to 'That's just the way it is' thinking. As long as they take a game or two (as they did last year) this can all be held up as a game effort – gone down swinging. And then ready for the next one (in a year's time).
At some point, that can't be good enough. This is that point. The Raptors no longer have the excuse of experience. The roster is overflowing with it. They can't say they lack the horses, since their two key cogs have five all-star appearances in the past three years.
More to the point, it's not going to get a whole lot better than this.
In the off-season, barring calamity, Toronto will sign Lowry to a long-term deal alongside DeRozan. Both are well into their primes.
In the middle-term, the top-end personnel is not improving. Whatever the Raptors are right now, they are. Powell is not going to become Kawhi Leonard, no matter how early he shows up at the gym. You might get lucky with a fringe player, but it's smarter to assume you won't.
While the Raptors stand still, the civic landscape around them is shifting. The Leafs are already hogging all the attention and will only take more of it next year. The Jays are, if not good, interesting – something the Raptors often aren't. It's easy to imagine this team being swamped by the local competition. It may already have been.
So while the Raptors may not allow themselves to think of it this way, the coming series against Cleveland is a defining moment for basketball in Toronto.
The Raptors could be good in a tedious way for several more years to come, but where's the juice in that? In its way, it's worse than being bad, because there is reasonable hope for improvement in the midst of awfulness. There is none in the purgatory of just-okayness.
So enough with the moral victories, the plausible excuses and losing the right way. If the Raptors are ever going to find their inner combatant, this is the moment to do so.
Cathal Kelly