The Toronto Raptors close out the week tonight at home against the Orlando Magic. This has been a busy week for me, with a big work (day job) event and getting ready to move to a new home next week. But I’ve still managed to jot down some notes from my occasional Twitter scrolling!
1. City edition
They’ve yet to be officially be unveiled, but as they always do, some of the league’s City Edition jerseys have started to leak out, and this looks like the one for the Raptors:
VAZOU!
Trago para vocês a primeira imagem da nova camisa City Edition do TORONTO RAPTORS! #NBA75
O dino voltou! Agora vestindo um uniforme muito conhecido pela torcida.
Vou te mostrar nos próximos tweets as primeiras referências que notei. pic.twitter.com/KQwpDv9IsY
— Camisas da NBA (@camisasdanba) October 25, 2021
It’s... fine? Kinda boring in that it’s just a mashup of last year’s City edition jersey and the classic dino jersey. I really liked the sharp simplicity of last year’s, personally, and I bought myself a Lowry one. I don’t think I’ll buy one of these, but I don’t mind this one at all.
2. Will the Raptors sell at the deadline?
Listened to Zach Lowe and Tim Bontemps this week on the Lowe Post podcast, and Bontemps seems to think the Raptors might be going in a different direction than Fred VanVleet and Pascal Siakam are. I guess he think those guys want to win, and the Raptors want to tank, essentially? I’m not 100% sure that’s true, but, as Bontemps went on to say, how they’re doing in January and February will probably tell the tale:
If the Raptors struggle, and aren’t really in the playoff race, I think they could potentially be a real significant team in terms of the trade market. Because there's not a lot of guys like Fred or Pascal who could be available this year and if one of them gets put on the market it could really be a swing piece for someone if they get a deal done.
Lowe, for his part, doesn’t think the return for either one of VanVleet or Siakam would be that strong, and I personally don’t think any contenders that could use either one of those guys have the assets anyway — they’ve all already traded all their picks to Oklahoma City and New Orleans. Zach went on to say that he thinks they just need a little more juice on offense — juice that Siakam should provide when he returns. (He also described them as “fun as hell” on defense.)
3. The forgotten man in Brooklyn
Really enjoy James Herbert’s piece on Joe Harris from a few weeks back. Harris has played with 80 different players in six years in Brooklyn! That seems crazy to me, but I guess that’s the way it goes in today’s NBA.
My favourite thing about the piece is just how honest Harris is about how it felt during and after the Brooklyn Nets’ playoff series with the Milwaukee Bucks (he didn’t play well and even though he says you shake it off and move on the next one, he still says “it sucked”) and on being able to move after misses and not let them get stuck in your head. Very refreshing reading.
4. The casual racism in Ed Rogers’ dismissal of Masai Ujiri
I thought about this a lot the other day, after the story about Ed Rogers saying Masai Ujiri was “arrogant” and not worth his contract, but that, combined with Rogers’ complaint about Ujiri bringing “bodyguards” to their meeting (they weren’t bodyguards) it reminded me of Phil Jackson’s comments about LeBron James and his “posse” from a few years back.
So I’m very, very grateful for Morgan Campbell, who wrote about this for CBC Sports this week. He did so in a much more eloquent manner than I ever could. It’s well worth your time, especially if you are like me (cisgender heterosexual middle aged white man) and are trying to better understand your privilege and how to be an ally and an anti-racist. We’ve got to get better, and just learning about some of the coded language and microaggressions that are so common in the sorts of interactions between white people in power and BIPOC people, like Rogers and Ujiri, is so important.
5. Let’s go to the zoo
On a lighter note, I can’t wait for this:
OG + Kate forever.
Toronto Raptors Five Daily Thoughts: New city edition jerseys, Masai, more - RaptorsHQ
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