Just wondering, but should the Maple Leafs really be looking for a “Bryan Colangelo of hockey” now?

Wondered about that at the time. Wondered why this halo surrounds the Raptor boss even though he has doesn’t own an NBA championship ring and his team has yet to even win a playoff round in Toronto.

Sure it’s impressive what he did in Phoenix, and yes, the Raptors were a laughingstock before he arrived and became a solid team in the weak Eastern Conference in his very first year.

But to the no-ring past and playoff disappointment of last spring we can now add a Raptor squad that is plummeting, possibly all the way to the seventh seed in the east unless they can get this thing straightened out soon.

The once formidable point guard tandem now looks shaky, no one knows what Andrea Bargnani is going to deliver on a nightly basis, nobody seems to want the ball at crunch time and doesn’t it seem just a little strange that player who wasn’t even in the NBA last year starts for this squad?

It seems pretty clear, based on the evidence, that this team isn’t even as good as last year’s group, and that a similar early-round ouster may be in the cards.

At some point, one should think, this will begin to reflect upon Colangelo.

And while we know MLSE always aims low when it comes to managers and expectations – and what they care about most is that the fans have started filling the building again in the Colangelo era – surely the club should really be looking for a hockey executive who can deliver more than their basketball man has so far, or, really, in his career.

If it’s a basketball reference they need, shouldn’t they be hunting for the Gregg Popovich of hockey?

- Toronto Star

Bosh has been a reluctant spectator these past eight games and admits watching his team struggle has been tough.

“Sometimes we get rolling, but if you’ve watched it, most times we are struggling offensively … and defensively.”

Bosh believes his absence has been felt even more on the defensive end.

“I make an effort to talk and try to be athletic (on defence),” Bosh said. “I try to be a presence on the boards on the defensive end and I try to be where I am supposed to be when I’m supposed to be there and I think that alone helps the defence out a lot.”

Bosh isn’t promising instant changes when he gets back, whether it’s Wednesday night for the Miami Heat or Friday night in Cleveland, but he’s fully expecting to make things better.

“Hopefully when I come back all of that will come to and end because I demand certain things out of my teammates and out of myself,” Bosh said. “I hope all these defensive lapses and stagnant offences, I hope all that changes.”

Mitchell says it would be wrong to consider Bosh’s imminent return a cure-all for everything ailing the team, but it’s obvious to anyone who has been watching this team without him that a healthy Chris Bosh is going to fix a lot.

- Toronto Sun

This was a game in which the Raptors were expected to have their first real advantage of this road trip as they were in Sacramento waiting for the Kings, who were in Phoenix Saturday night having their lunch handed to them by the Suns.

But better rested or not, it didn’t show on the court as the Kings began the game as the more aggressive team and were rewarded with an early lead as Beno Udrich and Mikki Moore led a group of Kings starters more determined than the Raptors.

The Kings owned the first 20 minutes of the game thanks in large part to better than 60% shooting from the field.

That number eventually came down to 48.2% but the damage had been done.

“Every time you spot a team a 16-point or 14-point lead it’s always hard,” Jason Kapono said.

- Toronto Sun

What he will have left for tonight in Utah, when he will be matched up against Carlos Boozer, is anyone’s guess.

Raptors head coach Sam Mitchell was almost apologetic after the game for having to ask as much as he has of Nesterovic.

“Rasho has been very consistent,” Mitchell said. “You can’t ask much more out of him. I had to play him a lot of minutes (last night) but he gave us a chance to win the game. Right now without (Bosh) he’s like a stabilizing person back there.”

Bosh is not a big follower of U.S. college basketball but he has heard about the LSU freshman that scouts and prognosticators have compared to him.

Anthony Randolph is a 6-foot-10, 200-pound player who also was born in Dallas.

Randolph averaged 15.6 points a game for the Tigers.

- Toronto Sun

Once again falling behind by double digits with passive defence that was at times laughable, Toronto ultimately suffered a 106-100 loss to the Sacramento Kings last night, extending the current losing streak to a season-worst four games.

And for all the good they did in the second quarter and again in the fourth, when they rode the unlikely duo of Rasho Nesterovic and Jason Kapono to huge rallies, the opening 12 minutes was their undoing.

It’s becoming a habit they’re finding impossible to break.

“Right now, we just have to play better, we have to collectively play better,” he said. “We had two or three guys against Golden State play good, we had two or three guys tonight, but we have to get five, six, seven guys playing well at the same time. We’re just getting sporadic performances.”

Last night, it was Jamario Moon and Andrea Bargnani as the starters who were virtually non-existent. Moon lasted four minutes into the first quarter before his play landed him back on the bench. Bargnani reverted to his foul-prone self, limited to just 17 minutes of five-point performance.

But those two performances just allowed a couple of other players to come up with big games. Kapono had 26 points – the first time he’s been over 20 in 42 games – and Nesterovic had a season-high 20 after playing all but the final 23 seconds of the game.

- Toronto Star

Me? I just do Moon but I wonder just who takes his place.

If you replace him with Kapono, what’s that do for the second unit scoring on nights when Delfino’s not making shots? And while Kapono’s defending better (“he’s trying to box out now,” one person told me on the weekend), can he guard starters?

The thing with Moon is all the stuff he’s supposed to bring: Defence, rebounding, energy, are lacking most nights. And teams have pretty much stopped guarding him.

Okay, couple of people wondered what in the world Linas Kleiza would possibly jawing about at the Raptor bench in the final seconds of a 30-point Denver win the other night.

Well, seems he was pointing out to Kris Humphries that he didn’t feel Humphries was worthy of being a lottery pick back in the day.

And Jay Triano took exception to Kleiza’s chirping, which got Kleiza all worked up and ended up with him picking up a ‘T.’

- Toronto Star

Toronto’s hold on fifth place in the Eastern Conference is down to a half game over the Washington Wizards and 11/2 over the surging Philadelphia 76ers.

Toronto’s mantra going into this contest was back to basics on the defensive end. Opponents shot nearly 54 per cent against Toronto in the past five games and every one topped 50 per cent. That stretch ended Sunday night as the Kings just missed, shooting 48 per cent.

Toronto took a 56-55 lead early in the third quarter, but fell apart and never led again. The home side went on a 15-2 spurt to take back control of the game.

- Globe and Mail

Apparently learning nothing from the 44-point disaster that was Toronto’s first quarter against Denver on Friday, the Raptors came out flat once more Sunday night in California’s capital.

The Kings came out hot, shooting 67% for the quarter. And, like in Denver, it was a mix of uncontested perimeter jumpers and routine lay-ups that had Sacramento up nine points after the first frame. Picking up from Allen Iverson’s perfect half in the previous game, Beno Udrih drained all five of his shots in the quarter.

Udrih simply torched Jose Calderon all night, with the Raptors’ starter unable to keep him in front of him. That meant breakdowns all over the floor for the Raptors, who did not recover well, at least in the first half.

All of Toronto’s defensive problems cannot be placed on Calderon’s shoulders, as many Raptors frequently blow assignments. But in that first quarter, Calderon was mostly at fault, not an isolated occurrence.

Calderon’s fellow starter, Andrea Bargnani, struggled on both ends of the floor as well. Aside from a few possessions late against Golden State, Bargnani has failed to establish himself as a post presence at all in the absence of Chris Bosh. Bosh missed his ninth straight game with a sore right knee, although he is hoping to play on Wednesday against Miami.

- National Post

“We had 15 (turnovers) in the first half,” Theus said. “That’s ridiculous and from a team that doesn’t pressure you.”

- Sacramento Bee

The Raptors picked Charlie Villanueva with the seventh pick in the 2005 draft, then sent him to the Bucks for T.J. Ford. When the Bucks drafted Chinese star Yi Jianlian, Villanueva lost his chance to start. But the third-year forward played so well that he reclaimed the starting job, even before Yi was injured. In the past two weeks, Villanueva has been outstanding, playing by far the best basketball of his career.

- Star-Telegram

Add in some sketchy substitutions (or lack thereof) by Smitch, TJ not finding a hot Kapono until the well runs dry, and the Raptors generally suckin, and we have a loss against a weak team. Oh yea, Jose sucked for his nth game in a row. Where the heck did he disapear too? At least TJ is trying to make some plays in this last little stretch, Jose has up and left.

Oh, and if the Kings didn’t turn the ball over so damn much, this game would have been much worse than it appeared. I say appeared because the Raptors lost by 6, but it really never felt like the Kings were in Jeopardy of losing. Whatever….

- RaptorsTalk

In the aftermath of Toronto’s 4th consecutive defeat, last night at Sacramento (Tor 100, SAC 1006), there are at least 3 different options which the team has heading towards this evening’s game at Utah:

A) Maintain the status quo;

B) Restore TJ Ford to the Starting Unit, exchanging roles with Jose Calderon; and,

C) Re-configuring their ‘rotation’ in a novel way.

- Khandors Sports Blog

There is a large contingent of NBA observers that feel the Coach of the Year award should not be handed-out based on a sizable turnaround from the season before. The logic goes that generally such a turnaround can be accounted for as much by roster turnover, general heath and a little luck as it can by coaching acumen. It is reasoned that it is far harder to take an already good team and make it great than it is to make a bad team okay. That upper-echelon of teams legitimately vying for a Championship is far harder to reach than the first round of the Playoffs.

This season, Sam Mitchell is proving why this line of thinking exists.

Take nothing away from last season’s accomplishment; he took a disparate group of players and made them play cohesively enough to reach their first Playoff berth in five years. However, he did so in a weak Conference and a weaker Division and may have owed more to the acquisitions of Bryan Colangelo than initially thought.

Keep in mind, the warning signs were there: the 2-8 start, 2-6 finish, the 2-4 Playoff ouster. However, in a year marked by such an unexpected turnaround, it can be easy, and perhaps even appropriate, to focus on all the positives that are accruing rather than the small, nagging negatives.

But the negatives were simmering under the surface, nonetheless. The team lost a lot of their offensive cohesion when Jorge Garbajosa went down on March 26th. They looked flummoxed defensively against Jason Kidd’s arsenal in round one of the Playoffs and they looked equally unable to adapt to the swarming defenses that engulfed Chris Bosh all series.

Basically, they looked fine so long as there was nothing around to upset the very delicate balance that Mitchell and the Raptors had created for themselves.

Fast-forward to today, and those nagging issues are sprouting into full-blown identifiers for the Toronto Raptors basketball club. When the commentators who work for the organization are slagging the team on the air, as they did in the broadcast against Denver, that should be a sufficient indication that something has gone seriously awry.

When a team faces-off against the Golden State Warriors and looks shocked to see a running-gunning-cutting-passing team, that falls on the preparation of the coach. When the same looks of shock-and-awe meet a similar team two nights later, that falls on the adjustments made by the coach. When a team loses one player, as good as he is, and completely falls apart on both ends of the floor, that falls on the system the coach has implemented.

After all, isn’t this the same year that has seen Boston survive stretches without Kevin Garnett, or seen the Rockets win nine straight without Yao Ming? Granted they may have more talent on their roster to fall back on, but when you replace Garnett with Brian Scalabrine or Yao with Dikembe Mutombo and barely see a drop-off, that is the sign of a coach instituting a system that maximizes the talents of the available roster.

I don’t know if there is a man or woman alive who could claim that what the Raptors have demonstrated on this west coast trip is the maximizing of an available roster.

And as Jack Armstrong so astutely pointed out during last night’s broadcast, if this team expects Chris Bosh to come back and solve all of their problems, they’re kidding themselves.

All year this has been the team that heats a guy up only to stop feeding him. This has been the team that gets Jamario Moon countless long jumpers and Jason Kapono none. This has been the team that has seen a significant drop-off in the play of T.J. Ford and Andrea Bargnani from a year ago. This has been the team that plays into the hands on an injury-ravaged Indiana Pacers team by going small rather than pound them with size they can’t match. This has been the team that has seen a notable drop in all areas of their game and it’s happening at just about the worst time of the season.

Mitchell can (and does) blame the players all he wants, but his Raptors have become a purely reactive team because he coaches them that way. This is not a team that walks into a game knowing who they are and how they’re going to beat their opponent, they’re a team that looks to interrupt what their opponent does and hope that they fall apart like the Raptors do in similar circumstances. They never impose their will on their opponents, but rather try and counter every move their opponent makes against them, tacitly admitting that they can’t conceive of a plan to beat them in advance and giving all the psychological power that implies to the opponent.

The bottom line is this puts an unenviable amount of pressure on Raptors’ management going into a summer when they have very little maneuverability. While Bryan Colangelo shares some of the blame for coming up short with regards to acquiring any defense or rebounding in the offseason, he surely could have and should have expected a better output than what he has seen this year from the roster he constructed. He has basically watched his team play their best ball of the season in November and December and subsequently tailspin into the abyss they’re in now.

He must now decide if he can afford to patch the situation gingerly and preserve the copious cap space he’ll have in the summer of 2009 or not. He must decide whether there are superior coaching alternatives available to him or not (unlike last summer when Marc Iavaroni and Rick Adelman were known to be available). He must decide if he can afford to keep two $7-$8 million- per-year point guards on one roster or not. Basically, he has to decide whether or not to rebuild the whole thing only 24 months after doing it the first time. It’s a huge problem to solve because either option could set the ball club back years in development.

Right now, the Raptors are in dire need of support. They need a far better offensive system. They need a completely new defensive system. They need an infusion of players who can perform the tasks (defense and rebounding) that this current crop cannot. It’s support that must ultimately come from Colangelo, either by endorsing the system he has now, or by supplying the aid the team needs this summer.

Colangelo and Mitchell have learned the hard way this year how much easier it is to swing back into Playoff relevance – especially in the East – than it is to take that next step and become a serious contender. It takes awareness, innovation, discipline and a little luck. Mitchell’s got seventeen regular season games and at least four Playoff games to establish at least some of those traits if he’s going to get the growing legion of Raptor fans from calling for his head, but it’s going to take all of those things, in spades, to get the Raptors organization to feel secure in keeping him in the driver’s seat long-term.

- TSN.ca

It’s becoming clear as my Dasani bottle that Jose Calderon and TJ Ford cannot coexist. I’m not being a drama queen nor am I a supporter of one over the other. They’re hampering each others games, Calderon hasn’t been the same since TJ got back and TJ hasn’t been the same since he’s been coming off the bench. Let’s face it, he’s over his injuries now so the deserving player should get the starting job and since TJ is our official starter, there’s no need for him to come off the bench anymore since you can’t really lose your job to injury. It’s not like the team is in some great rhythm that something might be disrupted if TJ starts. Maybe they can play better if they have well defined roles, like it was in the beginning of the season. What do you think?

Although they won’t admit it, the other is a distraction to them. More Ford to Calderon, than vice-versa. We need to get back to having a traditional PG setup and trade one of the two to address one of our many other needs. Which one do we trade? Do you really care? Is one of them that much better than the other?

- Arsenalist

sam mitchell once again strengthened his case for a 2nd coach of the year award by showing an incredible amount of indifference to his team’s performance. rasho again had a great game, goin 10-18 for 20 points with 8 boards, 2 steals, and 2 blocks. his performance during bosh’s absence will make his inevitable move this summer all the more bittersweet. ron artest kept his urges in check and was reported to be searchin Arco’s surrounding areas for hitchhikers. despite the risks involved in signing an unhinged rap mogul, watchin artest made me realize that he would be a nice fit for the raptors. big, strong wing player who plays great defense and can rebound? i just checked the espn trade machine and realized that he also has a great contract with a current salary of only 7.4 million, or 400,000 less than Rasho, and 900,000 less than TJ Ford. there it is; TJ for Artest and our problems are solved (on-court anyways)

- Raps Jays and Ramblings

There seems to be something intrinsic to the Colangelo’s family’s DNA. They just go out and build championship teams. Bryan Colangelo is a Jedi Knight, like his father before him.

He’s done a phenomenal job of rebuilding this Raptors team. To the point where someone like me who spent a good decade actively loathing the NBA and basketball actually looks forward to watching the Raptors and chooses to watch NBA games now over NHL games. It helps that the NHL puts out a shit product that gets worse every year, and that the NBA is having one of the most interesting and competitive seasons in its history.

None of this however, belies the fact that Sam Mitchell is a horrible coach. I like the guy. He seems very affable. I think if I were at a party, I’d like to hang out with him. He seems to have a pretty good sense of humour and does a good job getting along with his players, but as a coach…he needs some seasoning.

I don’t know how many more times I can watch Andrea Bargnani post up at the 3-point line. Or be forced to watch TJ Ford bounce around the floor like like a broken Etch-a-sketch, or the disorganized melee the Raps fall into when they’re losing in the final minutes of a game. His inability to call plays to get the ball to his playmakers is beyond frustrating.

The point here is that watching the last couple of minutes of the Toronto-Sacramento game it’s painfully clear Mitchell has no idea what he’s doing. The Kings were allowed to waste clock with impunity in the last 2 minutes, while the Raptors trailed by multiple possessions. Then even though he had Delfino at the line shooting foul shots, Mitchell still couldn’t communicate to his players that he wanted no foul. What happens? They waste another 10 seconds and then foul anyways.

Then with the raptors done by 5, he takes Capono, the best 3-point shooter in the league out of the game, and lets Jamario Moon miss a 3. Everybody loves Moon. He’s another guy who seems like he’d be fun at a party, but no one is ever going to mistake this guy for a clutch player. He’s fun to watch, he can jump a mile, but he still makes fundamental errors with incredible frequency. You can make the rookie exscuse all you want, but the guy is like 27 years old. He’s been doing this awhile, and its unlikely he’s going to improve much further.

- I Hate You 79

I almost thought tonight was the night that Chuck would bust out

“No need for Viagra, I’ve got a Kaponer!”

But sadly the Raps did not ride that train and Kapono cooled off. This was the best he has looked since, well….he played with the Heat or maybe in Xbox Live after All-Star weekend. He was drilling everything and was passing and was even diving on the floor. How can the Raps waste a night when Kapono and Rasho pile on a lot of points?

Well it is easy. Calderon has lost his Spanish mojo, Jamario is NOT A THREE POINT SHOOTER, Delfino does not seem to add anything and Primoz pulled his groin in warm up. Way to go dude.

- Cuzoogle

Did the Raptors’ charter plane land in the NBA’s western conference or Iraq? They have looked absolutely shell shocked since touching down to play LA 3 games ago.  Dorothy, we aren’t in Kansas anymore! In the “Take no possession off” (Mark Jackson, ABC) western conference, the Raptors have looked, in this order: 1. To Bosh for help 2. To Sam Mitchell for guidance 3. To the airline attendant for directions back east.  They look utterly out-manned and have many observers wondering if this team can win a game – let alone a round – in the play-offs.  I suspect that they will return humbled, and hungry; eager to reclaim some of their damaged pride.  If they don’t, expect the outcries for substantial off season overhauls.

- Hawkstock’s Weblog

Related posts:

1. Linkage – March 18
2. Linkage – March 13
3. Linkage – March 1
4. Linkage – March 31
5. Linkage – March 24