Free of sideshows, Raptors still have one long shadow hanging over them for NBA playoff opener

This particular Raptors team enters the NBA playoff season remarkable mostly for one thing: the light load they appear to be carrying.

There are no sideshows, and no distractions.

To go back over some of their previous greatest hits from back in the day, the coach isn’t launching a lawsuit against one of their opponents, nobody’s wearing protest headbands, the owner’s private jet isn’t firing up for convocation, they don’t appear to have any trouble with math, there’s no former superstar of theirs (or Superman, for that matter) in the opponent’s corner.

The general manager isn’t putting pressure on the coach to get a result and earn a new contract. The coach isn’t worried about his future.

They’re no longer wide-eyed at this whole show, they’re not carrying major health questions, they’ve spent the last six weeks taking care of business and getting used to the altitude on the second rung of the conference. They even managed to get through a whole NBA season without anyone bellowing out #NBAAllStar every time Kyle Lowry sneezed.

In their public pronouncements, coach Dwane Casey and GM Masai Ujiri have set this up as merely a step along the way, and sure, off a 56-win season that represents a high-water mark, that’s a pretty nice spot to land on and proceed from.

“I don’t think so,” Casey said yesterday, when asked if this was make or break. “We’re still a growing program, a growing culture. But we’re not a finished product.”

He's not kidding, but in terms of perception, he might as well be. For all this placidity, this is a huge spring for the club -- but mostly from the perspective of the Raptors’ fan base, and the Toronto crowds that inevitably latch on to a winner. Drop the ball now, against the seventh-seeded Indiana Pacers, and this version of the Raptors are three-quarters Buffalo Bills, a fine football team remembered most notably for losing four Super Bowls on the trot, and thus a punchline. Falter at this first hurdle once more, and all of those fans, diehard or newbie, take on another layer of bitter and set up one long year (and maybe more) of variations on Paul Pierce’s ‘they don’t have it’ putdown of last spring.

And actually there is indeed, one thing they don’t have. The Raptors have yet to win a playoff-season opener. That’s kind of astounding, isn’t it? And yet, there it is, oh-for-7, against a parade of first-round opposition that started back in 2000 with the Knicks and has bounced intermittently through Pistons, Nets, Magic and Pierce’s Wizards. Seven Game 1’s to start off their playoff journeys. Seven L’s.

That’s not a sideshow, not a distraction -- but it is history. And it’ll follow them right up to first jump Saturday.

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