Raptors head coach Dwane Casey gets pawned by a fan – and his own players

This was not Dwane Casey's finest day in the coaching box, or just about anyone in Raptors colours, actually. In the latest "biggest game in franchise history" Casey's Raptors instead laid the biggest first-half egg in NBA conference finals history.

It couldn't really get any better from deep in that hole, and it didn't, on the way to a 38-point defeat that puts Toronto's season one loss away from extinction.

But beyond getting pwned by a courtside fan (which merely evens the score for Drake's incessant hectoring at the ACC) and by the Cavs, Casey was left blindsided by a report from The Toronto Sun's Steve Simmons that two of his players, Demarre Carroll and Corey Joseph, were spotted "just before 2 in the morning" at Cleveland's downtown casino the night before and morning of the biggest game.

As Simmons notes, the Raptors were equal-opportunity offenders – it's not like Carroll and Joseph cost them the game. And as Casey notes, they are grown men and "these things happen," he told Simmons.

Given their nocturnal schedule and moneyed lifestyle, blowing off steam and hanging out in nightspots is for sure part of the game even at this high level of the season. Though it's usually confined to areas behind the velvet ropes we sometimes get a glimpse. Years ago, Chicago's Dennis Rodman got so bored with trying to fill his spare time amid the Mormons he found so irritating in Salt Lake City at the NBA Finals he jumped on a plane to go to Vegas.

Two of the subplots around the Raptors' only previous trip beyond the first round of the playoffs touched on the tangentials of this latest story, including gambling (Charles Oakley and Ty Hill's dice-game IOU) and preparation (Vince Carter's infamous trip to his UNC graduation in Chapel Hill on the morning of Game 7 in Philadelphia later the same day).

Absent of any context, though, a casino stroll is not what qualifies as conventional pregame preparation, and when the follow-up is this kind of non-answering of the bell, it's an issue at least until first jump on Friday's Game 6 back in Toronto, and one more (perhaps the last, at least in this cycle) "biggest game in franchise history."

The players will be asked about it Thursday, but regardless of their words, perhaps no one comes out looking worse than the coach who, according to one of the NBA's best chroniclers, dodged a firing when the Raptors advanced out of their first-round series with Indiana. When told by Simmons about Carroll and Joseph's night-out particulars, his "I didn't know that" is the most telling and damning comment of all.