THE SHOT (and more...)

Well, it's been a while, eh?

About three weeks have passed since I last wrote in this space. A lot has happened over that time in Toronto sports, but a few things first...

I don't want to make this sound more serious than it actually is, but I've experienced some health problems over the past couple of weeks. That's mostly why I haven't been able to blog. (Putting in the work at my day job has been a challenge.)

Don't want to bore you with any specifics... but I am a bit better now, at least good enough to be jotting this down at this moment. I am taking my, um, "load management" holiday this week. Hopefully, I'll come back healthier.

Did the Raptors' dramatic/thrilling/insane/out-of-this-world Game 7 victory over the Sixers help ease my pain?

Can't lie. It didn't. BECAUSE I ALMOST HAD A FREAKING HEART ATTACK WATCHING THE GAME FROM START TO FINISH!!!!

I was so nervous that I rode my stationary bike for an entire second half (commercial breaks and all) just to work off that energy.

By the time you read this, you'll have seen the video a few times. It's the kind of a highlight reel that makes its ways around social media and grabs the attention of casual fans or even non-sports fans. Even if you know absolutely nothing about NBA basketball or the Toronto Raptors, you'd have to admit this was one hell of a shot, the likes of which you won't see that often just because of how many bounces the ball took before it dropped. (4? 6?)

I obviously watched the play develop live, and I could watch it all day long (which I pretty much have). I think Kawhi probably got away with a travel but who am I to say?

I've never seen Kawhi get so excited after a shot. And I don't remember the last time I was this pumped after a basketball game. Being a Raptors fan... maybe never.

A few random takes from this.

(It's a super long post. I haven't written in a while, so I needed to get a few words out of my system. You've been warned.)

1. Talk about a friendy bounce. Kawhi sank a game winner from that same side against Portland during the regular season (a little closer to the basket) and also got a good bounce then. If Kawhi took this shot at Philly's Wells Fargo Center, does that get the same bounce? Probably not.

2. Kyle Lowry sprints from the opposite side to the bench and he picks up the ball on his way. That reminded me of Anthony Rizzo pocketing the ball that got the final out that clinched the Chicago Cubs' 2016 World Series title.

Since you must have seen Rizzo do that in highlights, I'll give you a version with mini figures. Fast forward to 1:05 ish (though it's really worth watching from start to finish. Jason Heyward pep talk is outstanding).

Kyle was holding on to that ball in his post-game on-court interview. Wonder if he gave it to Kawhi in the locker room.

3. If you look closely in the top left-hand corner, there's a lady in the red Raptors t-shirt holding a white towel. Not sure if she's an employee of the team or not, but she is one of those people who hands out towels and waters during timeouts.

Anyway, she's crouched in front of the bench, watching the play unfold like everyone else in the arena. But then, she sees Joel Embiid, he of 7-foot and 250 pounds (per basketball-reference, but perhaps more), flying toward her. Okay, maybe she doesn't see Embiid, per se. She just sees something huge coming right at her. And she has the presence of mind to duck and get out of the way.

Seriously, someone could have been hurt. Embiid had challenged Kawhi's shot as well as a 7-foot, 250-pound (or more) center could challenge a forward with a 7-foot-3 wingspan and "Klaws" of hands taking a jumper.




So a fraction of a second after this moment, Embiid comes down to a spot where the said woman was sitting down. Again, she avoided a potentially dangerous collision at the last moment. She or Embiid or both could have been hurt.

She is in this frame, bottom left corner.



After the shot goes down after what seemed like an eternity, she starts jumping up and down with joy while flapping that towel she holds at the same time. Then she gets pushed of sight by much bigger men.

I hope she's okay. And I also hope she'll be working every home playoff game from here and on.

4. If you watch the TNT feed in the first video clip above, you'll notice that Toronto's score remains at 90 even though the bottom of the board says "FINAL." It stays that way for solid 13 seconds. I don't know if these things are manually done or not in the booth. If they are, maybe the person updating the score was so caught up in the moment that he/she forgot to make it 92 for the Raptors.

The same with the Canadian feed at Sportsnet. It stays at 90-90 for good 10 seconds and the whole thing just disappears from the screen as we get a shot of the bedlam at Jurassic Park.

Yes, I notice these things.

Enough with my useless observations. Now on to something a bit more serious and personal...

So what's the meaning of this shot?

1. I don't even know where to begin. A miss.... The score was tied at 90, so we still could have won the game in OT, though I doubt it, given the way we were shooting the ball and we were begging Kawhi to carry us home. Losing in the 2nd round again (in other words, going no deeper in the playoffs than a year ago even after all those changes) would have altered the course of this franchise. Kawhi would have bolted (though I do think he'll still bolt after this year no matter what, but that's for another day). Maybe Lowry becomes expendable. Danny Green, people forget, is a free agent, too. Heck, even Masai has been rumored to be angling for a new gig.

Trading a beloved franchise star and sacking the Coach of the Year winner, and still going home after two rounds of playoff ball? That would have set the Raptors a few years back, in my mind.

But now that we're moving on to the conference finals against the Milwaukee Bucks, we can put aside those concerns for another week or so, at least. We can just keep on rooting for these guys and worry about summer questions later.

2. It was 18 years ago when Vince Carter took a jumper at the buzzer in Game 7 of the 2nd round series against the Sixers. Make it, and we were moving on to the next round against, yup, the Milwaukee Bucks. Miss it, we were going home. The shot wasn't even close. No chance for a lucky bounce like Kawhi's.

Like others who've been watching this team from Day 1 or at least early on, I have such vivid memories of that series and that particular shot. To be precise, I remember watching that game, maybe not so much the shot itself. (In the build-up to this year's Game 7, Toronto media went overkill with the trip down that memory lane and kept playing the missed shot over and over again. I must admit Vince took the shot farther from the corner than I remembered and, after his fake, he had more time to get settled for a shot than I realized at the time. Oh, what could have been...)

One of my favorite Raptors from that era was Alvin Williams. And what he said about the aftermath of the missed shot really stuck with me. He said something to the extent that the guys in the room weren't even that upset because they figured they'd be back in the same or similar position the following season and maybe a few years after that as well. They felt confident they'd get another crack at this NBA championship thing.

But we all know how it turned out. We made our first conference finals in 2016, 15 years after that 2nd round loss to the Sixers.

I've written this in an earlier post, and I still believe we would have handled the Bucks in the conference finals in 2001. No way we could've beaten Shaq&Kobe Lakers in the finals but for the Raptors franchise in its sixth season to even get to that stage would have been something else. Or even just getting to the conference finals that year would have meant so much. Maybe Vince would have stuck around and spent his entire career in Toronto? Who knows?

So to go back to Kawhi's winning shot... If he didn't make and we lost the game, I can totally see people asking much the same questions 15, 18 years from now. Something like, man, that Raptors team had Kawhi, Lowry, Gasol, et al, and still didn't get past the second round. No LeBron in the East either. They blew it, etc, etc.

One shot. That's all it took.

3. In his first and possibly only postseason with the Raptors, Kawhi has already cemented himself as the greatest playoff performer in franchise history. That says as much about the player that he is as about our playoff track record, but hey, we'll take it.

His legacy in this uniform is already secure. We should have his number retired (okay, maybe not if he leaves this summer). For the rest of my life, I'll never utter a bad word about one Kawhi Leonard.

He took 39 shots to get his 41 points. Not his most efficient game, but he understood he had to keep taking those shots or the team had no hope. It was a lot of iso-ball down the stretch, which is ironic when you think about how we acquired a player like Gasol precisely to get away from that style of play.

But if the ball isn't moving around, shots aren't falling, and defense isn't giving you much, well, you just give the ball to your best player and get the hell out of the way.

We did that quite a bit with DeMar, without much success. I love the guy and all, but obviously, Kawhi is much better at basketball than DeMar. That's really no knock against DeMar. Kawhi can do things individually that few others can in the NBA.

The game overall wasn't pretty. Only the finish was a thing of beauty.

4. A friend of mine who has been a Philadelphia sports fan his whole life (who now lives in San Antonio, ironically enough) sent me this message, almost 12 hours after Kawhi's shot went down.
 
"I slept on it. And it still hurts. Joe Carter and now Kawhi. Sigh."
 
I hadn't thought about Joe Carter, but indeed, his World Series home run in 1993 came against the Philadelphia Phillies. And this time, Kawhi sent another Philly team home with his own dramatic play.
 
But hey, the Phillies won the World Series in 2008 and the Eagles won the Super Bowl last year. With all due respect to Toronto FC and Toronto Argonauts, we haven't captured a big title since 1993. So don't complain too much, you Philadelphia fans!

I digress.

Where does Kawhi's shot rank in the annals of Canadian pro sports?

It's easily the greatest moment in the Raptors history. Only winning an NBA title would top this for the franchise. (Unless, of course, Kawhi drains another buzzer-beater in Game 7 against the Bucks over Giannis. Hey, a man can dream.)

To me, it's the first iconic Toronto sporting moment since Jose's epic three-run shot (and that flip or toss or whatever you wanna call it!) against the Rangers in the 2015 ALDS.

It's going to be nearly impossible to top Joe's "touch 'em all" home run on the list of Toronto's top sports moments. Only the Leafs' next Stanley Cup victory will usurp that.

Given the importance of the shot and literally how it made its way through the net (those bounces adding to the dramatic effect), I think this definitely ranks in the top 10 over the last 50 years.

Hopefully there will be more coming from the hard wood this spring.

It's quarter to 3 a.m. on my end. In a few hours, I will be off on a trip with my family. As I said, it'll be part of my "load management" plans.

Gonna miss the first two games of the Bucks series. I honestly don't have high expectations. I don't think we can beat the Bucks.

Meanwhile, I've packed my Kawhi Leonard jersey for the trip. Will be repping my team proudly.