I started really watching Raptors games with my dad about 9 years ago, when I was around 14, and have enjoyed watching them for most seasons up until last season and now this season of course. I remember LeBronto and and hated it, but could enjoy most of the regular season up until playoffs. My question is to the older fans who are in their 30s and watched the pre-Demar/Kyle era. I’ve watched a couple older games on YouTube, but hard to get a grasp on the overall season when I was barely a teen when it was happening.
Was this team ever as frustrating to watch as they are now? I know they’ve been worse overall, but being stuck in the middle with no sense of direction is so frustrating. If yes, please feel free to shares some stories of darker days 😅
Regarding being stuck in the middle.
Compare where we’re headed with what happened after the 2009-10 season. We were a mediocre team then, with one really good star player, and one promising prospect, (a former first-overall pick); some other interesting pieces but nobody who would end up be an all-star level talent. We also had a rookie head coach. Our FRPs that we had counted on developing were turning out to be end-of-bench guys, and we had given up other FRPs trying to solve our center issue, and getting underwhelming returns. So some similarities to where we are now. We also signed what was at that point the most exciting free-agent signing in team history, who was absolutely an abysmal fit on the floor and a distraction off it.
We lost the star player for a crap return at the end of the season, and the prospect underperformed, which was the beginning of signs that he was never going to amount to more than a role-player. A trade to fix the roster for three really intriguing players collapsed at the last minute. That following season we ended up with our third and forth worst-seasons in franchise history over the next two years, and received the fifth and eighth overall picks for those campaigns. Meanwhile, the star player we lost ended up going to a perennial championship contender. The main player in the trade that fell apart won a championship.
The only reason that era didn’t drag out indefinitely is because we drafted DeRozan (who greatly outdid draft-ranking projections), and traded for Lowry (who experienced one of the most unexpected mid-career turnarounds in NBA history); after three really crappy years, a new GM came in ready to blow things up completely again, but suddenly things started to click behind those guys. But until that really unlikely turnaround, there was no reason to think that we weren’t going to be among the worst teams in the league for many more years.
In a worst-case scenario where we lose Siakam and OG for nothing this offseason, we’re still in a less frustrating place than that era, because Barnes, despite his flaws, is infinitely less frustrating than Bargnani. We’re a better free agent market now than then. We’re far more likely to get value back for Siakam and OG, whether that means keeping them, trading them now, trading them down the line. Not having all our own draft-picks going forward sucks as far as a position to start a rebuild… but coming off an era where our late FRPs have failed to pan out or have been traded away is far better then the era we were in where our lottery-level picks weren’t panning out or were being traded away.