Last season, the Raptors became the first team in NBA history to win a championship without having a lottery pick on their roster. Now, they are healthy and undaunted as the NBA restarts. (via michaelgrange)
“I look at it differently,” says Marc Gasol, who won an NBA title as an underdog last year and then a world championship as an underdog and, understandably, doesn’t have a lot of time for the concept of underdogs or favourites. “I look at it like how all the teams that had a top-five player mostly, they didn’t get a championship. Right?
If the Raptors have an advantage it’s that they know they can do it. While Leonard got the lion’s share of the credit for bringing a title to Toronto last year, those that remain look at the fact that Raptors have gone 63-23 in their past 86 games without him — a better winning percentage than Leonard has with the Clippers this season — and figure Leonard didn’t do it alone.
But while they’re here — ‘here’ being in the antiseptic ‘bubble’ the NBA has set up outside Orlando — the Raptors have other things in mind, as do most of the players gathered having left behind family, friends and loved ones in the midst of generational social unrest, not to mention the pandemic.
And the Raptors being the Raptors, it’s not just North America either. Gasol grew up in Spain and learned about race relations in the United States when one of the first places he visited upon moving to Memphis as a teenager was the National Civil Rights Museum, built around the former Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Serge Ibaka grew up in Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo, a region torn by civil war and strife for decades, if not centuries. He left home to purse basketball as a teenager first in France and then Spain before coming to the United States and now Canada.
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