In the Toronto Sun, today, Bill Lankhof has a long article about Why the Raptors will always be losers. He makes some good points and gets some good ideas from people who seem to have credibility, but he’s essentially wrong. This is why the Raps will always be losers.
Poor supersub15 had to read an article without numbers in it. He reacts as if he’s in the marines with his “A lot of mumbo-jumbo psycho crap. All you need is a little something called ‘accountability’.” Right, supes. Or a number cruncher who can analyze the effect of things like confidence, leadership, and initiative on performance.
Here’s a little statistic for you: In 2000, Roy Halladay put up an ERA of 10.64, the worst ERA in history among pitchers who threw at least 60 innings. Now, go read the biography of Roy Halladay and tell me he’s ever had a day in his life where he he didn’t hold himself accountable.
Now, to be fair, Lankhof wrote a one dimensional article. He took the stuff from the Raptors’ history and used it, leaving out a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t support his article. So, let’s just call him a hysterical woman who just realized her husband is cheating on her and she is screaming at him with all she’s got that this is just a symptom of what’s wrong.
And the RealGM think tank is the husband with his fingers in his ears, humming to drown out the sound. The sad thing is, RealGM perfectly mirrors the Raptors organization, and I’m wondering if what Lankhof suggests – that it’s a culture thing, and it comes from the top – is true, and if the malaise is starting to get to Bryan Colangelo as well.
I remember Colangelo’s first season, when he brought in a bunch of new faces, and all the talk was about needing time to gel. After 10 games, the Raps were 2-8, and some reporter suggested to Colangelo that it was normal, they needed more time, etc. Colangelo said 2-8 is not acceptable, that they should be doing better than this even with the changes.
I didn’t hear that attitude this year. I think there’s something wrong, and it starts with this fingers-in-the-ear attitude.
lucky777s makes a good post that balances out Lankhof’s piece to some extent. lucky777s talks about the “Isiah Thomas / Bitove Jr ownership team”, who did appear to have passion, but were forced out by Slaight, who appeared to be more interested in the Raptors as a money-making vehicle. As a fan, you might want someone more akin to Mark Cuban.
But who is the owner now? Can you see him at games, or walking down the street. Well, yeah, kind of. In fact, just walk into any school in Ontario and you can talk to one of the owners. They’re right there in the classrooms telling the kids about he Norwegian leather industry, or asking them to solve for Y.
They may not even know two of the players on the team though.
lucky777s talks about some of the players that Grunwald brought in after Isiah left, and yeah, he’s right, they had pride in themselves, So, does Bosh and Jarret Jack and Demar Derozan. It doesn’t matter if the organization itself doesn’t have a mission statement that says, “…to win the NBA championship”.
It has to come from the top. I’ve worked in places where you get in there and only after you’re inside do you realize the losing mentality that exists, and it continues to exist because it’s allowed to, and you become part of it until there comes a day that you don’t even see it anymore. New people come in and they mention it, and you just shrug your shoulders and say “Hey, man, whatever” like you just smoked a doobie.
gerrit4 wants “a player like Artest, Stephen Jackson, or Corey Maggette. There needs to be a strong culture to keep players within their roles.” (I don’t know what he’s thinking there.) But he goes on to say they will never come here till we win a championship. That’s what I mean by the loser mentality filtering down. It’s gone past the players and into the fans.
To wit: “So we missed the playoffs, big deal. We missed it by one game, and it would have been a disaster if we’d have made it.” So says orbesnet but almost anyone could have made that statement, including some members of the Raptors, although they would have done it privately. He goes on to say “When’s the last time the leafs made the playoffs?” which is such a loser mentality, I wouldn’t even know where to start.
BBman only has 11 posts, maybe the losing mentality hasn’t infected him yet. He thinks it was “one of the best articles Mr. Lankoff has ever written”, and goes on to talk about the Oak Man. I would agree that Oakley was a divine leader. He just had an attitude that made people follow him, and no one questioned him, not ever.
There was another guy who seemed to make a difference: Garbajosa. The guy was relatively unathletic, not really all that skilled, not all that strong, and smoked cigarettes. Yet, the Raptors played better when he was there, and Mike D’Antoni, basically said that any team Garbajosa played on was better when he was on the court even though Garbo was never the best player on the court.
Maybe this is why Colangelo so often refers to the end of the Garbo era when talking about how things went wrong for the Raps. He had himself and a player of influence within the team who seems to have made players better.
ldnk writes, “I’m going to write a follow-up blog. "Why the Toronto Sun is barely a newspaper". It’s borderline tabloid and melodrama headlines annoy me.” Blah blah blah. Scott Carefoot says the Raps are better than the Clipper and the Warriors. Big deal. “I get it, though. Hyperbole sells, drives pageivews and generates massive threads on message boards.” I hate how he condemns other writers for not writing like he does. Again, it’s the loser mentality: put down others rather than raise your own game. He later asks, “Would this column had (sic) been written if the Raptors hadn’t missed the playoffs by one game?” In other words, a 41-41 record would have been acceptable. Mediocrity rules!
goodfella1977 says, “The team is desperately lacking that veteran leadership that will pull everyone together.” That may be true, but I think it’s possible there are players on the current Raps who could lead, if other key players hadn’t bought into the notion that the status quo is kind of okay. I mean, the people who own the team are happy, aren’t they? Attendance is at an all-time high the past few years.
roundhead0 says, “it’s one thing to have "pride" or mental toughness. But basketball is still fundamentally about execution, and that includes the physical part and the X’s and O’, I don’t care how mentally tough you are: if you are not quick enough to stop the guy with the ball, then you’re going to have a problem.” All true, but you think they couldn’t have done 10% more with the right attitude? And that 10% would have made the difference, especially during that 20-game run after the all-star break.
JMP_JMP says, “Good point…but if we’d made the playoffs, it would just be prolonging the pain for four games.” No, you’re missing the point. It’s not about getting a few lucky rolls and squeaking out a few more wins. It’s about believing that you are better, and good enough to contend with the Cavs, which they showed they were in the regular season, when they have their heads screwed on right.
WaltFrazier, who I haven’t seen around in a while, thinks “If Jose throws the pass a little higher and we beat the Nets in that playoff series, how different would all this talk be?” What kind of talk is that. To paraphrase Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, “you know what you’ll be saying – a bunch of losers sittin’ around in a bar. ‘Oh yeah. I used to be a basketball player. It’s a tough racket. If only I’d thrown that pass a little higher.’” There were a hundred other points in that game (and many others) that could have made all this talk different.
Kevin Willis lists excuse after excuse for the Raps, like a good fan, and like the players and management did during the final interviews. Bravo. Now stick your fingers in your ears and hum “I’m not listening”.
dacrusha finally says it: “Everything always starts at the top with ownership. You’ve got the Donald Sterlings and James Dolans of the world… and then you have the Mark Cubans, Peter Holts and Jerry Buss’s of the world. Raptors don’t even have a single owner that anyone can identify with… they’re run like an unwanted step-child of some giant conglomerate that only cares about the bottom line.” He’d make a great husband!
Indiana Jones, most famous for calling Bosh a pansy because he went to the hospital with a displaced nasal fracture and a broken maxilla, doesn’t place too much truck in the mental approach to the game. He probably thinks Halladay lacked athleticism and talent too. Indiana Jones is the poster boy for self-indulgent posts.
albedo attacks Lankhof for saying that “At the professional level, athletes are all fairly equal in talent.” He’s right, it was a stupid thing to say, but it’s like the husband who instead of listening to why his wife is hurt, he picks up on the stupid parts of what she says when she’s hysterical, and attacks them. He also attacks psychologists for thinking that the mind plays the most important part in winning games. I mean, fair point. Even with my best attitude and LeBron’s worst, LeBron would beat me one-on-one, but we’re talking about gifted athletes playing 82 games, not me going one-on-one with James. Please don’t tell me that Raps didn’t have an extra 5 or 6 wins in them if they brought the right stuff night in, night out.
Anyway, this thread only reached three pages even though the article was posted a good 14 hours ago, and the reason it’s not as popular as, for example, Yogi’s secksy avatar thread is because people don’t understand this. There are no numbers attached to mental attitude for an entire organization.
Paraphrasing Alec Baldwin again, “follow my advice and fire their fucking asses because a loser is a loser.” But how do you fire the owners?
“ Watchit, lad, you might have a ban in your future. 
“ I agree. The thing is, I like Scott. He’s cute like a puppy. If only he wouldn’t piss all over the floor. Scott says, “it’s much easier to take a shot at me than look at the context of my post, right?” Fair point. But then he goes on to piss all over the carpet: “Yes, sometimes the mods post stuff that other people wouldn’t be allowed to. Guess what? That’s how it works. Mommy and daddy get to do things that the kids don’t. When you have your own message board and when the kids grow up and move out to their own place, then you can do whatever you want.”
