It sucks that the Raptors fired Dwane Casey. They probably had to do it—they’ve lost like a hundred straight playoff games to LeBron James, and the systemic and cultural changes Casey engineered this past season made not even the slightest dent in James’s dominance, and they can’t any longer credibly claim to be…
They did everything right.
Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey was voted by his peers as the NBA’s coach of the year two days ago. He received this award for coaching his team to a 59-23 record and the top seed in the Eastern Conference. Today, Casey lost his job. This is because LeBron James exists, and happens to play basketball in the…
In the second postseason of his career, Rodney Hood has done very little to speak of. So far the Cavs’ trade deadline pickup has coughed up 4.6 points a game on 40-percent shooting from the floor and just 13-percent shooting from the arc, making him an especially useless cog in a LeBron Plus Shooters offense. By…
Let’s get this straight first off: the Raptors were dead the moment LeBron James’s floater went off the backboard and through the net to end Game 3. But at the very least, the number one seed in the East could have put up a fight before packing their bags for summer vacation. Instead, Toronto laid down and accepted…
That the Cavs won Game 3, at home, on another act of eye-popping heroism from LeBron James, should surprise exactly no one. The Cavs were the favorites, they won both games in Toronto, they have the best player in the world, and the Raptors are cursed. But that doesn’t mean the game wasn’t without genuine surprises,…
The late NBA heartbreaks continued tonight in Cleveland as LeBron James gave the Cavaliers a 3-0 series lead with a buzzer-beater that downed Toronto just after the Raptors’ OG Anunoby hit a three-pointer to tie the game with eight seconds remaining.
In every playoff series, LeBron James is going to have a handful of games where he’s utterly unstoppable and goes for some ridiculous stat line like 45-12-14 just because he can and because his team needs him to be everywhere all the time. The Cavs found out how far LeBron alone can take them in the first round, when…
Well, that settles that.
The No. 1 seed Raptors, again, built a first-half lead tonight only to squander it, losing 128-110 to fall behind 2-0 in their second-round series against the Cavaliers. And while it may be tempting to file this one away as yet another classically Raptorsian playoff performance, there’s only so much—which is to say:…
Drake spent time during the Raptors’ spectacular Game 1 choke getting into it with Kendrick Perkins, a man much larger than him, and at one point even called him a “fucking pussy” while the two were surrounded by approximately 500 security guards. It was one of those fake NBA fights where both guys talk over each…
There is no such thing as a LeBron Stopper. There are LeBron Inconveniencers, and if you are one of them, and have eaten a well-balanced meal and hydrated deeply and prayed to all the relevant deities, you might “hold” LeBron to a triple-double and 26 points on 40-percent shooting, as the Raptors did last night. As…
I’m not here to argue that the Raptors’ collapse in Game 1 of their second-round series against the Cavaliers is proof that their 59-win season was totally hollow and that they are in fact fraudulent pretenders unworthy of the No. 1 seed and should be expelled from the NBA so that no one ever again has to spend…
Noted Toronto fan (and former failed basketball player) Drake stirred a little beef with Cleveland bench goon Kendrick Perkins during tonight’s Raptors-Cavaliers Game 1. It started with some words at halftime...
After jumping out to an early lead, the Raptors caved and let the Cavaliers take a Game 1 victory in overtime tonight, 113-112.
The Wizards, who won 43 games during the regular season—that’s three fewer than the Denver Nuggets, who failed to make the playoffs in the much tougher Western Conference—and were the Eastern Conference’s 8th seed, were eliminated on their home floor by the Toronto Raptors Friday night.
So the Washington Wizards will not be swept by the Toronto Raptors. Friday night the Wizards got hot from the floor, survived several instances of their players being crabby, runaway buttheads, and grabbed Game 3 on their home court. Marcin Gortat shaved his mohawk; John Wall cooled it with the turnovers; Markieff…
The competitive part of last night’s Game 2 between the Toronto Raptors and Washington Wizards was over, long over, by the time some combination of shame and embarrassment sparked a smidgen of detectable pride or competitive intensity in any Washington player. The result was a laughably misleading 11-point margin of…
The Toronto Raptors, the first-place team in the Eastern Conference, lost last night, to the third-place Cleveland Cavaliers. They lost to the badly depleted second-place Boston Celtics three nights prior. They’ve lost five of their last eight games, the worst stretch in what’s so far been the best season in the…
The top two teams in the Eastern Conference met last night. You may have missed it: first of all, the men’s Final Four was last night; second of all, you might’ve simply sagged into the position, literally weeks ago, that the top of the Eastern Conference was settled. It’s not! The Celtics came into Saturday night…
