Under Masai Ujiri’s guidance, the Toronto Raptors' list of accomplishments is long: Five consecutive postseasons, a first Eastern Conference finals appearance, the first three 50-win seasons in franchise history. The past five years has been the best stretch in the Raptors' history.
Friday’s firing of head coach Dwane Casey wasn’t about the results he produced in the regular season, but Toronto’s continued failure to get over the postseason hump. Sure, it’s the same hump that has halted every team in the East since 2011, when LeBron James started his streak of seven (and counting) consecutive Finals appearances.
But it was the way the Raptors lost, especially in their latest sweep to the Cleveland Cavaliers, which finally pushed Ujiri to make a move. It was time to try it another way, after coming up short on so many occasions with the same group.
“Sometimes, these things come to an end,” Ujiri said Friday. He described firing the peer-anointed Coach of the Year as the hardest thing he’s ever done. “Our relationships come to an end and we’ll figure out a way to move on … It was really, really difficult.”
A year ago, Ujiri resisted the urge to break up his core group, re-signing Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka, and worked with Casey to usher in a culture reset. It put the spotlight on his coach and his players to revamp their game in order to produce a different playoff result. "I can’t pull off the culture reset this year, can I?" Ujiri joked to reporters at the start of his season-ending press conference Wednesday.
He can’t. Because, this summer, the spotlight will be on Ujiri and his own reset, with Casey’s dismissal the first domino to fall. And, then, there will be the question of what roster moves Ujiri can make to ensure the postseason outcome differs next year.
“Roster changes are a little bit more difficult and complicated,” Ujiri said. “But we’ll continue to grow this team as much as we can… With roster changes, it’s not something that I can change today; sometimes it takes two months, sometimes it takes one year, sometimes it takes two years.”
Ujiri has tinkered with the roster several times during the past five seasons, but the reality is the Raptors continue to face the same problem: Without the assets or the ability to add a true two-way superstar, Toronto will always be one player short.
That, in turn, means you must seize opportunities that come your way. Opportunities like winning 59 games and having home-court advantage throughout the East playoffs, and the three-time defending Eastern Conference champions appearing to be on their last legs. Maybe if one of those fourth-quarter shots in Game 1 had fallen, it would have been a different series. Or, maybe, the Raptors simply got another up-close look at the difference between a team built around a superstar and one built around camaraderie, chemistry, and the sum of the parts being greater than the whole.
The calculus hasn’t changed for Ujiri since he took over this team and appeared intent on a long-term rebuild until Knicks owner James Dolan decided he didn’t want to trade for Lowry. The Raptors stumbled their way accidentally into becoming a perennial playoff contender in the East.
On Friday, Ujiri rejected the notion that this team - and Casey, in particular - failed in the playoffs. “I don’t know what I’d call it - not succeeding,” Ujiri said. “I always (look at) where we were five years ago, the five years working with Casey. That’s the success he’s been given the opportunity to have here.”
Ujiri's not wrong. But the regular-season successes of this team, and the incremental improvements made in the postseason, were a five-year roundabout way of avoiding the same question: Where do you go when you’ve done everything you can to maximize the success of a roster without a superstar player?
Friday’s move to fire Casey felt more like an indictment of the Raptors' situation than one of all this team's flaws being tied to a particular coach.
Ujiri will hire someone new, he will tinker with the roster, he will try to rearrange the equation to give the Raptors a better chance of getting past whichever great player they’ll need to shackle to get to the Finals. Friday was an end of an era, but also a reminder of the difficulties of contending in the NBA.