Raptors put on show in winning home opener: Arthur

The nerves creep in, every time. The man inside the Raptor suit used to do his routines free and easy; he did his best, and he was loved for it, and at some point he realized he had given people a standard they had come to expect. So now when he goes out there, in his 20th season, he worries. If a bit doesn’t go the way he wants, he tries even harder to make up for it. Every second he’s out there, he says, his heart is beating 100 miles an hour.

Expectations can be hard, and they can be dangerous. The Toronto Raptors have done without them for many years now, but after a 48-win season and a seven-game playoff loss, a bar has been set. The 2014-15 season opened with Atlanta Wednesday night, and it felt different.

“In all of Toronto’s history I’ve never seen us so together, so united, so passionate,” said Drake, the Global Ambassador, speaking to his most specific local constituency in Maple Leaf Square before a 109-102 win. “We deserved this . . . we’re going to see the best days for the Raptors that we could ever hope for.”

There is showbiz swirling around this franchise now, buzz. In the morning CP24 showed the shoot-around live, which means they set up a camera in the small room where media access occurs, and broadcast the interviews as they happened. Mostly, this indicated that CP24, bless them, has not attended a lot of morning shoot-arounds.

After nightfall, the CN Tower was lit in red and purple to note the occasion, and the Square was filled with a young, bellowing crowd on a breezy night, and Drake and general manager Masai Ujiri made them cheer before game time. Tim Leiweke, still hanging around and proclaiming he has no immediate intention to leave, grinned as his two biggest stars hugged and posed for pictures before going outside.

And the crowd remained the best crowd in town, as it has for many, many years. In a front row near a railing, Ujiri’s parents, Michael and Grace, watched their first NBA game in person, after years of following their son’s teams over television. Their son held their granddaughter for a while in the first quarter, a few feet away.

And the Raptors went out and delivered a show. Their two backcourt stars, DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, struggled to make shots. Toronto played with pace, but forgot sharpshooter Kyle Korver existed several times, which is inadvisable.

But they hung a 60-point first half on the Hawks, and got big play in managed minutes from Amir Johnson, from Terrence Ross, from Jonas Valanciunas and Greivis Vasquez and newcomer Lou Williams. Their two best players shot 7-for-27, and the defence had some lapses, and the bottom nearly fell out in the final few minutes. The crowd was incredible.

“It felt like a playoff atmosphere,” said Johnson, who only found out what that felt like in Toronto in April.

“Best crowd in the NBA,” said Vazquez. “It’s a party.”

A year ago, so many people — this writer included — were saying the best move might be to disassemble the Raptors and start building from scratch. It almost happened. But then, a year ago, LeBron was in Miami. Expectations can change fast, too, and you have to be careful with them.

“I’ve always had that (caution), and especially this year,” said Raptors coach Dwane Casey beforehand. “There’s such a good feeling around the city, (but) everybody loves to see somebody fall off a cliff, fall off the wagon a little bit.

“So how we handle that is really going to tag our season, because that’s where you’ll see it test our chemistry, test our roles, test everything, is when something happens, we fall down. It’s how we get back up. I’ve seen it so many times with expectations: if you don’t meet them everybody’s like, ‘well, are they meeting expectations, will they get there, what’s going on?’ But it’s a process. It’s a marathon.”

It is that, this season and beyond. Ujiri has, in the best-case scenario, a team that can compete for home-court advantage, that can conceivably win a playoff round, that can give Chicago or Cleveland a scare. That’s probably the ceiling, with health and luck and the expected performance. Few stories unfold as they’re supposed to, but that’s the range. Casey only had to add a play or two to the offensive playbook this year, far fewer than he did a year ago.

Or maybe guys get hurt this year, or something. You never know.

It will unfold one game at a time, earned. Casey talked about how it was nice that meaningful games were finally here, but that can mean a lot of things. The pre-season is over, sure, but so are the days when the only thing on the line in this building was draft position, for months on end. No, they’re playing for something different, now.

The Raptor went out with his surgically repaired Achilles tendon Wednesday and he was nervous, as usual. For him, the pre-season is meaningful, too, because someone might be seeing a game for the first time. For some people in Toronto, they might be seeing something for the first time, too. That’s the hope, anyway.

“The excitement is there with the fans, and it’s great to see,” said Casey, who is in his fourth season here. “Somebody asked the other day, ‘would you rather have the excitement and the expectations than the other way around?’ I’d rather have that. We all should strive to get there, where people expect us to be.”