The last Toronto Raptors team to start a season 0-4 featured Loren Woods at centre, Mike James at point guard and Joey Graham at small forward.
Rafael Araujo came off the bench. Rob Babcock was the general manager and Sam Mitchell the head coach. They eventually started the season 0-9 and won only 27 games on merit.
That was in 2005-06.
The current edition of the Raptors is a lot better than that, but they are till 0-3, tied for last in the Eastern Conference and seemingly incapable of not getting in their own way in crunch time.
A four-game losing streak to close out 2020?
Not impossible.
As Kyle Lowry put it after his team coughed up on themselves in the fourth quarter of their 100-93 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers: they’re in a bad spot.
“I just think we’re not all on the same page right now,” Lowry said after a rare loss against his hometown team, a series the Raptors have dominated over his career in Toronto. “That’s a big thing with us. We’re not on the same page but we’re working towards that. It’s just that right now we’re adding a couple of new guys, new positions and new roles and this and that and I think the shortened pre-season, the short time off, guys are still getting their legs under them a little bit.
“[But] we don’t have time to waste no more, we’re 0-3 and we need a win really, really bad. I feel like we’re getting to that point where it’s a must-win. We gotta do everything we possibly can to win the next game.”
That would be New Year’s Eve back in Tampa when the Raptors host the New York Knicks. Normally that would be guaranteed-win-night, a moment where the mature, mentally tough former champions feast on a young team trying to find their way in the league.
But this edition of the Raptors seems short on guarantees.
For a few years, it was a lock that the Raptors would make life miserable for Sixers centre Joel Embiid. It was only a season ago — though it seems like another age — that the Raptors held the Philadelphia big man scoreless in 32 minutes. Embiid was 0-11 from the floor and 0-of-3 from the line and turned it over four times, too.
That came on the heels of the Raptors reducing Embiid to tears after Toronto booted Philadelphia from the playoffs en route to the 2019 NBA title.
This 2020-21 version of the Raptors is very much trying to find their identity. Proof? Little-used and all but forgotten Stanley Johnson was even getting key minutes off the bench. Anything is possible, it seems, with this group, good or bad. What they land on is yet to be determined.
In the meantime, freed from his constraints Embiid roamed comfortably. The Raptors’ primary solution was, seemingly, to foul the seven-foot, 300-pounder. Embiid finished with 29 points and 16 rebounds while shooting 14-of-16 from the line. The Raptors got to the line 14 times as a team and their trio of centres was a combined 2-of-12 from the floor for nine points.
Embiid dominated down the stretch, clogging the paint and protecting the rim as the Raptors collapsed on offence. Toronto managed just two field goals and scored six points in the game’s final 6:55, giving up a five-point lead without much of a fight in the process. On the other end, Embiid was able to get to the line or create plays for others — such as when he found Seth Curry wide open for a three with a minute left that pushed the Sixers’ lead to five.
It was a nice play by Embiid, but another breakdown by the Raptors in a key moment — a theme to this point in the season.
“We’ve had a little bit of an issue of finding that guy in the first three games, from [JJ Reddick on New Orleans] to Patty Mills [on San Antonio] to Curry tonight,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse. “That just comes down to being in sync, connected or whatever defensively … It was like nine guys under the basket because everybody thought Embiid was shooting. He kicked it out to Curry who was the only guy left out there on both teams, I think.”
Lowry was Lowry — he finished with 24 points, nine assists and eight rebounds — but he was a man on an island. He got some assistance as OG Anunoby — a ghost through the first two games since signing his four-year, $72 million contract — stepped up with 20 points and five steals.
But elsewhere the Raptors were lacking, and the question is do they lack something tangible or can they find a way to cover the gaps? The Raptors have blown double-digit leads — they were up by 14 midway through the third quarter against the Sixers — in all three of their losses.
“[We’re] Just letting our foot off the pedal and just not keeping the same urgency that we have when we’re going on our runs, getting these big leads,” said Anunoby. “Just playing smarter too, where sometimes, you know, we take bad shots, don’t play as hard on defence. So just keeping our foot on the pedal the whole 48 minutes to finish out the game.”
A more complete effort would help and, optimistically, there was some promise on Tuesday night. Coming into the game the Raptors were ranked 20th in the NBA in points allowed but made a more concerted effort to gum things up against Philadelphia.
It worked to an extent — if Toronto can hold their opponents to 38 per cent shooting and force 18 turnovers more often, their three-game losing streaks will be few and far between. But they’ll need some offence, too, as they aren’t going to win many games shooting just 36 per cent from the floor and making 19 turnovers themselves — including three in the final seven minutes.
“I think we’re not being strong enough with the ball,” said Nurse, perhaps talking about Pascal Siakam, who was 8-of-23 from the floor, didn’t take a free throw and was last seen walking off the floor and directly to the dressing room in a huff after fouling out with 25.6 seconds left in the game.
“We’re making some hard driving things and it seems like we’re either having a late pass handling issue, a finishing issue — or even when we do go up without a pass, we lost the ball out of bounds a few times,” Nurse said. “… We just kind of have not handled the ball with enough strength late in the game.”
The Raptors have a day to regroup before hosting the Knicks — who are 2-1 — on Dec. 31st back in Tampa.
It’s a must-win game to close out 2020. Lowry even said so. Stranger things have happened, but through three games, the Raptors have shown anything is possible and not all of it is good.
PARIS (AP) — French judicial authorities are investigating the disappearance of two Paralympic athletes from Congo who recently competed in the Paris Games, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Bobigny confirmed on Thursday.
Prosecutors opened the investigation on Sept. 7, after members of the athletes’ delegation warned authorities of their disappearance two days before.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that shot putter Mireille Nganga and Emmanuel Grace Mouambako, a visually impaired sprinter who was accompanied by a guide, went missing on Sept. 5, along with a third person.
The athletes’ suitcases were also gone but their passports remained with the Congolese delegation, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak publicly about the case.
The Paralympic Committee of the Democratic Republic of Congo did not respond to requests for information from The Associated Press.
Nganga — who recorded no mark in the seated javelin and shot put competitions — and Mouambako were Congo’s flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, organizers said.
An investigator gave the World Anti-Doping Agency a pass on its handling of the inflammatory case involving Chinese swimmers, but not without hammering away at the “curious” nature of WADA’s “silence” after examining Chinese actions that did not follow rules designed to safeguard global sports.
WADA on Thursday released the full decision from Eric Cottier, the Swiss investigator it appointed to analyze its handling of the case involving the 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
In echoing wording from an interim report issued earlier this summer, Cottier said it was “reasonable” that WADA chose not to appeal the Chinese anti-doping agency’s explanation that the positives came from contamination.
“Taking into consideration the particularities of the case, (WADA) appears … to have acted in accordance with the rules it has itself laid out for anti-doping organizations,” Cottier wrote.
But peppered throughout his granular, 56-page analysis of the case was evidence and reminders of how WADA disregarded some of China’s violations of anti-doping protocols. Cottier concluded this happened more for the sake of expediency than to show favoritism toward the Chinese.
“In retrospect at least, the Agency’s silence is curious, in the face of a procedure that does not respect the fundamental rules, and its lack of reaction is surprising,” Cottier wrote of WADA’s lack of fealty to the world anti-doping code.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and one of WADA’s fiercest critics, latched onto this dynamic, saying Cottier’s information “clearly shows that China did not follow the rules, and that WADA management did nothing about it.”
One of the chief complaints over the handling of this case was that neither WADA nor the Chinese gave any public notice upon learning of the positive tests for the banned heart medication Temozolomide, known as TMZ.
The athletes also were largely kept in the dark and the burden to prove their innocence was taken up by Chinese authorities, not the athletes themselves, which runs counter to what the rulebook demands.
Despite the criticisms, WADA generally welcomed the report.
“Above all, (Cottier) reiterated that WADA showed no bias towards China and that its decision not to appeal the cases was reasonable based on the evidence,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said. “There are however certainly lessons to be learned by WADA and others from this situation.”
Tygart said “this report validates our concerns and only raises new questions that must be answered.”
Cottier expanded on doubts WADA’s own chief scientist, Olivier Rabin, had expressed over the Chinese contamination theory — snippets of which were introduced in the interim report. Rabin was wary of the idea that “a few micrograms” of TMZ found in the kitchen at the hotel where the swimmers stayed could be enough to cause the group contamination.
“Since he was not in a position to exclude the scenario of contamination with solid evidence, he saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” Cottier wrote.
Though recommendations for changes had been expected in the report, Cottier made none, instead referring to several comments he’d made earlier in the report.
Key among them were his misgivings that a case this big was largely handled in private — a breach of custom, if not the rules themselves — both while China was investigating and after the file had been forwarded to WADA. Not until the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported on the positives were any details revealed.
“At the very least, the extraordinary nature of the case (23 swimmers, including top-class athletes, 28 positive tests out of 60 for a banned substance of therapeutic origin, etc.), could have led to coordinated and concerted reflection within the Agency, culminating in a formal and clearly expressed decision to take no action,” the report said.
WADA’s executive committee established a working group to address two more of Cottier’s criticisms — the first involving what he said was essentially WADA’s sloppy recordkeeping and lack of formal protocol, especially in cases this complex; and the second a need to better flesh out rules for complex cases involving group contamination.
The French league’s legal commission has ordered Paris Saint-Germain to pay Kylian Mbappé the 55 million euros ($61 million) in unpaid wages that he claims he’s entitled to, the league said Thursday.
The league confirmed the decision to The Associated Press without more details, a day after the France superstar rejected a mediation offer by the commission in his dispute with his former club.
