07-28-2015, 07:24 PM
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#29
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Designated Red Shirt
OVR: 0
Join Date: Sep 2009
Posts: 5,795
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Re: Raptors Rising: A Toronto Raptors Alternate History
November 15th, 2010
This was the first game in the NBA I felt genuinely sick about. We were playing the Bulls that night and it was a personal game for the fans, and a personal game to me. Chris Bosh had left the franchise — and the fans, including me — high and dry, just like Vince. Just like Vince, we couldn’t blame him — it wasn’t exactly like the organization did anything good for him. They left him alone in terms of talent.
But he still left. He could have stayed, could have stuck it out. Paul Pierce did that for the Celtics, but Bosh teamed up with Wade in Chicago and here he was. That team was undefeated when they entered our building.
And they left, 7-0, winners. We fell to 4-6 and I felt like we were a lot *hittier than that. We played our hearts out in that game, we took it to not one, but TWO OTs, and we just didn’t have enough. The Bulls won because they were better than us — we traded blow for blow against them but they had three legitimate scorers in crunch time.
And my team? My team had me. I kept taking it, I kept going, and I got damn close to winning this game myself. Jerryd did his part, he knocked down some great triples, DeMar tried to do his part but he got left on an island from deep and kept missing. Then he got scared and drove into a double-team, chunking it up and hoping for a miracle.
No one else on that team could score in crunch time except me, really.
But that night wasn’t bad just because of the loss. It was bad because of the way the locker room was when it was all said and done. Up until that point, no one had really had a problem with me killing it night after night, dominating the ball. I passed to others, others got their points.
Well, everyone but Barbosa.
“The *uck is wrong with you, man?” The guy, three inches shorter than I was, got into my chest, eyes on fire. “You got to score every time up the floor? Can’t pass? Can’t look off? Just got to shoot, shoot, shoot!”
Barbosa got nothing. Zero points. All game. You know why? He was a dick to me. He was a dick to Danny. He was a dick to Ed. If you were a rookie, he was dick to you. He tried to haze us and I told Danny and Ed to ignore him. I wasn’t going to be hazed, there wasn’t going to be any hazing on my team.
Barbosa, the vet, took offense to that. And now he was going to shovel some *hit my way? “*uck you,” I told him, nice and loud. I pushed him away from me and he came flying back to me like a rubber-band.
And then Danny got his big arms around the Brazilian and swung him around, facing away from me. “Lay off, man!”
“*uck him! *uck him!*” Barbosa repeated, his English breaking down into lightning-fast Portuguese.
“Too bad you don’t play as fast as you speak anymore!” I called out to him as I went into the showers.
I heard him slam his locker over a dozen times as I was showering.
As I showered, my mind relaxed and I got to thinking. Barbosa and I weren’t getting along, so he was marked as the guy I was going to trade before the deadline, easily. I was concerned about the lack of low-post scoring for us as well … defensively, we were beyond solid, but offensively it was me and Jerryd most nights, DeMar sometimes, and no low-post offense.
If we were going to be a competitive team we needed to get more well-rounded, more multi-dimensional. Danny and Ed could work on developing their post games as the year went on, but until then it was just going to be me.
I could carry us for that long, but our record indicated we weren’t as far off as I thought. We weren’t that bad. A little better and we might actually compete for a playoff spot this year. But was it worth it if it meant a lower draft pick?
That would be a question that would be on my mind the rest of that night, and I wouldn’t come up with an answer.
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