After winning the championship, it was rebuilt, and it was built in three years, and the king of the north returned

"In my experience, there's always a habit in the outside world that they underestimate us Raptors."

30 minutes after beating the Atlanta Hawks to secure playoff qualification, Chris Boucher said in the press room of the Canada Scotiabank Centre.

He was right. When he first arrived in Toronto, no one expected the Raptors to win the championship that season. This year is his fourth year in Canada, and no one wants this team to finish fifth in the East. But he actually does not need to limit this concept to the "outside world", because even the head of the Raptors did not expect the Raptors to play so well this season.

Before the season began, Raptors general manager Marseille Ujerry set the tone for the season in an interview with Canadian television: "We are not a team built for the present. We may have growing pains this season, and sometimes our games or results will be ugly, but I'm pretty sure we know what we're doing. ”

From a team built for the future to fifth in the East, the Raptors have improved so fast that it even shocked the coach who concocted it all himself, Nick Nas, who began to think bitterly after winning the Hawks last game: "In the first 25 games of this year, our tactical execution on the defensive end was very bad. Every time we switched to joint defense, we would give the opposite big empty slot a chance to shoot. If we change from joint defense to staring at people, our defensive rotation is a mess again. This was very worrying to me at the time. But you look at today's game against the Eagles, when we hit people and stared at people, we were able to handle the blocking and demolition initiated by the ball carrier at Trae Young's level, and we also played a joint defense, and we also played a quarterback for a while... On the defensive end, the lads are improving too fast. ”

Nas actually understood from the beginning that this Raptors team was not the championship Raptors he was familiar with, and most of the players on this team were young and thin, often unable to carry out his complex defensive instructions. For most coaches, the best way to coach these young people is to play the simplest tactics possible and not let them think and judge.

But Nas and his coaching staff refused to compromise. Nas believes that the Raptors, who have many tall and agile forwards but no real big center, should play their current style of defense: a lot of pounces, reinforcements, defensive changes and local pinches, every time a player is passed, there are other players to help him make up, and every time the opponent moves the ball, he has to walk through the long-arm jungle of Raptors players.

Even if the effect was not satisfactory at first, he did not waver in the slightest. In the first 30 games, the Raptors' record is 14 wins and 16 losses, and the defense can only rank 20th in the league. At the time, it seemed that the team was not on the right path. But after that, they hit 33-17 and finished defensively sixth in the league. Time has proven that Nas was right.

VanVleet admits that persistence brings victory: "The coaching staff has developed a great defensive system for us, and if we execute well, this system is almost invincible. If we don't execute well, we'll be blown up by our opponents. We did a poor job at first, but the coaching staff was confident in us, and instead of modifying the plan, they let us stick with it and get familiar with it. ”

That's the Raptors' team philosophy, and it's the Raptors' biggest strength this season: It's not a short-sighted team, they have smart management, so they don't waver by a momentary setback. They've won the championship and know how to win. Both Ujery and Nas understand that building a strong team is a long-term process.

Such philosophies also played a role on draft nights. Before the night of the 2021 NBA draft, it was widely believed that the top four of the draft should be Keniann, Green, Mobley and Sagas, so the Raptors' act of picking Scotty Barnes with their fourth pick caused a lot of commotion in the basketball world at the time. But it didn't take a few games for Barnes to shut up the doubters: In Siakam's absence at the beginning of the season, he played the role of Siakam on the court, and while playing well, the Raptors won 6-4. Everyone was surprised to find that the 20-year-old always influenced the game in his own way, with points, rebounds, assists, defense.

Although his performance in the middle of the season was not as impressive as it was at the beginning of the season, Barnes remained the best performer of the year (probably better than Mobley) throughout the season. In a fifth-place team in the East, he played 2,562 minutes this season, ranking first in the team. As a rookie, he plays every game against the best players in the league — Kevin Durant, Luka Doncic, Jason Tatum, yesterday James Harden. Under his defense, Harden scored just 13 points on 3-of-12 shooting in the game. Maybe Sargas can improve the Raptors' backcourt in the short term, but in the long run, Barnes seems to be the player who helps the Raptors take it to the next level.

We wrote a previous article about how good VanVleet was this season, and VanVleet deservedly been named an All-Star, but siakam shouldn't be ignored either. Siakam is Toronto's top pick, and if you watch yesterday's game, you'll see what he looks like with ravaging every defender on the 76ers. It started with Tobias Harris, then Danny Green, then George Niang, Sherk Milton and Paul Reid, and finally Rivers couldn't stand it, and after the fourth quarter, he even let Embiid leave the inside line to keep an eye on Siakam.

Guess what happened next? With 2 minutes left in the game, Siakam broke through from the top of the arc, then flew the pursuing MVP candidate with a beautiful up and down step, completed the most critical layup on his head, widened the point difference to 6 points, and the Raptors locked in the victory. By the end of the game, his stats were a big triple-double of 37 points, 11 rebounds and 12 assists. Under his leadership, the Raptors beat their potential playoff opponent for the third time this season.

Of course, in a series, if you were to bet on Embiid and Siakam, 99% of the world's people would play Embiid. But the team's victory or defeat is not only a competition of stars. The 76ers' reliance on Embiid is simply too great, and this kind of thing can be seen in the 2019 series, in the 237 minutes embiid, the 76ers have 90 more points than the Raptors, and in the 99 minutes he did not play, the Raptors won 76ers by 109 points. In that well-known, seventh game, which was eliminated by Leonard, Embiid only rested for 168 seconds, and the 76ers lost 12 points in those 168 seconds — a difference of two points.

Three years on, 76 people still haven't been able to solve the problem. In this game, the 76ers lost 13 points in the 11 minutes of Embiid's game. Maybe Embiid is still a player the Raptors can't handle, but his team is not. Harden's arrival didn't solve the problem automatically as everyone expected, his retreating three-pointer against Barnes' long arm didn't work, and when he tried to break through through the cover, the Raptors' tall forward army caused him trouble again.

The 76ers' bitter hand against the Raptors does not stop there, as the league's three-pointer production and efficiency are moderately low, the Raptors' positional offense can rarely open up space through coordination. So with the exception of VanVleet, Nas rarely let the rest of the Raptors launch a high-level blocking offense. They prefer to let their tall forwards pick out the opposing team's small guards, and in this link, the 76ers just don't have much to do: The 76ers' defensive blocking strategy is to change everyone except Embiid, which allows raptors scorers to hunt their defensive weaknesses unscrupulously.

So yesterday's showdown was a guiding game. When Philadelphia still loses on 19-of-36 shooting, even staunch 76ers supporters can no longer use the Raptors as a stepping stone to the Eastern Conference semifinals, and anyone who follows this team should admit that this team could cause trouble for any team in the Eastern Conference.

Coach Nas attributed the team's good performance to the culture: "I think we have formed a team culture. It may sound a little strange, but our attitude of hard work and the way we stay competitive has paid off as it deserves. My players found a special way to grind out those wins that allowed us to make it to the playoffs. I don't think anyone can predict our success, it's been a good season for us. ”

From the 2019 Finals to the 2022 playoffs, the Raptors have rebuilt faster than most people think. No matter what kind of performance they play in the playoffs, they have grown much faster than people expected. But that's not what they're most terrifying about. They're going to get better, and Ugery will never settle for "good" and "good" and he will do whatever it takes to make this team a championship contender again. The Raptors' progress this season will not change his original intention, but will only accelerate this process. Don't forget his words:

"We're not a team built for the moment."