It was the day the Raptors season began in October. In the quiet of the tunnel leading to the Scotiabank Arena court, a high-ranking team official was asked privately what he thought.
“We’ll win some games we shouldn’t, we’ll lose some we shouldn’t,” he said. “But I think we’ll be OK as long as we stick with it.”
Well, here we are at the season’s end and the prescience of that comment hits home. The enduring characteristic of a team that surprised many with a fifth-place finish in the Eastern Conference may be that it simply soldiers on through good and bad, more concerned with improvement than immediate results.