It’ll be a month ago this week that the Raptors returned from a West Coast road swing in a dispiriting shambles.
If a team is what its record says it is, Toronto’s NBA team was a mess. With two wins in their opening 10 games, they were co-occupants of the league’s basement with the Detroit Pistons. In a season that began with veteran point guard Kyle Lowry imagining his team’s potential as a “real-life defensive monster,” they were a bottom-line disaster. So it wasn’t particularly surprising that they asked fans for patience as they figured out life after Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol.