Right in the midst of this column coming together — look, it’s been a busy day — it was announced that Toronto’s Kyle Lowry had been named the Eastern Conference Player of the Week. This is a small thing, but it describes exactly how the Raptors just had a 4-0 week despite a continuing onslaught of injuries.
At the start of the week, Fred VanVleet was out, then in one fell swoop, the team lost Marc Gasol, Norman Powell, and Pascal Siakam. Meanwhile, the Raptors’ bench unit has been hit with a bit of pain too — there’s been no Matt Thomas or Stanley Johnson for weeks at a time, right after Patrick McCaw finally made it back to good health.