Love it or hate it, Raptors begin In-Season Tournament with tall task vs. Celtics

Listen, I’m sure at some level the NBA’s fancy new In-Season Tournament will turn out to be pretty fun. 

It’s just that locally, the ‘IST’ experience — as it’s been short-formed  — could be nasty brutish and short for the Toronto Raptors if they don’t get their Ish Smith together. 

The Raptors are the last team in the NBA to start the cup-style format where the league’s 30 teams have been divided into six groups for pool play, from which the six teams with the best records and the teams in each conference with the next best record advance to an eight-team knockout stage. The semifinals and finals are set for Las Vegas with the winning team earning $500,000 per player, plus there’s a trophy. 

The Raptors get their first taste of the new world — featuring garish courts and dedicated uniforms as part of a heavy-handed league-wide branding exercise — on Friday when they host the Boston Celtics. They are jumping in at the deep end. In a pool of five teams — the Raptors are joined in their pool by Brooklyn, Orlando, Chicago as well as the Celtics — it’s likely going to require a 3-1 record to have a chance to advance. 

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Given the Raptors just got pumped by the Giannis-less Milwaukee Bucks, will likely be without O.G. Anunoby for the third straight game after he required stitches on the index finger of his shooting hand after cutting himself doing “household chores” and the Celtics flicked the full-strength Raptors aside like prime Shaquille O’Neal used to shed defenders when they played in Boston last on Saturday, Toronto is facing some long odds. 

The 5-6, offensively challenged Raptors either have to upset the 9-2 Celtics, who are by every measure the NBA’s best team at this stage of the season, or they have to hope the Celtics get beat twice in group play and then the Raptors would have to run the table. 

How much of all this is on any of the players’ minds is an open question. 

On one hand, you have point guard Dennis Schroder, who when asked if the new enhancement to the schedule will get his competitive juices running a little faster, said: “If you know there’s $500K on the table for the winner do you have motivation? There you go.”

On the other you have Pascal Siakam pointing out quite correctly that because all the in-season tournament games are part of the NBA’s regular schedule except for the final, it doesn’t make sense to make a bigger deal out of games that are supposed to be a big deal anyway. 

“I think I’m pumped to win a game right after losing a game,” he said when asked if Friday’s game against Boston had any extra meaning for him. “We want to bounce back. We didn’t play well [against the Bucks] I’m excited about that, like having an opportunity to play a game and having an opportunity to win after the loss.”

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And the chance to win the money? The trophy? A free trip to Vegas in December? Does that register? 

“I don’t know. I don’t think that that moves the needle, but I think it’s just playing basketball. I like basketball. It’s my opportunity to play and compete. To me [that] is always exciting,” said Siakam. “I don’t think the money makes me like, ‘Oh my God, I have to kill myself.’ I have to kill myself every night because I want to be great. It’s not like those games don’t count. All those games are important. To me, I don’t try to put extra pressure on that. We’ve got to win every game that we try to play anyways. So it’s like, why not try (the same) for those ones?”

It’s an interesting point, that Siakam makes. In trying to elevate a select few regular season games above others to add more spice to what can be a long, drawn-out regular season, does the NBA not send the message that the other games don’t matter as much? 

A big-picture question, to be sure. The motivation for the league is undoubtedly to create a stand-alone property that can be a jewel to be haggled over as the NBA goes about negotiating its new, mega-billion dollar media rights deal. Don’t be surprised if a few years from now the  ‘In Season Tournament brought to you by (insert sponsor)’ is a pay-per-view product available to Netflix subscribers or something of that ilk. 

It will be interesting to see how it all ends up. Siakam — a European football fan to the core — noted that the various Cup competitions that are part of the European sports landscape gain a lot of their oomph because teams typically end up playing against teams that they would otherwise not play in their league competitions. Each game is new, rare and different. 

As pointed out, the Raptors have already played the Celtics this season and will play them two more times over the course of the regular season with each of those meetings carrying just as much weight in the regular season standings as the others. 

So Friday’s game is now more important and last Saturday’s less so? It doesn’t make sense. 

But perhaps that’s where all this is headed: maybe the in-season tournament truly becomes a competition separate from the other games on the schedule and the results don’t carry over to the regular season.  Maybe the 82-game regular season gets trimmed back a little bit and instead, a single-elimination knockout tourney is built out in the new space created.  As it grows in familiarity and revenues, it becomes a significant opportunity to earn the kind of quick money that could grab players’ attention and maybe over time winning it carries with it some of the cachet a playoff series win might. 

Maybe it’s the first step toward a meaningful global competition, where the champion of the IST meets the winner of a similar tournament among the top clubs in Europe or a EuroLeague all-star team. 

The practicalities of these kinds of things always tend to get in the way, but at least by launching the property, it allows for some creative thinking and spitballing. Nothing wrong with that. 

But for now? It’s new and it has some hurdles to overcome. When I asked Raptors forward Scotties Barnes how he would explain the new format to someone he paused, smiled before saying “they could look on Google.”  Like a lot of NBA fans, Barnes is still a bit confused by the whole thing. 

Still, even a stick-in-the-mud traditionalist can see how this could all end up being at least some fun. 

Consider this scenario: An up-and-coming team without a pedigree of recent playoff success makes its way out of the group stage, gets hot in the knockout round and finds themselves in Las Vegas playing for all the marbles or the $500,000 winners share, if you prefer. Maybe it’s the super-entertaining Indiana Pacers, or the on-the-cusp-of-big things Oklahoma City Thunder 

On the other side of the bracket is one of the league’s more established teams who make it through mostly on the virtue of being really good, like the Celtics or Denver Nuggets. 

So there you are on Dec. 9^th — the date for the final in Las Vegas — with not much going on, the newness of the current season fading and the light at the end of the tunnel that is the run to the post-season still months away and you flip on the TV and see a basketball game that, sort of, kind of, matters. 

The up-and-comers get a moment in the NBA spotlight that is had to come by for less established teams in smaller markets. The hoops world gets to see a basketball savant like the Pacers’ Tyrese Haliburton show why he might be the most exciting player in basketball right now or pay closer attention to the Thunder’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the least appreciated superstar in the league. 

Either way, it works: David either slays Goliath, which is always fun, especially in a league like the NBA where true upsets in seven-game playoff series are so rare, or the big boys stomp, collect the winner’s cheque and signal once again to the league that the path to the NBA title goes through them. 

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On Friday the Raptors get their crack at the IST against the Celtics who are looking to improve to 2-0 in the competition.  It’s not quite win-or-go home for Toronto, but its fate will be determined quickly. After Friday’s game, the Raptors travel to Orlando on Tuesday where they play Orlando and then host Chicago next Friday before playing their last pool game in Brooklyn on Nov. 28^th. 

Chances are their inaugural IST result will be determined before that — certainly, a loss to Boston would put their chances of advancing somewhere between slim and none. 

But for now it’s at least a pleasant distraction and hey, what else was everyone going to do?

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