After nine years, the Kyle Lowry era in Toronto has come to an end, but Raptors Chairman Larry Tanenbaum has said that Lowry’s will be the first jersey retired by the franchise (Keith Allison/Flickr).


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Blake Murphy of The Athletic joins the show to delve into the performance of the Toronto Raptors during Las Vegas Summer League, especially regarding the newly drafted Scottie Barnes. Additionally, we discuss the Kyle Lowry trade, what he meant to the city and the Raptors franchise, and how they will move forward without him next season and beyond.

9:10-10:08: “[For Scottie Barnes], the playmaking on the move is real. … Barnes’ defense is gonna be his calling card early on. I think he’s been pretty good on that end. The processing speed there is really high level and they’ve had him picking up full court, they’ve had him guarding across positions. So I think he’s going to be a real player from day one defensively as hard as that is as a rookie, but the offensive game is gonna take a little bit of time.”

18:48-20:20: “The Raptors haven’t had a lot of guys stick around nine years. They haven’t had a lot of guys win a lot in Toronto also. So I think the fact that Lowry’s […] ascension kind of parallels the franchise’s own rise to being a more legitimate franchise in the NBA, and being a pretty consistently good team and eventually a championship contender. The growth of Lowry and the growth of the team as a whole are kind of hand in hand. … Lowry has always really fit kind of what Raptors fans are about. And what I mean by that is, you know, the “We The North” campaign from back in 2013-2014 kind of tried to get at this like: ‘Hey, there’s an entire country here that’s obsessed with hockey, but, hey, pay attention, there’s a bunch of us basketball fans too.’ And hey, there’s 30 markets in the NBA, and 29 of them get what Raptors fans feel like is preferred attention. … They kinda had this level of othering with the fan base where you could kinda get people to buy in more by pointing out that they were…underdogs too. And I think that Lowry really represented that with his career path and his general attitude and the chip on his shoulder.”

24:27-25:15: “I never thought it was particularly likely that [Raptors executive Masai] Ujiri would leave to run another basketball team. I thought what might poach him away are some kind of bigger things of like, ‘Hey, does he want to be more involved at the league level or with Basketball Africa League, maybe?’ Or, he does a lot with his Giants of Africa charity and could pretty seamlessly, I think, transition into…using his voice and prominence from a political end. I would have been really surprised if he was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go be the president of the Washington Wizards and see if I could build a team there,’ but it wasn’t a sure thing that he was staying.”

27:30-28:18: “Even with the COVID and the shoulder injury and the clutch struggles, I thought [Pascal Siakam] improved. I thought he improved as a playmaker, he improved his shooting from every area of the court inside the arc, so that’s an important consideration. … Having said all that, he needs to keep going. He got paid, not the full supermax, but the 28 percent kicker on his max deal, and he needs to continue to improve to deliver on that. He’s not that level of player yet.”

32:09-33:17: “You look at how far “[OG Anunoby]’s come from an offensive skill perspective already, and it’s really encouraging. Obviously, this stuff is not linear, so you can’t keep projecting him just forward and forward and forward, but…we’ve kind of seen him grow from this 3-and-D guy to a really elite 3-and-D role player to now where I want to see what he looks like this year with a 20 percent usage rate. Can he be a 2a, 2b kind of scorer along with VanVleet behind Siakam, because I think that the base is there, but it’s harder to do that stuff at higher volume. So that’s his next challenge. Defensively, there’s no question, I think he’s probably a top-five defender in the NBA, and I don’t think he’s gonna lose that any time soon.”

40:27-41:06: “If you tier out the Eastern Conference, they’re probably in the 6-10 or 7-11 range. They’re certainly not a team that is for sure going to avoid a play-in game. They’re not a team that for sure is gonna make a playoff run necessarily. But I think a lot would have to go wrong for them to be bad. You look at last year, displaced from home, COVID outbreak wipes out half the team and half the coaching staff, including three starters, and even then, after all that, they still had to intentionally bench guys down the stretch to make sure that they didn’t make the play-in game and could get a better lottery spot.”

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Music: “Who Likes to Party” by Kevin MacLeod.