Omnishambles Interrupted

I stopped blogging about the Raptors because the endless negativity was getting too depressing. But since then, something amazing happened—the Raptors stopped stinking. And by an amazing coincidence, that change occurred just as Andrea Bargnani stopped playing.

The Raptors have now won three in a row and are six games out of the eighth playoff spot. But, more importantly, they've been fun to watch. Without the lazy, selfish chucker that is Bargnani pooping all over the place, the rest of the team competes, shares the ball, and plays team defense. No idea if they can keep it up or what the ceiling on this bunch is (they're definitely not cursed with too much talent), but at least they are watchable and competitive.

Amir battling hard, as usual. Kind of like Andrea Bargnani, but the exact opposite.

Even Jose Calderon, a terrible defensive hole, has been okay—his offense has been excellent, and without Bargnani around destroying the team's interior defense, they rest of the team has been able to cover for him fairly well. Plus Alan Anderson has been stepping up, Landry Fields is coming back (potentially with his game fixed) ... all in all, I am cautiously optimistic.

To sum up:

• End the omnishambles - check
• Trade Bargnani - half-check. At least he's out of action
• Fire Colangelo -  looks like he's being to make it until the end of the season. But dear lord I hope his contract doesn't get renewed. He's still a terrible GM, even if the Raptors are no longer sucking hole of horrid at the moment.

Minus 7.5

With the loss to Portland last night, Toronto is now 4-18 and the proud owners of the worst point differential in the league — an average of 7.5 points per game less than their opponents. That's worse than even the 2-15 Washington Wizards. 

This is just way too much negativity for me. I cannot spend the next seven months (or more) railing on this terrible team. I'm signing off. 

End the omnishambles! Ditch Bargnani! Fire Colangelo!

Sigh.

Welcome to the Omnishambles Resistance

Well, here's a website just might make Omnishambles moot: FireBC.com.  So eloquent and to the point. He's also on Twitter @BadShahThoughts.

But I suppose every bit of fan outrage helps push MLSE toward taking some action. And, if we get really lucky (and defy all precedents of Raptor history), maybe positive action.

Anyhow, here's my favorite pic on this page of Colangelo sayings:

Unacceptable, Splitting Apart Omnishambles: Raptors 99 - Jazz 131

For a brief moment in the first quarter, it was looking like dueling omnishambles, as both the Jazz and the Raptors played some truly terrible basketball. It was like both sides were trying to lose. But then the Jazz got their act together and the Raptors stepped up their omnishambles to new heights, leading to a pretty thorough blowout.

We got stomped.

The tone was set from the first possession, when Bargnani and Pietrus stood around the 3-point arc awkwardly before Piétrus gave away the ball. The rest of the game was that kind of shambling ugliness. Bargnani drifting about pointlessly on "defense". No ball movement. Toronto lost on the boards and rotated terribly on defense, leading to open shots for Utah.

Someone out there in Internet land quoted Tracy McGrady's famous quote from Toronto's disastrous third season, when everything fell apart and the team finished 16-66: "The ship be sinking."

That's what I fear we are on the verge of here. Less than a quarter of the way into the season, there have been too many tough losses, late-game choke jobs, and ugly omnishambles. Sometimes a team reaches a point where it just breaks. I fear the Raptors are reaching that point. Lowry is too much of a competitor to handle this losing. Other players just don't care. Too many pieces don't fit together. This team is a mess, and unless something changes things are going to get a lot uglier before they get better.

Eric Koreen Joins Omnishamble Movement

Great to see the National Post's Eric Koreen join the calls to get rid of Andrea Bargnani, surely one of the cornerstones of the Omnishamble movement (along with ditching GM Colangelo ... and getting some actual, you know, talent). Here is his latest column:

Bargnani truly does not fit the culture that Casey is trying to establish. He has been the subject of locker-room discontent this season, and that comes when one player’s ethos does not mesh with the team’s. He is a highly skilled player who has not succeeded as a focal point in Toronto. In his seventh season, it is increasingly safe to say he never will. The pro-Bargnani and anti-Bargnani camps have been making the same arguments for years, and all that is left are the results. 

So wonderful to hear people not making excuses anymore, or politely tiptoeing around the ugly truth. And Koreen is totally right — the fans have turned on Bargnani and, rightly or wrongly made him the focus of their anger (well, rightly). Very soon the boo birds are going to come out, and they are going to sing their ugly song as loud as the Air Canada Centre has heard since the bad, last days of the Vince Carter era.

But does Koreen does more than just call for dumping Bargnani:

It just feels as if trading Bargnani is the only course of action at this point. For one thing, if the Raptors come back to Toronto following this five-game road trip in an approximation of their current shambolic state, Bargnani could very well become a target of the fans’ vocal derision.

Nice! My emphasis, of course, but how great it is to see "shamble" used in all its neological glory. Has he heard the fans' cries?

Anyhow, we need to get rid of Bargnani asap. And Colangelo. And all the omnishambles.

'Worst-Case Scenario': Now Tim Chisholm Turns on Colangelo

It's always a good morning here in Omnishambles Nation when we wake up and find another journalist who has decided not to put up with any more of Bryan Colangelo's crap. This morning, TSN's Tim Chisholm has seen the light, posting a reasonable and measured article that condemns our GMs for his failures.

While not calling for Colangelo to be fired now — he says it would paralyze the organization when moves need to be made before the trade deadline — Chisholm clearly thinks that Colangelo will be on the umemployment line if he can't turn things around this year. One choice nugget:

Here's the situation facing Colangelo: he knows that if this season continues down the path it's on, his contract will be allowed to expire this offseason and he'll hit the unemployment line significantly tarnished. He sold the higher-ups at MLSE on his rebuilding plan that involved punting two seasons (after missing the playoffs in the two seasons before that), so that he could assemble a new roster the 'right way'. This year was supposed to show the early promise of that plan, and so far, the team has performed worse than they did at the start of either of their two rebuilding seasons.

Or, to put it more succinctly:

What's gone wrong? Basically everything.

So. There we are. A terrible season coming after two deliberately terrible seasons and before that two accidentally terrible seasons. By the time BC will be able to make a trade, this season will be pretty much gone.

Chisholm thinks a "fire Colangelo" meme is a non-starter. But I say where would we be if we didn't try? You've got to try. (Unless you are Bargnani on defense). So, in the spirit of our team's most prolific chucker, I keep throwing up hopeless shots:

End the Omnishambles! Fire Colangelo!

The Slow and the Scurrilous: Bargnani Drift

An great outing by Kyle Lowry — along with impressive performances by Ed Davis and Mickael Pietrus — was wasted last night in Sacramento, as Toronto lost to the Kings 107-100. But what stinks for them is great for the Omnishambles, as the latest season of suck rolls on.

The 2nd and 3rd quarters had some of the best/worst omnishambles of the game, featuring plenty of one-and-done non-offense, weak interior defense, and general ineptitude. Among the highlights:

• LoCal getting early burn, starting just a couple of minutes into the 2nd quarter. And not just LoCal, but LoCal with Bargnani. 
• Speaking of a clueless one, 3-14 and 3 rebounds was another classic performance. There's nothing like seeing bodies on the floor, diving and scrapping after the ball, and there's Andrea, bending over at the waist, poking vaguely at the ball. Throughout the game, plenty of Bargnani drifting about on defense, vaguely around but rarely engaged. 
• DeRozan driving (slowly) into traffic and complaining about not getting calls. 
• A classic omnishamble ending. Tied with 2 minutes left, Tyreke Evans (shooting 0.308 from the 3 this season) sinks two long bombs, while DeRozan misses a 2, then a 3, and Bargnani misses a 3, too.   
• Jonas Valanciunas getting beaten up badly. Now, I love Valanciunas: I love the enthusiasm with which he plays and I love the potential he exudes. However, I have not been loving his results of late. Honestly, he looks out of gas much of the time. He gets pushed around and out-hustled to way too many balls. Val is wonderful and should mature into a special player, but he's not there yet. And for now, he is a big part of the Raptors' omnishambles. It might be time to demote him and restrict his minutes for a while, let him build up his game and his confidence. 

On the other hand, a few tantalizing positives: 

• Amir Johnson and Ed Davis played some solid defense. Johnson did not have a good game on offense, but he was active
• Davis was wonderful, throughout his limited playing time. 
• Lowry was amazing, with 34 points (on 20 shots), 11 assists, and 5 rebounds. Just a scrappy, great performance.
• I think DeRozan plays better defense when he's on the floor with good defenders. I could be imagining things, but I swear when he is with Lowry, Davis, and Amir, he tries a lot harder. Hopefully I can find some evidence proving this in the future.

Ten games out of first now. Yeah! Nice going, Colangelo.

A different sort of "10". 

UPDATE: Wonderful words from Ryan Wolstat at the Toronto Sun. Welcome to the Operation Clambake for Raptor fans. Preach it, brother:

Bargnani is by no means the only problem but he is by far the biggest problem. He is killing the team when he is out there. When he hits shots at a good clip he makes up for most of his failings. When he is mediocre, or worse, he handicaps the Raptors.

9 1/2 Wrecks

I'm trying to think of a pithy and amusing way to depict the miasma that is Bryan Colangelo's Raptors (because they sure aren't my Toronto Raptors). I would like to pick a number, something that I can update as the season goes along to make the Raptors' omnishamblic awfulness plain to see. Some of the options are:

• 9 1/2. The obvious choice, the number of games we are out of first place. 
• 1. The number of games we are out of the other first — as in the top draft position. As in worst.
• 0.222. Our winning percentage. 
• 3.92. The cost of each Raptor win, in millions of dollars.*

Feel free to make other suggestions. 

# # #

* At $3.92 million per win, firing Colangelo and his $5 million/year looks downright cost effective, doesn't it? 

Raptors 110 - Nuggest 113: Mile-High Shambles

Last night's game was almost an anti-omnishamble — miserable for much of the game, but coming together in the last quarter and putting up a fight. Kind of like Voltron. But, like Voltron, the Raptors can only assemble for a limited time before falling apart, and in the end they lost again.

Voltron, like the Raptors, could only assemble for a short time. The vehicle Voltron, not the lion Votron. The lion Voltron could stay a robot as long as its pilots wanted (and was much cooler than the vehicle Volton). There was also a gladiator Voltron, but that cartoon never aired in North America. Oh, never mind...

Anyhow, the Raptors presented a whole bunch of omnishamblistic fun last night, including:

• LuCal - the deadly, two-guard force of Calderon and John Lucas. For those times when LoCal, Lowry-Calderon, is just too effective and you want to dial things back.
• 23 points on 20 shots. Four rebounds. 2-8 from 3pt land. No assists. No steals. 2 FTAs. Any guesses who? DeRozan? Good guess, but no, it was Bargnani.
• The glorious site of the Raptors big men pinned under the basket as the small Nuggets grabbed rebound after rebound. 53-37 rebound edge for the Nuggets on the night.
• 3 points (on 1-5 shooting), 0 rebounds, 0 assists, 0 blocks from Toronto's starting SF, Pietrus. 
• Tough night for Valanciunas - 7 points, 4 rebounds, 4 fouls in just 20 minutes. Although he did get 3 blocks. but Val was looking slow and gassed for much of the night. 
• Corey Brewer looking like an all-star in the first half, running the Raptors into the ground.
• Toronto outscored on the fast break 19-2.

'So, uh, when's tip off? Qu-est-ce que c'est? What's started already?'

Were there any positives? I'm glad you asked:

• Another good night for Ed Davis in limited minutes - 6 points, 9 rebounds, 1 block in 17 minutes, including a good chunk in the 4th when the Raptors made their comeback.
• Decent night for Terrence Ross - 12 points (on 4-8 shooting, 2-2 FTs and 2-5 from 3), 6 rebounds, and in general a lot of hustle.
• 11 points, including a 3-pointer, for Amir Johnson. Lots of energy in the 2nd half, too.

Where does that leave the Raptors? At 4-14, we are tied with Cleveland for 2nd-worst record in the league, so there is a decent chance we could keep our pick this year — although I'm sure the Raptors can shamble their way to a 6th-place finish or so by the end of the year, just to infuriate their fans some more. After all, by point differential, we are "just" the 6th-worst team in the league.

Fyi, Toronto's record for the seven years before Bryan Colangelo: 0.437.
Toronto's record in the seven years of Colangelo: 0.425

End the omnishambles! Fire Colangelo!

Nate Silver Hates Colangelo (Most Likely)

Stats demi-god Nate Silver was on Bill Simmon's Grantland podcast a couple of days ago, talking about all manner of stats in sports and politics. All very interesting stuff, of course (yay Nate).

Maybe 30% of the podcast is about basketball, and of course they don't mention the Raptors at all (we are pretty irrelevant at the moment). But they do talk a bit about salary, stars, and contracts in a way that absolutely crushes GM Bryan Colangelo and his "philosophy" of team-building.

Starting around the 36-minute mark:

Silver: "It's always the mid-tier deals that kill you."

Simmons: "I would never sign a guy for like $8, 9, 10 million. Those are like the death contracts. ... You don't give $10 million a year to a role player. You save that for the big guys."

That right there is a complete and total indictment of the Toronto Raptors — a team full of mid-tier players, signed from $6 million to $10 million (we have no one earning over $10.5 million this year), including three mid-tier guys signed for three more years.

Thanks, Bryan, for tying down those "assets." Thanks a lot.

Raptors 101 - Phoenix 97: Not So Shambly

Sorry this write-up is late, but the personal life kept me away from kvetching at the computer yesterday. Besides, the Raptors got the win and were much less shambly than normal, so the angst levels were lower than usual.

 Despite the win, the game did show a few signs how horrid our GM is. Most notably, Mickael Pietrus going for over 31 minutes in his Raptor debut. Yes, a SF who was unemployed until a couple of days ago, is already the best SF on the Raptors -- a 30-year-old, 10-year veteran who has never had a PER over 15 (and has had a double-digit PER only once in the last five years), who hasn't had a ORat better than his DRat in five years, is the best SF on the Raptors. And it took us a month into the season to sign him.

That said, I think I'm just about the most optimistic person on most of the Raptor boards when it comes to Landry Fields. I really think, once he's rehabbed that elbow, that he'll be a half-decent player again, able to pull in something resembling his rookie-year numbers. Optimistic -- or maybe just chimeric.

I'm Tired. So Tired.

I think I'm done with the Raptors.

I'm still thinking about this, but I love the game of basketball. I loved basketball before the Raptors came into existence. So I don't need them; in fact, they need me far more than I need them.

But I've had enough of this. I cannot keep up with a team that simply cannot compete for as long as I have. It's just...exhausting, and I'm at my wits end.

Every year, I look at the NCAA tournament as manna from heaven. It's basketball played the way it's supposed to be played. I can deal with less talent, less skill and less athleticism; the game is played purely, and that is eminently more enjoyable than what the Raptors have subjected me to.

I've had good friends encourage me to go back to NCAA basketball; my initial reaction was negative, just due to the lack of broadcasting up here. But now that I think about it, I'm going to have to go that route.

I'm hungry to see the game of basketball played properly. I'm happy to cheer for a team that doesn't necessarily win championships, but that accomplishes absolutely everything it possibly can. Can I say that that's the Toronto Raptors? No, honestly, I can't.

I've spent years supporting and investing myself in this team, to the point of watching every possession and charting its outcome statistically. I can do so no longer. I will turn away from the Raptors and start turning towards the NCAA.

North Carolina has been my team since I was 10 years old, since I first started watching basketball. They'll always be my primary team, but I think I'm going to enjoy starting to follow the University of Pittburgh. They're a team with great coaching, hard play, they've made the NCAA tournament often and I have family in the area. And, they're reasonably close.

It takes a special kind of incompetence to lose the kind of fan I've been, but the Raptors have found a way to do that. They couldn't win a game if their lives depended upon it, but they can lose fans as well as anybody out there.

Another Columnist Turning on Colangelo's Omnishambles

UPDATE: Hey, great to see TSN's Gareth Wheeler really lambasting Colangelo for his failures (HT: Mango Kid). At last, someone holding the GM responsible and not accepting lame excuses.

Colangelo, Gheradini, Embry, and Co. have done nothing to make this a winning org. Yet have cushy jobs. Joke. @dinonationblog @wolstatsun
— Gareth Wheeler (@WheelerTSN) November 28, 2012

Colangelo should not be the guy. Record is terrible. Combined 85 games under .500 last 4+ seasons. Unacceptable. @yyzsportsmedia
— Gareth Wheeler (@WheelerTSN) November 28, 2012

Bar set so low I was asked who would do a better job than Colangelo. 85 gms below .500 in 4+ years. Question is who could do worse. #Raptors
— Gareth Wheeler (@WheelerTSN) November 28, 2012

ORIGINAL: The Toronto Star's Brian Cox isn't exactly calling for Bryan Colangelo to be fired in his latest column, but he's coming close. At the very least, he thinks the GM should be getting more heat for producing so much ineptitude over seven seasons.

Baby steps, Mr. Cox, baby steps. First Andy Phillips at the CBC, now Cox. Slowly the media is coming around to the idea that Colangelo needs to be held accountable for his repeated omnishamble monstrosities.

My favorite non-argument against firing Colangelo: "Who else could replace him?" Yeah, kind of like those Wall Street bankers who complained about their huge salaries, saying without earning those ungodly sums, the big financial houses could not hire the best and the brightest. The thing is, the "best and brightest" of Wall Street devastated the world economy and melted down the financial industry. If that's what the best and brightest can do, I'll gladly take my chances with the mediocre and dim.

I mean, the Raptors are already a mess. What's the worst that a no-name replacement is going to do? Sign mediocre players for huge contracts? Give away valuable draft picks? Oh yeah, Colangelo is already doing that.

Fire Colangelo! End the Omnishambles!

Grizzlies 103 - Raptors 82: 3rd Quarter Omnishambles

No Bargnani today? Dare I dream? Davis playing in his stead? Kleiza starting at SF?

It was an intriguing way to begin last night's game against the Grizzlies. And for the first half, Toronto held tight. But during halftime, the Grizzlies apparently woke up, and in the 3rd quarter, the beatdown was thorough and unrelenting.

But it was glorious to see what Toronto might be like in a Bargnani-less world. After the Grizzlies went on an early 8-0 run, the Raptors responded with a 9-0 run of their own, and for the whole first half it was a pretty close game. Sure, Ross missed a bunch of bad 3-pointers, but each time he missed, he responded with some great defense going the other way and got a block or a steal.

In the middle of the 2nd quarter, there was some Kleiza-Gray two-man-team stuff going on. Let's hope we never see that again. But overall, Kleiza pulled his weight. And, of course, Amir Johnson fouled his man 21-feet away from the basket for no discernible reason™.  We were even blessed with almost no LoCal, save for the last 22 seconds of the 2nd quarter.

In the 3rd quarter, though, the Grizzlies woke up, and their big men decided to run a camp on how to pound the paint, and the omnishambles began. Memphis' bigs were just too big and too good, and Toronto had no answers. The Grizz were in the bonus less than three minutes into the quarter. Amir went down with a sprained ankle. And, even worse than LoCal, we were exposed to several minutes of LuCal (John Lucas and Calderon on the court together ... yikes!).

In the end, Toronto lost badly -- but it was not one of those humiliating, infuriating losses. There were a few signs of hope, especially what a Bargnani-less team might look like. Clearly, our frontcourt is still a couple of years and a couple of stone away from resembling Gasol-Randolph (understatement), but they did okay in the first half. Even when Ross cannot shoot, he looks good on the court and can play defense. Not a lot of angst on this one -- just an old-fashioned beatdown by a great team.

Of course, if it is true that Kyle Lowry's ankle is still bad and he should not be playing, then expect a lot more omnishambles:

@wolstatsun Ross had two nice dunks and forced some bad shots in the third. D was very rookie. Lowry is hurt, shouldn't be playing.
— Michael Grange (@michaelgrange) November 28, 2012

Rockets 117 - Raptors 101: Blackout Omnishambles

Sadly*, last night's Raptors game was blackout out on League Pass, so I won't be able to give it the drubbing it deserves. But judging by Oliver Macklem's fine wrap-up on RaptorBlog, we don't need my bitterness this time around -- Macklem's account sounds shamble-tastic enough for all.

Omnishambles key to the game:

• Starting SF getting zero points? Check
• LoCal, the Lowry-Calderon two-headed PG nightmare getting serious time? Check 
• Ed Davis shooting 83% but playing barely 20 minutes? Check
• Amir Johnson shooting threes? Check-check.
• Bargnani respirating? Check
• A clueless GM with no knowledge of value, assets, or what makes a team work going up against Daryl Morey, one of the savviest GMs in the league? Check-check-check.

Omnishamble Stomp!

If the game opens up online any time soon, I'll try to add my 2 cents.

----------------------------

* And by "sadly," I mean "What a wonderful relief for my tortured eyes and spirit".

When I Lost The Last Remaining Shred of Hope

I'll confess: I kinda like DeMar DeRozan. He seems like a good guy, he seems to really reach out to the community and he understands that he's representing the city and the fans and he plays in a way that seems to be consistent with that. And by all accounts he works really hard to get better.

If there's a human being I can say I'm glad got a payday like DeRozan just got, DeMar DeRozan would be on that list. He's not at the top of it by any stretch of the imagination, but he's on it. Good for him and his family.

There's only one problem, though: he's just not very good, and his contract is going to be an albatross on the neck of this franchise for a very long time.

DeMar currently sits not even in the midst of a career year; he's basically been what he's always been. He has a PER of 14.3, he's not shooting well from the floor, he's getting to the line even less frequently (measuring by FTA/FGA) than he has before and his rebounding hasn't even come back to the level of his rookie season. His AST% is down from last year. His defense is where it's always been since he's been a rookie: decently efficient, but so uninvolved that in the whole scheme of things that he has no impact whatsoever.

This is what Bryan Colangelo paid $9.5 million/year for. For four years.

Colangelo has no business whatsoever making an argument for upside. You simply don't pay for tomorrow's performance today at full price; you have to expect some sort of discount for paying up front for performance which is nowhere close to being in view. And when you're the only bidder, why would you pay for a level of production to which DeRozan hasn't even come close in his entire career? If we measure a player's salary against the wins he contributes, DeRozan's contract should be around the MLE level, and not much more. (The league on average pays about $1.7 million/win; DeRozan's pro-rated 82 game Win Shares last year was 3.3, so perhaps you could justify as much as $5.7 million for him; Colangelo, for reasons known only to himself, paid almost twice that.)

Nobody in the world (with any sense) pays for upside which hasn't been delivered in any meaningful way yet, anyway. If any of us mere mortals were to invest in a stock which promised us consistent dividends, and we're gone through three fiscal quarters and the company hasn't issued a thin red dime in dividends, then most of us would move that stock. That is especially true when it's a young start-up and the suits are still promising dividends at some undetermined point in the future and there's a bunch of other people interested in giving it a shot, and paying a little bit of a premium for it. Common sense says to sell high on that stock, and put your money into a proven performer instead of waiting on "potential" which is highly unlikely to materialize.

I'm beginning to sound like a broken record on this point, but I thought maybe Colangelo had learned his lessons coming into this year. We all know his previous contract disasters: Kapono's four-year full MLE deal, Fields' deal, Calderon's $9 million/year contract for five years, issued in a year when there were only three teams with more than the full MLE available to offer and none of them needed a point guard, Bargnani's contract (so full of optimism that it was nauseating; not an ounce of that contract had anything to do with production of wins), Turkoglu's contract...etc. etc. But then there promising signs: he put together a crafty front-loaded bid to get Jarrett Jack, using the luxury tax as a weapon against Indiana. He kinda gave Kleiza a little less than the full MLE (and, even so, Kleiza's contract has been terrible value). He paid Amir Johnson fairly, as far as win production goes (even though he thought he was overpaying him). And then Colangelo said that the team simply wasn't good enough to not move guys, and he publicly says he's going to be very careful before even thinking about extending DeRozan. I thought maybe lessons had been learned.

And then he went and offered that ridiculous contract to DeRozan.

It all came crashing down at that moment. Colangelo simply cannot help himself, I concluded; he has no sense of value as far as the NBA is concerned. Either in terms of how to assess it, or how to acquire it. For a guy with a business and applied economics degree from Cornell, he sure as hell doesn't know how to put appropriate value on things.

Bryan Colangelo is simply going to keep doing the same stuff that got the Raptors into the mess they're in right now, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. This is who he is, on a fundamental level. This is what he does. This is what we can expect. The man is so lacking in sense that he has gone and capped out a team that has won a mere 30.8% of its games over the previous two years.

How is a business graduate so clueless as to invest that much in an entity which performs so poorly? How is that a high-percentage investment?

Alas, asking questions like these, I fear, is to induce but more despair. Bryan Colangelo isn't thinking rationally about this team. There's no other conclusion to reach about that. Instead of building a rational team, he's trying to assemble a team he likes, or he wants to cheer for. But, should he be thusly inclined, he should resign his job and become the Athletic Director at a mid-major NCAA program somewhere, or stick to the D-League or the NBL. The NBA is a competitive high-stakes environment, and only those capable of dynamic thought and bold action survive.

Bryan Colangelo with stats team, working on the Raptors' line-up 

Ed Davis - Good Soldier, or Walking (Shambling) Dead?

“Obviously he and DeMar (DeRozan) are arguably our best players or the guys we need to finish games. You always have to ride with your stars and that’s what (our coach) did. Andrea is never going to shoot 2-for-19 again. I think it was a good thing just to know that coach Casey has that trust in him.” - Ed Davis.

At first I was going to go with the whole "drinking the Kool-Aid" cliche for Ed Davis's comment in the Toronto Sun this morning. But then I thought maybe the zombie metaphor was the way to go. Infectious, stumbling undead? Sounds a lot like our omnishambling squad.

'Must ... support ... crappy ... teammate...'

But I hope that's not what it was. I hope Ed was just being a good, supportive teammate. I hope he was being a good soldier, putting team first. Most importantly, I hope he did not believe a word he said. Because, as Blake so nicely put it yesterday, Bargnani is no star and he's not our "best player". 

(Btw, Sun, showing Ed Davis's points and rebounds to indicate how he's been playing over the past five games? LAME. It's 2012, get with the metrics. They are far more usual for showing how efficient and useful a player has been in limited minutes).

In sunnier news, a member of the Toronto media has finally called for the head of GM Bryan Colangelo. Thank you Andy Phillips! All five of his criticisms of Colangelo's team are spot on.

End the omnishambles! Fire Colangelo!

There's No Room For "Our Guys" Here

I’ve got to go with Andrea, come hell or high water, he’s our guy
- Dwane Casey

There are times when special athletes are afforded trust in their abilities, even when it runs counter to intuition. Jimmy Chipwood had it in the movie Hoosiers, when the entire team refused to run the set play for a teammate that Coach Dale drew up for a teammate; he wanted the ball, and they wanted him to have it - to hell with his coach's idea. John Elway had a remarkable knack for putting together 4th quarter showings to pull his team's proverbial chestnuts out of the fire. Other great players such as Michael Jordan or Reggie Miller could have been terrible all game, but to close a game their own teammates would have demanded the ball be put in their hands.

They're our guy. We rode them to where we are now and we're not going to stop until we have no other choice.

Not only is that attitude laudable, but when you put the idea of the "hot hand" for shooters in the harsh light of day, it often doesn't hold up. Playing the percentages is almost always the money play, both in sport and in life. If you feel most comfortable putting the ball in Player A's hand with 3 minutes gone by in the second quarter, all else being equal you should feel the same with 2 minutes left in the fourth.
They're your guy. They've taken you places. You trust them to do it again. You're not going to be dissuaded by a few missed shots here and there; their resumes speak for themselves.

That's a great idea when we're talking about Reggie Miller (one of the most devastatingly efficient offensive players of all time), or Michael Jordan (the greatest player of all time) or Kobe Bryant who, for all his faults, is legitimately great. It's even a great idea for players who might not for a second deserve inclusion into the same sentence but who unquestionably are high-percentage options, such as a James Harden or a Kevin Martin.

When, however, the discussion shifts to players such as Andrea Bargnani, standing by your man is less likely to make you look like faithful, forgiving and virtuous like Tammy Wynette, but more like a desperate yearbook editor from high school making excuses for why the guy who asked her to prom never showed up - even though the last three formals he went to he stood up the girl he asked out and was found making out with a cheerleader in the backseat of his dad's Towncar. At some point, you have only yourself to blame; this guy just isn't about to change. Make all the excuses for him you want; the reality is, he's a cheap cad who's dedication needs to be called into question, and little is going to change how that reality is perceived.

This issue isn't about one poor shooting game from Bargnani. Although it takes a special sort of incompetence to shoot 2-for-19 from the floor - most of those shots (wisely) lightly-contested - Coach Casey is right to say he's not going to do that too often. If you gave Andrea a hundred times to relive that game and shoot the exact same shots, I daresay he shoots at the same clip in almost none of them.
Nor is this about Ed Davis, who while he did have a seemingly marvelous stat line, strangely it wasn't that far off from where he's been all season. Nor is it about his alleged inconsistency (which only really seems to appear when you look at single game uninterpreted box scores, and not when seen so much in percentages or efficiencies). Nor is this even about Casey's baffling logic that Bargnani was a better fit defensively than Davis.

No, what this is about is the resume of the guy being hailed as "our guy" - come hell or high water. And why it is that the guy you're trusting that much has led you to a lot of hell and a lot of sewage and not so much glorious triumphs against raging currents of NBA competition.

If Bargnani really were "our guy" - the guy who Casey argued he was - then there's not too much fault to be found in his argument. The problem is, he most obviously is not that guy. And the fact that he's being presented as though he were is very, very troubling. His offensive inefficiency is just a fact; for a "shooter", he sure doesn't shoot that well. For a post player, he doesn't rebound offensively. For a "skilled big", he doesn't get to the line or pass the ball or even do a particularly good job of not turning it over despite the fact that he doesn't pass that much. His offensive rating (points produced / 100 individual possessions) has been well below league average almost every year he's been in the league, except for one glorious year when he was right at league average.

That player cannot be "our guy". He simply is not a high-percentage option. His history of winning is virtually non-existent.

Whether or not a team that has sported a .308 winning percentage in the past two years should even have any of the players on those teams as "our guy" should probably be discussed as well. Bryan Colangelo came into the season assuring everybody that everybody was on the table because the team wasn't good enough to justify keeping anybody, so even that dolt knows on some level that what's happening with Bargnani is purely nonsensical. But, when push comes to shove, the team keeps trying to apply the same formula; Bargnani is "our guy", regardless of results.

Maybe someday Bargnani might actually put up results which are even slightly encouraging. That seems like a faint hope, given his career to date. But in the absence of those incredibly unlikely results, the team's disposition towards Bargnani can be described as nothing less than abject madness.

Spurs 111 - Raptors 106 - Double-Overtime Omnishambles

Yet another late-game meltdown, ending with a double-overtime loss to the Spurs, 111-106. This one so bad it inspired me to start the Omnishambles blog. Against all the odds, the Raptors played tight with the winningest team in the NBA, the Spurs, forcing them into double-overtime. Much more in keeping with the odds, the Raptors lost, thanks to some ugly, incompetent playing.

Omnishamble keys to the game:

2-19. Two-for-frickin'-nineteen. Seriously. That's 0.105 shooting. 0-7 on 3-pointers. Just 12 times in NBA history has a player cranked up 19 or more shots and sunk just two of them. Just one other time did a player chuck 19 or more times, sunk only two, and not sink any freethrows (Thurl Baily in 1987).

Calderon, in-bounding king. Unlike Bargnani, Calderon is a warrior who always gives his all. Sadly, his all is not really NBA-caliber. Usually his problems mostly revolve around his slow footspeed. But last night we encountered a fun new wrinkle: inbounding. How does an elite, veteran ballhandler have such problems throwing an in-bounds pass? And how does a player having that kind of problem stay on the floor? Only Raptor coach Casey knows for sure.

DeRozan's 11-28. Better than Bargnani's uber-turd, but not by a lot. He seems to think he has a Dwyane Wade-esque game, deserving of all those bail-out calls. But he's not -- much slower, much less of a jumper, mediocre defender at best. It's popular opinion that DD has stepped up his game this season ... but has he really? His TRB% is lower than it was his rookie year, his TS% is 0.506 (barely up from last year, his worst), and his eFG% is 0.449 (ditto). There is not a single area of his game that has improved steadily from his rookie year. Usage went up 2nd year, but has since plateaued. 3pt shooting was the same 1st, 3rd and this year (just a horrid 2nd year).  Points, assists, rebounds, steals, FTAs, all basically the same. 

LoCal: Credit to Raptors board Pseudonym for that monicker, referring to the horrid combination of Lowry and Calderon. Now Calderon is pretty darn good for a 15-20 minute per game PG backup. However he is NOT a shooting guard. Whenever he plays at the same time as Lowry, bad things happen. And yet Casey insists on trotting out this abomination for 10+ minutes each game.

Flowers for Bargeron: The Bargnani-Calderon combination is like Algernon, only slower. Whenever Bargnani and Calderon share the floor, the other team goes into a two-man game and rips apart Toronto's defense. We can kind of handle one of them on the floor at a time, but both? Might as well replace our basket with a soccer net.

In non-shambles notes:

ED! It's basketball malpractice the way Casey has overlooked Ed Davis this year. The guy is sporting a PER of 20.5 and is rebounding 21.7% of all available rebounds when he is on the floor (that's 6th in the NBA for players topping 10 minutes a game), and yet he is playing just 13.6 minutes per game, by far the fewest in his three seasons. Last night was a typically terrible case in point -- 15 points and 14 rebounds in 22 minutes, and yet he's kept off the floor down the stretch in the fourth quarter and for both overtimes. Seriously?!

Jonas! 22 points on 13 shots. 3 blocks. Yes, he got pushed around a lot and abused by Tim Duncan ... but Duncan does that to a lot of players. Jonas pulled his weight and showed off his typical tirelessness.

Lowry. Maybe not a brilliant game, but still, 20 points, 4 assists, 8 rebounds is not bad at all.

End This Blog! End the Omnishambles! Fire Colangelo!

Welcome to Raptor Omnishambles, the blog dedicated to the craptastic horrorshow that is the Toronto Raptors.

Raptor fans have been lucky enough to deal with a lot of terrible teams over its 18-year history -- just five playoff appearances in all that time,  just one playoff series win, and a 0.406 record despite 14 lottery picks. Now, however, enough is enough -- GM Bryan Colangelo has turned the Raptors into a turd of a team -- bad draft picks, signing poor players for huge amounts, mis-matching players who in no way complement each other, and refusing to hold players accountable.

Bryan Colangelo was brought over as General Manager in 2006, in the midst of one of the lowest points in Raptors history. Right away, he made some savvy moves, had some good luck, and turned things around, tying the Raptors their best season ever at 47-35 (yeah, underwhelming, I know, but we take what we can get).

Since then, however, things have not been so hot. Following the 2007/8 season, we have been well below 0.500 ball, finishing in 2011 at 0.268, 2012 at 0.348, and so far this year, a blistering 0.273 (that's 3-11). And through it all, our team have been defined by shockingly bad defense and a mis-matched roster that has made as much sense as a "Gangnam Style" reference in 2013.

Exhibit A for our failures is without a doubt our 2006 No. 1 pick, Andrea Bargnani. He was supposed to be an unguardable 7-footer, an Italian Dirk Nowitzki, but he turned out to be a lazy, apathetic turd, who rebounds less than many guards and utterly indifferent to defense (well, for 3/4 of the game ... there's usually a quarter when he tries a bit, but fails anyway because he is so clueless).

Despite some epically, historically bad defense (10th-, 17-th, and 18th-worst DRat of all time), our team continues to showcase our worst defenders. What makes this season worse than most is that the Raptors actually have some decent young players now, but many of them see little playing time while Bargnani, Jose Calderon, and other stiffs play big minutes.

The buck needs to stop somewhere. Someone needs to be held accountable for this mess. And ultimately that is the GM. Colangelo must go. And Bargnani. And many others. But first and foremost, Colangelo. Now. Before he can cripple the team with overpriced extensions, giving away draft picks, or other long-term damage. It's time to stop the omnishambles that are the Raptors. Colangelo. Must. Go.