ballocks

we're again hearing calls for patience. but patience implies improvement is on the way- exactly what raptors are improving? if anything it's the opposite. we find players like parker, garbajosa, moon, even bargnani in the rough, they play well for awhile and then... regress. who is responsible for this? or what is responsible for it?

without exception, i think the only players who have improved noticeably over the past two seasons are jose calderon and kris humphries. jose is a much more useful player than he was. humphries, despite the missed charity stripers today, is slowly becoming a rotation piece. but i'm losing faith in the others. chris is a good guy and an important leader but he's looking evermore plain by the day. one thing that bothers me and is a sign of how his entire game looks (imo) is his drives to the basket. in his second year he was clearly working on going to his right. he couldn't finish very well, but at least he was trying to improve his move to the right side of the rim. now? now it looks like he's given up on it entirely- as if it was the biggest challenge in the world and he just couldn't hack it. he either goes left every time or, on the increasingly rare occasions he does choose to go right, he either attempts finishing with his left hand or takes some wild, off-balance fadeaway/curl along the base line. he might as well put his right hand in his pocket.

i had no idea that he was that weak.

my point is that it seems as if he simply gave up trying to improve on that part of his game. well, if we're waiting for him to improve and he's chosen not to, what exactly are we waiting for now?

bargnani's development (or lack thereof), to me, is a crime. it's like pulling teeth. he made two nice plays today- one drive on ilgauskas where he finished on the left, and another pump fake on the perimeter followed by a one-dribble pullup jumper for two. but those were his only baskets of the game. the rest of the time you might as well have had maceo baston on the floor. bargnani looks so out of sync right now that i couldn't be more frustrated with a 23 year-old.

something's gotta be up with this team. we're now sitting in seventh in the conference, just 1.5 gms out of ninth, third in the division, so even swirsky and doug smith must be hard-pressed to talk about home court for the first round. we have so many ready-made excuses before every game that i can hardly pay attention to the media coverage anymore (and i'm usually pretty tolerant of it). we just give up. sam mitchell says, "that's the one thing about our team. we play hard." no you don't, sam. actions speak louder than words. that might be what you want to believe, but it's not true imo.

i want to see this team disappointed and angry for once. i no longer want to see them holed up in a shell begging for mercy. they should be ashamed of themselves for today's collapse- but i'm sure they'll just pull out one of their excuses and pretend like there was nothing they could do about it. "you can't stop a player like lebron when he gets hot." i'm so tired of it, man. something's gotta give.

and something to keep in mind: when the raps were up by 15-20 in the second quarter, swirsky went off on a tangent about how unimpressed he was with the cavs (even named mike brown), not only today, but this season. "there's no energy. this team just doesn't have it." he may have been right. but if i had a chance to speak with him right now, i'd ask him how he feels about the raps collapsing like divas to said "team with no energy" and the fact that they're now tied in the standings. maybe it's come time to criticize the raptors in a similar way. un-im-pressed.

peace