Bill Simmons RIPS the Raptors roster and salaries. (UPDATE Zach Lowe & Rob Mahoney go in on Raptors)

[ChinaManTran]

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[Johnny Bball]

Zach Lowe hasn't had this team right in years. He was only validated in his opinion due to massive injury then a subsequent tank because it was over. This team was always better than his idea of it.

At some point it becomes obvious these analysts just don't watch every team on a nightly basis, so they are just going by raw data and statistics without any context. From an outside view they are just seeing that we sucked the last 2 years, Barnes appeared to have regressed last year, Barrett's advanced stats weren't good, and our bench was not very good. Ingram of course had barely played at least over the last couple seasons so they saw him as damaged goods.

However, with context and for us that see this team every night, last year we won 30 games and that was despite Quickley missing almost the entire year, Barnes, Barrett and Jak missing significant chunks of the year, without Ingram, and we were intentionally benching our starters in close games, trying to lose, lol.

It was almost certain that by virtue of being healthy PLUS adding Ingram PLUS adding Collin Murray-Boyles PLUS our young guys getting better, we would be at least a .500 team. Very few year expected them to be 14-5 out of the gate, but most here thought after 20 games we would be somewhere a bit better than .500.

Yep. Not sure if it was "most", as there is still a huge amount of perennial negative self-immolating posters around here posting low 30's mid 30's guesses. But I expect the will be in the 40's and in the playoffs somewhere between 6 and 10 depending on health. If they finish top 5, or win in the 50's, that would be extremely impressive. This start is very impressive and exceeds expectations.

[PushDaRock]

The national media got too hung up on individual salaries and the luxury tax situation and that has nothing to do with the quality of the team or the players.

This team won 30 games last year despite a lot of injuries while actively tanking for half the year. Getting to at least .500 in the east was never going to be an unrealistic jump, especially considering they added Ingram to the team for basically nothing off their roster.

I never really understood how the salary situation became THE dominant narrative about this team amongst a lot of NBA talking heads over the past year.

It's not like the Raps situation is even all that noteworthy. They've got the 13th highest payroll in the league. It's not like they're top 5 or anything. If it was to the point where they were into a second apron and it came with significant penalties that would be one thing, but it's not.

I can't count the amount of times I heard the same "I don't know what this team is" line. I'm not sure what was so confusing. It's a team that doesn't often attract high level free agents that was trying to stockpile assets, add solid players, build depth, create a positive winning environment, and maintain flexibility to make trades and use draft picks to upgrade down the line. Why was this so hard for national media to understand?

Probably because it's more simplistic for people to think you need to either rebuild or go All-In

[OakleyDokely]

If it's tank or title, everyone other than OKC should be tanking right now.

[GCougar]

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Perk's high on Darko. That was an eye opener for me.

[pilkoids]

I still think we end up between 6 to 8 in the standings at the end of the year. The gap between 2 and 7 seeds is 2.5 games

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