There is a person out there drawing a sketch after every Raptors game. They are currently at sixty one sketches out of eighty two. It is a commitment to documentation that I find both impressive and slightly concerning, much like when my uncle decided to catalog every different type of bird he saw at the Kennedy Commons parking lot.
I wonder what the sketch for a late game failure looks like. Is it just a drawing of a basketball rolling slowly into a sewer grate while Bobby Webster watches from a distance? We have been seeing a lot of those lately (the failures, not the sewer grates). People are asking what Bobby needs to do to address these fourth quarter collapses, but maybe the team is just tired of running around.
The Cost of Falling
Season ticket holders are reporting that playoff confirmation prices have actually dropped. My 300 level row 6 seat is apparently twenty five percent cheaper than it was in 2024. This is the first time since the world stopped in 2020 that anything in this city has become less expensive.
It is a nice gesture (or a terrifying admission of our current talent level). Usually, sports prices only go up, like the price of a beef patty at the station or my blood pressure during a Scottie Barnes isolation play. If the prices are lower, does that mean the playoff experience will be twenty five percent less stressful? I doubt it.
Looking Toward the Exit
Because we are who we are, the conversation has already turned to the draft. People are talking about guards who can shoot and facilitate. That sounds helpful, because watching us try to facilitate in the final two minutes is like watching a cat try to use a microwave. It is confusing for everyone involved.
We keep finding Raptors fans in the wild, appearing out of the blue. You see someone in a purple jersey while you are buying milk and you give them that look. It is a look of shared trauma and mutual understanding. We are all just waiting for the next sketch to be drawn, hoping it looks a little bit more like a win and a little less like a cry for help.
The Long Walk to April
We have twenty one games left to figure out if we are a playoff team or just a group of tall people who enjoy traveling together. I am not sure which one I prefer at this point. One leads to cheaper playoff tickets, and the other leads to me looking at scouting reports for teenagers I will eventually grow to resent.
Either way, the sketches will continue. Someone has to keep track of what happened here. If we do not document the late game failures, did they even really happen, or were they just a collective hallucination we all had while sitting on the 401? My uncle says the birds know the truth, but he also thought Andrea Bargnani was going to be the next Dirk Nowitzki.