The regular season is irrelevant.
That is the message the Toronto Raptors sent on Friday, when they fired Dwane Casey two days after his now-former peers in the NBA said he did the best coaching job in the league this season. Casey led the Raptors to the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference this season, along with the second-best record in the league. He even got to coach in the All-Star game.
But that did not matter. Swept in the playoffs, swept out of Toronto.
The Raptors were good this season, but not great. They cannot beat LeBron James, who has engineered Toronto’s outster in the past three seasons, the last two of them being sweeps.
So Casey paid the price, and with that comes the reminder: Winning is not enough in this NBA. Coaches must meet expectations, regardless of how misguided they might be.
“In some ways I think the time has come,” Raptors president Masai Ujiri said a few hours after telling Casey that he was done in Toronto. “Sometimes these things come to an end, relationships come to an end, and we’ll figure out a way to move on, a new voice, just a new everything in terms of that position.”
That is becoming a mantra around the NBA. Last summer, all 30 coaches kept their jobs. Next season, there will be at least nine coaches in roles they did not have a year earlier.
Lloyd Pierce will be one of them after the Atlanta Hawks on Friday gave him his first head coaching job in the NBA. He replaces Mike Budenholzer, who left last month after the Hawks finished 24-58.
Let us be clear: Casey was flawed in the conference semi-finals, when the Cavaliers won 4-0. There were some peculiar decisions late in Game 1 when Toronto fell in overtime, and no resistance in two games. Casey should have done better, and he should not have offered an end-of-series series assessment that was essentially him saying the rest of the conference is helpless until James is not great anymore.
However, most days this season, he was brilliant. The National Basketball Coaches Association picked him as their coach of the year, in large part because of the way he took an already-good Toronto offense, and made it better. A high-risk move and it paid high dividends.
Whoever gets the gig in Toronto, and any of the other open NBA jobs, will surely understand the new reality. Good is not good enough anymore.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier