It feels fitting to start this just getting back to Toronto.
In the week I was gone, to a country even greener, Toronto burst open, and the city I came back to felt like a new place.
Summer in Toronto is like coming out of a coma. The shock at the end of every May that the city is capable of coming alive like this again. Towering umbrella canopies of maple, elm, buckeye, oak, ash, all with new thick green down every side street; clumps of lilac in white, purple popsicle, soft pink, tumbling like grapes thick on the vine. Last of the tulips still straining, crabapple and cherry blossoms frothing, early poppies fluttering, iris unspooling, the peony bush we grew from a bulb is taller this year, and for the first time with two tentative buds.
The tenderness this time of year in the city. The relief. A giant held breath coming out at once.
Sun up by 6am, down after 8pm, so much easy light that it feels fine to squander it again, to loiter, to stop and stare, to make side trips for the pleasure of exposure. There’s a hedonism in Toronto summers. I’ve known the feeling, even if a sunnier semblance of it, since I was a kid, and I’ve written about it before, because so much of a person’s life in this city gets lived in its warmest months. Ninety-two days to cram in and go full bore.
June with its easy plans and breezy heat, a reacquaintance with the lithe feeling of air on your bare limbs, sweat on your brow, squinting, and yourself gone a few shades darker. Then comes July and its swelling humidity, the guaranteed one solid week of heat warnings where you murmur thanks for A/C if you have it and take several ice cold showers a day, murmur thanks into a swivelling fan, voice gone choppy, if you don’t. Thunderstorms roll in fast behind walls of clouds so dark the city seems to quiet, air charged, sky tinged a bruise green. A deluge and then steam rising from the pavement.
All-nighters in July happen by accident just because you’re taking advantage of the coolest hours of the day after dark, but then the night bleeds into morning and you’re left slick, dazed, probably with some minor scrapes and maybe with your hair dripping water, tang of chlorine fuzzed around your head like a halo as the sun shoots down the grid-like streets from the east, beaming molten off the streetcar tracks.
By August there is a comfort struck with summer, less fevered, still indulgent, but an ease marked when the humidity lifts and the lake yields more breezes than storms. All the parades have happened, people have gotten their fill of wanting to be pressed up against stranger’s bodies in the shut down streets. It’s possible now not to just sweat any time you leave the house. The CNE starts, shrieks from the midway forced by juddering mechanical rides is all the passive energy anybody can muster and people’s eyes go fuzzy in the carnival lighting, thinking back to all they did, how they’ll squirrel the last three months away and pull from these sunscreen slick stores when it’s so cold and grey it becomes impossible to even picture what a tree with leaves on it looks like.
In its scramble, summer in Toronto is restorative. The well of life it will be crucial to pull from when the city seems to lose its own in winter gets topped up even as one goes about guzzling it down — I’ve gotten most of my major flesh wounds in summer, but then, it’s also when I’ve fallen most in love. Summer in the city makes it hard to picture the place as anything other than this: green, honeyed bright, sustaining, condensation running down glasses and aluminum cans over ready fingers. It doesn’t make sense that there’s such an enduring quality to something so fleeting, but anyone from here will tell you this time of year, the muggy pleasure, prolonged relief and gauzy yearning of it, this is what the city really is.
Topping up, it’s what the Raptors need to do, too.
A development year — you know it cause you’ve heard it, by now, a hundred times. What the organization was very clever about was letting everyone else fill in the blanks of how far development could work as an ad lib.
Scottie Barnes as bright green prospect who the team didn’t really need to do anything, but by giving Barnes that buffer and ample protection from expectation coming from anywhere other than within, he burst open, matured, grew towering. The franchise had been years removed from picking so high that there was no language of “bust” etched into its culture. Yes, you could certainly harken back to Anthony Bennett, to Andrea Bargnani, but why? The front offices of those seasons, in NBA time, have toppled and been buried like ancient empires. It turns out the best thing for a high pick like Barnes was to go to a team that revels in the mid-Draft; a team of climbers and provers and names once used to the margins. No “big names” and no big name problems.
Gary Trent Jr. got his own renaissance. Precious Achiuwa felt all the room development gave him keenly, maybe too eagerly at times, but then how rare and vital is it for a second to fourth year player to occasionally be encouraged to fall all over themselves so that they will gain the necessary footing in order to last into their fifth, sixth, seventh season and beyond? Toronto’s bench was slim, but Chris Boucher, Malachai Flynn, Thad Young, Khem Birch, Yuta Watanabe, Svi Mykhailiuk, whether or not they stay, weren’t Nick Nurse’s crude tools for hacking at depth, but wholehearted cartographers of new margins, charting by success and mistake how much farther the team now has to go.
There are big names in Toronto, but they’ve been made that way through repetition. In practice, reps for seasons under the We The North era Gemini juggernauts of DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet and OG Anunoby have outsized themselves. Through practice, hearing their names stumbled on over and over again on broadcasts south of the border, you’ve learned them, too. What’s nice for them is that development was never only a this season thing, so that this year, even minus the strut and support of Lowry, those three in tandem held the shape of the team.
For as “new” a team as Toronto is — though it might be time for a collective conversation around legacy teams and expansion franchises, how nobody is new and how old doesn’t so much matter anymore — and how recently minted as a championship franchise, the well of the Raptors runs deep. This season wasn’t a fallow period. Very substantial things took root and grew (it’s telling that the happiest the team demonstratively was during the playoffs was when Barnes was awarded ROTY), already established practices proliferated. There’s a beautiful canopy here and the biggest job for President Masai Ujiri and GM Bobby Webster this summer, once they and this group have taken some months to loll and enjoy the relief sound development will shelter them with during the offseason’s occasional tendency to scorch, is to place expectation on all this improvement. To decide, as a Toronto summer will clarify, what this team really is.