You know, it’s hard to get too upset about a loss to a good team like the Trail Blazers. They’re stacked, and in fact, I feel like they’re better than their record - even though it’s pretty good at 19-12 after beating the Raptors.

Unfortunately, it is frustrating, because once again, the Raps had a big lead - 11 points before a miracle three a the halftime buzzer by Travis Outlaw cut it to eight. It’s also frustrating to think that, heading into the season, our expectations were set high enough to make us think we were in the same class as the Blazers.

But, in the past two months reality has set in and we’ve come to expect that the Raptors don’t have much of a chance against good teams, because, well, they’re not a good team themselves. And although you can clearly say there’ve been improvements - three weeks ago the Raptors were getting blown out of games completely, now at least they’re in them in the first half - it’s not enough to get them back into the race.

So we’re stuck with another middling team in another mediocre season. In other words, it’s hard to get excited or upset about anything at all - they only beat teams worse than them and never beat teams better than them, so where’s the drama?

Of course, we all know the most frustrating thing about the loss was seeing Brandon Roy dominate the fourth quarter like that. 18 points, and most of them very difficult jump shots, the kind of “give me the ball and let me create something from nothing” mindset that none of the Raptors have. And he could have been a Raptor. Sigh. That one play, where he drove left, stumbled, lost the ball, got on his feet, recovered it, and hit a fade-away? No one on the Raptors even has the balls to take that shot. Sigh. That one mistake is haunting us every time we play the Blazers.

(A bit of a tradition for me is watching Lord of the Rings; you know how Boromir and the men of Gondor call the one ring “Isildur’s Bane?” I think I’m going to start calling Bargnani “Colangelo’s Bane.”)

Actually Andrea had his best game in recent memory last night. Slump buster? I’m not holding my breath, but at least he hit some jump shots.

Oh well. The Raps roll into San Fran tonight to take on the Warriors and they’ve got a chance to finish up 3-3 on the trip. That’d be nice since I expected a 1-5 trip. Of course, I expected that “1″ to be against the “Thunder” and losing to them still hurts. A lot. They could have already guaranteed a 3-3 trip by beating the worst team in the league. Alas.

However, I don’t really think 3-3 is going to happen. I’m sure you’ve all noticed, Golden State is virtually impossible to defend - they just run up and shoot. Given the Raptors are one of the worst transition defensive teams I’ve every actually seen play professional basketball, that can be trouble. I mean on most nights you can be assured the Warriors won’t hit a high enough percentage to win, but they’ll get enough layups and open looks tonight to outscore the Raptors.

And even if they don’t shoot that well, the Raptors’ offense isn’t good enough to keep up. I know Golden State is a terrible defensive team but if you’ve seen the Raptors struggle to even get open shots, let alone hit them, then you have to fear that that will continue tonight.

Of course, it is completely possible the Warriors will stink. You never know with this Golden State team. But I don’t believe the Raps have it in them to really step up, and play aggressively enough to take the Warriors out of what they want to do. I just think Golden State will simply run them off the floor and will take it by 19.

Now, one last thing, it’s been brought to my attention in the comments that there will be a protest at Rogers headquarters regarding the TSN2 issue tomorrow, December 30. Now, it’s planned to last all day, which seems a little extreme in this weather, but if you can make it down there and support the guys who’ve put it together, that would be great. Anything to bring some sort of attention to this ridiculous impasse.

I do hope that there is a future protest planned for those morons at MLSE since this is more their fault than anyone else’s (what team signs a television contract where the games are shown on a station that’s not available on cable in their home market?).

Anyway, hopefully tomorrow goes well for these guys, they get some support and maybe some attention. It’s probably a good time to do it, you know this is usually a pretty slow news week so a station like CityTV would likely be able to send a camera crew over. Anything to get some attention and pressure on the parties involved can only help.

Here’s the details:
Tuesday December 30th, 2008
Rogers Building
333 Bloor St. East, Toronto
8 am to 5 pm

There’s a dedicated Facebook group and if you need any more info, you can email Drew at spuddaz@yahoo.com. Good luck to everyone heading down there.

25 games. TWENTY-FIVE.

UN-BE-LEIVE-ABLE.

I am so angry about this I don’t even have the words. A full 30 percent of TORONTO Raptors games cannot be seen in cable TV in Toronto.

http://www.thestar.com/Sports/article/521892

I cannot fathom what sort of IDIOT at MLSE allowed this to happen. I cannot believe that TSN thinks it’s acceptable to relegate the only professional basketball team in Canada to a secondary network. I can’t believe Rogers isn’t making an effort to make as many channels as possible available to its subscribers.

I think what pisses me off even more is how the Raptors completely glossed over this fact in their announcement of the schedule.

Two quotes from the press release:

“82 regular-season contests being broadcast in High Definition (HD) and televised nationally for a third consecutive season.”

- A very misleading statement, bordering on fallacy, since A) TSN2 is not available “nationally;” according to my research, it is currently available on 19 of the 45 cable providers in Canada. That’s less than half, by my math.

- In addition, only six - SIX! - of those carry TSN2 in HD. Also some cable providers do not carry Raptors NBA TV in HD either. So, while you can tell us every game is broadcast in HD, who the hell cares if HD service is not available to the viewer?

“This also marks the seventh straight campaign that the entire regular season schedule will be aired locally.”

- An outright lie! “Locally?” I’m assuming by locally, they mean Toronto. Yet Toronto isn’t getting the entire regular season! We’re missing 30 per cent! How can they make such a statement? (And I can even play the semantics here and argue use of the word “aired,” since most of the games are only available via cable or digital cable - if you get the channels! - you can’t say it’s being “aired” locally. The only over the air broadcasts are on CBC.)

Tom Anselmi, MLSE’s executive VP and COO, is quoted in the release as saying, “”We’re excited to have the CBC, Raptors NBA TV, The Score and TSN as part of the broadcast line-up” - note how he doesn’t mention TSN2 - and “The promotional power of these four networks supports growing basketball across Canada.”

Again, he doesn’t seem clued in that the games are actually on FIVE networks, one of which is NOT available “across Canada” and more importantly, in the team’s own home market.

To top it all off, there’s no mention of TSN2 fall to the 11th paragraph of the press release! Even then, no breakdown is given - you have to read the attached schedule to see that there are 25 games blacked out in Toronto. Maybe they thought no one would notice? Apparently they think Raptors fans are too ignorant, stupid, or mindless to actually read that far.

You insulted us all by not acknowledging this situation, expecting us not to notice, and trying to tell us that all games are available to everyone.

Nice spin job, guys. Really. But all you did with that press release was confirm, once again, that you don’t care about your fanbase.

I try not to curse on this blog, and that’s a good thing because the profanities that are streaming through my head right now, directed at MLSE, Rogers and TSN, would probably get this site blocked by Google’s safe search.

I thought it was bad when they forced people to cough up the $$ for Raptors TV for, what was it, 24 games two years ago? Now it’s 25 and even if I wanted to pay for them, I don’t even have the choice. Screw you all, MLSE, Rogers and TSN.

SCREW. YOU.