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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO - It was hard to miss the oversized, diamond-encrusted piece of jewelry monopolizing Dwane Casey's right ring finger as he sat at the podium and addressed the local media a day after his team was swept from the playoffs.

That was precisely the idea.

The Raptors head coach wore his championship ring - won as an assistant with the Dallas Mavericks in 2011 - for Sunday's Game 4, hoping it would act as a good luck charm.

"That ring didn't do us any good last night," he said Monday, in the aftermath of the humiliating 125-94 loss that knocked Toronto out of the post-season. "I wore it to try to give us a little boost, but it didn't."

For the first time in recent memory, Casey sported the ring at his post-game press conference following the team's elimination. It was on his finger again when he spoke publicly for the final time this season and, perhaps, the last time as head coach of the Raptors.

His message was as subtle as the $40,000, Mark Cuban-designed ring on his hand.

"We should all be accountable," he admitted. "[But] I'm very confident I know what it takes to build a winning team."

"We went from 30th in the NBA [in defensive efficiency] to [14th in my first year in Toronto]. I haven't forgot how to do that. We just have to make sure we have the right pieces, the right leadership, the right togetherness to be a good defensive team."

Casey, the architect of Dallas' title-winning defence, was brought in by former general manager Bryan Colangelo to shore up Toronto's long-standing reputation as defensive doormats, to which he had some immediate success. Last season, the Raptors defence ranked among the NBA's top 10 teams before taking a nosedive this year.

The man who was once hired to fix the defence finds himself on the hot seat now that it is broken, which is fair. Casey has been around the league for almost two decades and has a pretty good handle on how the business works. When a team fails to live up to expectations, the coach is usually the easiest to blame.

With a lost season in the rear-view mirror, Casey took full responsibility for what went wrong, because it's his job to do so and the alternative - assigning blame - is fruitless. Still, the Raptors coach is confident he'll be returning next season to guide this team back on the right path.

"No one's told me any different," he said. "I mean, I'm preparing, working. I have no control of that. I'll say this - I've never worried about a day of sitting back. I don't read the blogs or read the comments. But I work my butt off and do my job to be prepared, and our staff did the same thing."

"Can we do a better job? Yes, all of us can. But at the end of the day, we have to evaluate, be evaluated, on who we are and what we did, and be accountable for it. And it's true of everyone throughout the organization. Players included."

In many ways, Casey has been the voice of reason all year - the only voice of reason in the locker room at times. The coach was always uneasy about their transformation to an offensive-minded club, preaching defensive focus and drilling the principles in practice. He recognized the red flags and his message remained consistent: 'if we play like this, we won't go far.'

"I just, I felt a sense of complacency among all of us," he said. "Coaches, myself, you know, 'It's going to be OK.' No, it's not going to be OK. I saw the defence get worse and we kept preaching it, talking about it. I know you guys got tired of hearing me preach about it. But I thought that's what changed more than anything else. We took our foot off the gas pedal a little bit defensively and continued wanting to score more, to score more."

"He relayed it, he said it so much that it had to be embedded in our heads," Patrick Patterson said. "And I felt like it did. I felt like all of us tried our hardest to play tough every single night on both sides of the ball. Coach Casey is definitely a guy who's always going to tell it as it is. He's not going to sugarcoat things and that's what we needed for us, especially in the second half of the season. I think his message got through."

But it didn't. Not entirely. The Raptors were seduced by their new style of play, trying to outscore teams in a manner that was not sustainable and ultimately hurt their defence further. Again, Casey took the blame and he does deserve some of it for enabling his players to scrap pristine ball movement in favour of isolations and quick jumpers.

"Even though you're winning, to me, my one area, what I didn't do a good job of, was establishing an offensive style," he admitted. "Now that sounds crazy, we were in the top 10 in offensive efficiency. But establishing a style of play offensively that will help our defence. That's, as a staff, that's something we'll go to the drawing board and make sure we establish a tempo, a pace, a shot selection that helps your defense. I thought a lot of our defensive woes were connected directly to our shot selection, our quick shots. Make or miss, you've got to establish a style of play that will help get you back on defense, get your jerseys back where you're 5-on-5 more so than in transition or coming back frustrated because you didn't touch the ball. There's a lot of things that go into that."

Masai Ujiri will meet with the media on Tuesday morning. Last year, Ujiri and Casey held their season ending press conferences together, sitting side by side at the podium. This time around they were separated by 24 hours. Read into that what you will. There may be something to it. There may not.

No, Ujiri did not hire Casey but he committed to him last summer, inking the coach to a new three-year deal (with two of them guaranteed). Although the perception of this team has changed, expectations haven't, not internally.

The Raptors front office, like Casey himself, have tempered expectations all year, understanding this is still a young, growing and incomplete roster. Although they had hoped to make it further than last season and surely didn't anticipate getting swept, they never got caught up in the team's early-season success or lost sight of it's relatively modest ceiling.

"You have to look at from the standpoint of, where are we as a team," Casey reiterated. "I said it all year. We're a young team, not just a young team, but a team that's young together. Last year was the start of the process of rebuilding, whatever we were doing and we took off. We took off, we got things together, made the playoffs, won the division and it was probably a year too quick for where we really actually were as a team and we set expectations out of the room."
 
Casey doesn't blame the fan base for questioning that process or the job he and his staff have done this year, he knows it comes with the territory, but he's also not deterred by it. He still has the backing of those in the room.

"I know [Casey] gets a lot of flak," said DeMar DeRozan, who has spent four years playing for him. "[Casey] is a great coach. I've got to give him credit, he pushes us day in and day out."

"Enough blaming him," added the always passionate Greivis Vasquez. "It's not his fault. At the end of the day the players are the ones playing. So why would you [blame him]?

"I think Casey was the same coach the whole year, with the same face and he was honest to everybody. That's important for a team. I also understand that he won 48 wins last year and he won 49 [this year]. So there's a lot of different things that people don't value because they expected us to go to the second round and do a little bit better. I get it. I get it. But it's a team in progress. So you've got to sit down this week and just think about how we can get better, what do we need and all that. But it's just not fair to blame coach and say it's all his fault."

It's unlike Ujiri to make any brash decisions and he certainly wouldn't pull the trigger on a coaching change this early in the off-season. However, if he has committed to stick with Casey to start next season, it wouldn't be a surprise to see him endorse his coach and put an end to the speculation on Tuesday.