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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO - Moments after Wednesday morning shoot around let out, Dwane Casey was asked about his team's recent success at home, where they've won a franchise record-tying nine straight games and will spend the bulk of the next three weeks. 

Only, he didn't hear the word "home", or chose not to. Instead, he was stuck on the word that was used just before it, a common trigger for the Raptors' perpetually cautious head coach: "success". He cringes at the very mention of it.

"I'm never satisfied," said Casey, shaking his head at the implication. "[I'm] not comfortable. I'm not going to get comfortable. I'm not going to fall in a trap where we think we're where we need to be, because we're not."

"I'm not falling for all the No. 2 in the conference [talk] and all that. We're not good enough to feel that way."

You've heard this, or a variation of it, before and will hear it again, more and more frequently as the post-season approaches. The timing of these reality checks are hardly coincidental. You'll hear them after big wins, you'll hear them before possible trap games against inferior competition, you'll hear them ahead of long stretches at home, where teams tend to get comfortable and let their guard down. And if it sounds like a broken record to you, can you imagine how often his players have heard it? But that's the idea.

Some have wondered whether Casey is the right coach for this team, particularly after their flameout in the playoffs last season, but his approach, his message were among the reasons Masai Ujiri felt comfortable betting on him this summer. They're among the things that have the Raptors playing the best basketball of his now five-year tenure with their eyes locked in on the ultimate prize. Casey's a relentless worker and expects the same from those around him. He demands it, and the room has bought in.

"It's very important," said reserve forward Patrick Patterson. "We all talk about it. Granted we've won some games, we made it to the playoffs, the first round, we won some division titles but other than that we haven't done anything. So our goal is to get out of the first round and make a solid effort to the Eastern Conference Finals but we have to stay levelheaded, we have to stay calm, we have to realize that in order to get to where we want to get to we have to take it day-by-day, practice-by-practice, one possession at a time."

This latest rant came before Wednesday's rematch with the Timberwolves, an 18-win team that embarrassed Toronto just before the All-Star break. Up by as many as 18 points in that game, the Raptors took an early vacation, as Casey says, and Minnesota out-scored them 62-44 over the final two quarters. For as good as they've been this year - overcoming injuries, bouncing back from losses and competing with some of the best teams in the league - there are moments like this that remind us just how fleeting "success" can be.

Complacency is an ugly word in professional sports, it's an ugly word in life, but it's human nature. An 82-game season is a long stretch of time, especially for a team that has every reason to be counting down the days until the playoffs begin. For one, they're in a pretty good spot in the Eastern Conference, sitting in second place with a full six-game lead on third-seeded Boston, although Casey joked that he probably wouldn't feel comfortable with a 10 or 15-game cushion. Okay, maybe he wasn't joking. Then, they know that nothing they do matters, in the grand scheme of things, until they prove their worth in the post-season. So, surely the thought of going on cruise control for a day, a week or a month must be tempting. That has a lot to do with what did them in last season.

There seems to be a different disposition about them this year. They're still having fun, laughing with each other after wins, as they should, but the complacency they carried themselves with towards the second half of last season appears to be a thing of the past. They're more humble, business-like and accountable. The sense that, 'Our record is good so we'll be fine' is gone. It's something Casey guards against every day, because he has to. 

A year ago, the Raptors abandoned morning shoot arounds at home fairly early in the year, opting for pre-game walkthroughs instead - not an uncommon thing in the NBA these days. This season, they've gone back to it exclusively. They're on the court at around 10:00 AM before every single home game, with the exception of the isolated early start time. Casey insists there's no connection between what happened last year and these early wake-up calls, they're just trying to "shake things up", he says, but it's hard to imagine they're completely unrelated. The bar has been raised and so have their standards.

Now, you can hardly tell if the team had just won or loss from speaking with Kyle Lowry or DeMar DeRozan after games. They sound more and more like their head coach every day. 

"We've got to move on from it and understand that we've got a bigger task each day as we get closer to the playoffs," DeRozan said following Toronto's 114-105 win over Minnesota. "It's about us continuing to get better, figuring out ways to win games when things aren't going our way and to stay composed, keep learning and never be satisfied with anything."

Everyone appears to be on the same page, from Ujiri to Casey, to Lowry and DeRozan, down to the guys on the bottom of the roster. Will that translate to "success" when it matters most? Impossible to say, but it can't hurt.

It almost makes you wonder, would Casey be any different if and when the Raptors do achieve the kind of success they're aspiring for? What would be an appropriate amount of success for him to acknowledge it, for him to look at us and say, 'Hey, we're actually pretty good'? Perhaps he's right not to. If the man in charge isn't constantly striving for more, what are the chances the players will? At least for now, as they aim to fight off the complacency that bit them around this time last year, as they attempt to make the very difficult jump from good to great, this is the message they need to hear, over and over again if necessary.

"I promise you, you're going to hear it over and over again, we're not going to relax, we can't," Casey said. "We're going to continue to practice, we're going to continue to work defensively, we're going to continue to work offensively because again, we haven't done anything. Even last year, we didn't do anything."

"What I'm saying right now, it's not going to go away. So if you don't want to keep hearing the same thing, don't ask me. Because I'm going to be talking about staying on point, staying focused the rest of the way."