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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO - On one of the most bizarre days his profession has ever seen, Dwane Casey didn't look or sound like the coach of a team in the midst of seven-game winning streak, longest of his tenure.

In many ways, this stretch has been impressive and at 28-15, second-best in the much improved Eastern Conference, so is their record. However, Casey - the Raptors' voice of reason, their level head - has experienced regular season success with this team before and knows how fleeting it can be.

Winning is great. If nothing else, it beats the alternative. Yet, for teams that take it for granted and lose sight of the real prize, it can breed complacency. Perhaps that's what derailed them at this time a year ago but one thing is for certain, Casey is doing everything he can to make sure mistakes of the past are not repeated.

"Last year you get seduced into thinking, okay, we won, everything’s hunky-dory, and it’s not," he said after practice on Thursday. "Offensively we’re doing some things wrong, defensively we’re getting some habits that definitely are not getting the results we want. So you get seduced into that and everybody gets happy on the farm, gets delusional when they think, okay we're winning, what's coach so upset about? Well, there's a reason."

"Our record, we're not who our record is. We've got to be a hungry team each night and not believe the hype because we've seen that story before."

By this point last year, their fortunes had already begun to turn. After starting the season 24-7, a stretch littered with red flags, they would go on to drop eight of their next 11 games before a late-season collapse culminated in the first-round series sweep that still haunts them today.

This is not the same team, and Casey knows that. After 43 games last year, the Raptors were ranked 20th in defensive efficiency - bad and getting worse by the day. They're 10th this season, one of the most improved teams in that category while still maintaining their status as a top-10 offensive club. They finished last season with a record of 15-21 against opponents above .500. This year, they're 12-7 - tops in the East - having knocked off almost all of the league's elite teams.

Friday's 101-81 wire-to-wire victory over the depleted Miami Heat extended Toronto's win streak to seven games - the franchise's longest in nearly 14 years. On the surface, that may be cause for celebration, but Casey's job is to look closer and identify the warning signs before they fester into something bigger. For starters, only two of the teams they've faced over that stretch have winning records. On top of the friendlier schedule, their resurgent defence has been up and down. The Raptors have only won three games in which they've surrendered 100 points in regulation all season and two of them came this week, allowing both Brooklyn and Boston to shoot over 50 per cent from the field, an emphasis for the head coach in practice this week.

“It’s always a concern, we went through it earlier in the year, slipped a bit and got back on track," Casey said of the team's defence. "We can’t forget or get lured into the fact that we’re out-scoring people.”

"At the end of the day, we’re trying to develop winning habits for the bigger picture."

His players have bought into the message all season long. There's a different attitude to this team, a business-like approach and a focus on that big picture. Gone is the hint of arrogance that did them in when things were going south last winter, that 'our record is good, so we'll be fine' swagger, a swagger they now understand has to be earned.

"Well bottom line is, if we don't fix those things we're going to start losing, we know that," said 35-year-old Luis Scola, a veteran player whose presence has helped in this team's continued maturity. "Good teams fix the problems while they're winning so they continue to win and they never really let the problem grow to a point that it's uncontrollable."

"So this is a good challenge for us. A team that is winning, a team that is doing really well in the standings, that has a win streak but has to fix some issues. How are we going to react? What kind of team do we want to be? These are things that we're going to discover this week and it's a good thing to have, it's a good test for us and it's going to prepare us for what is coming."

Even with the wins piling up, even with Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan playing the best basketball of their careers, the Raptors know they can't afford to let their guard down, not this year, not in the East. Friday's opponent should serve as a cautionary tale: things can change in a hurry.

Just a few weeks ago, Miami was neck-and-neck with Toronto atop the East standings before the injury bug hit hard. On Friday, they had just nine available players against the Raptors, missing three starters - Hassan Whiteside, Goran Dragic and Luol Deng. Dwyane Wade was expected to sit out with a shoulder ailment but felt obligated to play through it. With the loss, their seventh in the last eight contest, the Heat fell to eighth in the conference.

It's been 17 years since the East produced an eighth seed with a better record than the West but, even with Miami's slide, that would be the case if the season ended today. The conference is better and more balanced than most players and coaches can ever remember it.

"Never," said Heat forward and former Raptor Chris Bosh, asked when he recalls the East being this strong. "Since I've been in the league, never. It's always been kind of close, but usually it's like, alright, 40-42 [wins] will get you home-court advantage. Now, it's not like that. Probably [the] 2-8 [seeds are] going to be a very, very tight race. Very exciting."

"It's so tight, you have one bad week and you're out of the money," Casey added. "Fortunately, with our injuries other guys have stepped up and picked up the slack. We haven't had a lot of drop off but we have no room for error. Our margin for error is very slim."

Trending in the opposite direction as the Heat, Toronto has actually started to gain some separation as the conference's second-best team. The Raptors sit 2.5 games ahead of Atlanta and 3.5 in front of Chicago as of Friday - a day that saw the first-place Cavaliers fire their head coach David Blatt, despite holding a three-game lead over Toronto with a 30-11 record. Assistant Tyronn Lue takes over in this unprecedented shakeup and while any team with LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love will be fine - they're still the East's team to beat - things aren't looking so bad for the Raptors, who may suddenly be the most stable franchise the East has to offer.

Provided they can continue to take care of business and learn from last season's undoing, this is not a bad time to be a Raptor.

"Our goal is just to keep winning games, getting better," Lowry said. "We're not worried about other teams and what they're doing, we're worried about ourselves and just trying to win as many games as we possibly can. If we create separation while that's going on, then great, until then we're just going to worry about us."

"Yeah, it's very promising," said Casey. "Promising like Christmas is coming, you look forward to it but it's not there yet. So we're excited about what we can do but again, it's about work, it's about doing more than just talking about it, getting it done on the court each and every night."