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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO - When Masai Ujiri spoke at a season ticket holder's event just months after his hiring back in the fall of 2013, he urged Raptors fans to help turn the Air Canada Centre into "a living hell" for visiting teams.

It was an empowering sermon delivered by Toronto's soft-spoken (or so we thought at the time) new general manager, including some colourful language, for which he would soon become known. The speech certainly turned some heads but not in the 'hey, he's right' kind of way, more so in the 'that's wishful thinking' or 'the GM just cursed' kind of way.

In the three seasons prior, the Raptors ranked between 13th and 19th in attendance, which actually isn't bad when you consider that over that span, they went 50-65 at home. The team occasionally showed better on the road, but the reality was they weren't very good anywhere.

"I remember how it felt when teams used to come in here knowing it was going to be a cakewalk, so to speak," said DeMar DeRozan, the longest tenured Raptors player. "With that, I think a lot of it has to start with me and lot of the guys that were here through that process and knowing that, that's a terrible feeling to have. You try to do everything you can to change that culture and I think we've done that, the coaching staff has done that and the organization has done it."

On Wednesday, Toronto set a new franchise record by winning their 11th straight home game and made it 12 in a row after Friday's dramatic 117-115 win over the Portland Trail Blazers.

The Raptors and their fans have turned the ACC into one of the league's most feared buildings and opposing teams are all taking notice. LeBron James talked about it last week when his Cavaliers were in town. They lost. Utah Jazz head coach Quin Snyder tipped his cap to Toronto before his team's visit a few days later. They lost too.

How are they doing it? It's easy to make the correlation between winning, sparked by the franchise's 2013-14 turnaround, and being a dominant home team. That obviously has a lot to do with it but one hasn't always lent itself to the other. Despite all their regular season success over the last couple years, the adversity of being out on the road would often bring out the best in them. At the ACC, they were mostly up and down and, as it turns out, home-court advantage in both playoff series was hardly an advantage at all.

The perks at playing at home in basketball are probably less tangible than in other sports. In football, a deafening crowd can seriously disrupt the visiting team's play calling. In baseball, the host team bats second and, more importantly, last (plus, there are different field dimensions and batter's eye backdrops).

In the NBA, the advantage is more of a mental thing. It is what you make of it.

"I think it's the familiarity of it," Dwane Casey said. "Shooting backgrounds is one, there's [also] something about the crowd noise in your favour when you do something positive that will juice you up a little bit. But the comforts of home is sometimes good and bad. Sometimes guys get too comfortable being home, thinking because you're at home you don't have to play as hard but I think it should be the other way around, you wanna protect your house, protect your home and take care of home. So I think just the familiarity of the home settings, your locker room, routine as much as anything else is a home-court advantage."

The importance of protecting home is something we heard a lot about from a concerned Casey in years past and the topic resurfaced early this season as his team opened 4-4 in Toronto. Since then, they've won 19 of 21 games in their arena. Cleveland is the only Eastern Conference team that has fared better at home.

On the campaign, they're scoring almost three points more at home than on the road, allowing roughly two points less. Statistically, the differences in their home/road splits are subtle. The biggest difference from the Raptors of old, according to Casey, is something that's harder to measure. He says it's maturity. DeRozan, along the same lines, insists they're coming out with a greater focus and that same sense of urgency they're used to having in everyone else's gym.

Friday's contest, billed as a battle between two of the league's best backcourts, was one they nearly let slip away, and probably would have in the past. The Raptors led by as many as 15 in the fourth quarter before Damian Lillard went off, scoring 22 of his 50 points in the frame. With the Blazers young star hitting big shot after big shot, DeRozan and Kyle Lowry held him off to pull out the victory. Twenty-four of DeRozan's season-high 38 points came from the line, where he set a franchise record for most made free throws in a game.

"[We're] just getting more comfortable, understanding the importance of winning at home, understanding how to close out games, it's a little bit of everything," said the Raptors All-Star two-guard. "We've got to realize, we've always played well on the road with that chip on our shoulder. Now, I always tell the guys we've gotta take advantage of the opportunities when we're home as well because the crowd's going to stand by us."

Now, the fan base has done their part. The Raptors were fifth in average attendance last year, they're fourth this season and the team has delivered.

Their schedule has been unusual. Thanks in large part to playing a contest in London and hosting last month's All-Star festivities, they have spent long stretches of time on the road, balanced out by a couple of seven-game home stands. After becoming the third NBA team in the last 20 years to finish a home stand of seven games or more with a perfect record in January, they're off to another perfect 2-0 start to this one.

After weathering a tough road-heavy stretch early in the season, most of it with injuries to a couple starters in Jonas Valanciunas and DeMarre Carroll, the Raptors are indeed taking advantage now that the schedule has turned in their favour. With 12 more regular season games left at the ACC, five of them over the next couple weeks, they'll need to win eight to break their franchise record for home victories - 30, set in 2006-07. They say one of their goals is to get to the playoffs with home-court for the third straight year, and with a 4.5-game cushion in second place that seems like a safe bet.

"There's a lot of hot gyms," Casey said. "But it's not the gym, it's the people in the gym, it's the players you're going against in that gym and the style of play that they play that makes up that whole formula as far as [what is] a tough place to play."

They've been taking advantage of home, but can they maintain that advantage when it matters most?