Apr 21, 2015
Stoudamire reflects on what was and what could have been
Twenty years after becoming the Toronto Raptors' first-ever star, Damon Stoudamire looks back with TSN.ca on what was, what could have been and this current Raptors team, as well as what's next for his coaching career.
TSN.ca Staff
,TORONTO - The throngs of fans packing into ‘Jurassic Park’ to watch the Raptors on a big screen outside of the Air Canada Centre is a far cry from Damon Stoudamire’s earliest memories of Toronto.
“It didn’t look like it did now,” he said with a laugh.
Stoudamire was the team’s initial draft pick, seventh overall out of Arizona in 1995, and the team’s first ever star. When you think about those nascent Raptors teams, Stoudamire was the face of them. In his first year in the NBA, the point guard from Portland would almost average a double-double (19.0 points a game with 9.3 assists in 40.9 minutes a night) and go on to win NBA Rookie of the Year, the first silverware ever collected by the organization.
But the teams were bad. Those early Raptors teams were really bad.
In their first two seasons in the league, the team combined for 51 wins. With the likes of Zan Tabak, Vincenzo Esposito and Acie Earl getting regular playing time in those early days in the cavernous SkyDome, there wasn’t much for fans to get excited about in their new franchise, but Stoudamire says he saw the passion for the team even then.
“I felt like it was there,” Stoudamire told TSN.ca “I think that after we started playing, I felt that they embraced us, but we just weren’t good enough yet. But I always felt that if and when the team got better, it would be embraced and now, today, obviously, it’s definitely embraced in a major way.”
Stoudamire is back in Toronto this week as his former team sits down 1-0 to the Washington Wizards in their first-round Eastern Conference playoff series. He never got to experience the playoff atmosphere in Toronto, traded in the midst of his third season to his hometown Portland Trail Blazers in 1998. That season would go down as the Raptors’ worst ever to date, winning a paltry 16 games and undergoing a myriad of changes which included the departure of general manager Isiah Thomas. Shortly after Thomas left the team, Stoudamire requested a trade.
For Stoudamire, the end in Toronto was so abrupt that it’s hard to qualify what the legacy of the man nicknamed "Mighty Mouse" in Toronto is.
“It’s crazy because I don’t even really know,” Stoudamire said. “You say it was two-and-a-half years, but it was 'to be continued,' ‘to be determined.’ I was playing for the Raptors and boom - you just got traded. From a business standpoint and for the fans from a fan’s standpoint, it ended just like that. One day you’re playing and boom – it’s over. I don’t really know what to think. I don’t really know. I’ll say this, though. It just feels really good to be a part of those initial teams, to be the first draft choice. That’s just something that nobody can ever take from you.”
Stoudamire’s exit just as he was emerging as a star became somewhat of a blueprint for players to follow in Toronto and a source of consternation for fans. Marcus Camby (taken second overall in the 1996 NBA Draft), Tracy McGrady (taken ninth overall in 1997) and, most notably, Vince Carter (taken fifth overall and acquired in a draft night swap with the Golden State Warriors in 1998) would leave the team in acrimony and leave fans wondering what could have been.
Kobe Bryant famously told SLAM Magazine that if the Raptors had stayed together as constituted, they would have won an NBA title.
It’s hard not to ask ‘What if?’ even for Stoudamire himself.
“I think about it a lot,” Stoudamire said. “Actually, me and Vince talked about it. Me and Tracy talked about it. You just think about that team. You make trades in basketball, but how could you not be successful by drafting myself, then Tracy and Vince? Who gets those type of players in the draft in almost consecutive years? And you can throw Marcus in there. Myself, Marcus Camby, Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter - that team right there itself!”
As for the current team, Stoudamire doesn’t believe a 93-86 overtime loss to the Wizards in Game 1 will derail the series for the Raptors, but it’s critical to bounce back in Tuesday night’s Game 2.
“It’s one game,” Stoudamire said. “You go and you make adjustments. You gotta win the next one, though. You gotta bring a little more energy, just watching the game. They looked a little lethargic out there. You gotta get the crowd involved. I think that [Raptors coach Dwane] Casey would have definitely mentioned those things. They gotta get off to a better start. That’s the biggest thing.”
The focus in the lead-up in Game 1 was on Raptors killer, Paul Pierce and – as Game 1 proved – it was with good reason. Pierce torched the Raptors as a member of the Brooklyn Nets during last season’s seven-game first round series and he was up to his old tricks on Saturday, leading all scorers with 20 points.
Greivis Vasquez warned of the dangers of putting too much focus on Pierce and Stoudamire agrees. A teammate of Rasheed Wallace, perhaps, the greatest trash-talker and disturbing force in the modern game, Stoudamire sees the potential peril in letting Pierce get to the Raptors.
“I think the thing you have to do is make Paul Pierce work,” he said. “When he’s in the game, to me, he’s playing too free. He’s getting wide-open shots. He hasn’t really had to guard on the defensive end of the floor. You gotta get into his legs. I mean, I’m 41 and I don’t know how old Paul is, but he’s got to be pushing 37-38, so you have to make him do different things. I think he’s always going to talk because that’s where he’s at right now. Up to this point, he’s been backing it up, but you have to go at Paul when he comes into the game. You have to go at him and you gotta be up on him defensively and make him do some different things.”
Talking tactics and X’s and O’s is what Stoudamire does these days. After finishing up his playing days with the San Antonio Spurs in 2008, he entered the coaching ranks, first as the director of player development at Rice University in Houston before joining the Memphis Grizzlies staff as an assistant from 2009 to 2011. From there he jumped to the collegiate game as an assistant at Memphis under Josh Pastner before returning to his alma mater of Arizona for the last two seasons with head coach Sean Miller and a pair of appearances in the Elite Eight.
Stoudamire believes his future lies in coaching, but he’s not certain at what level as of yet.
“From the standpoint of being in the pros, I knew the pros,” Stoudamire explained “I came to college to kind of figure out the college game. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out exactly what it is I want to do long term. Coaching is not easy. It’s a grind and it can wear on you, but it’s also a great feeling for me to be close to the game and be able to teach guys the game that I love, especially college kids, and just give them some life lessons along the way.”
After almost 25 years in high-level basketball, Stoudamire played under and worked with a variety of coaches with different styles and philosophies, including a pair of coaches often considered among the greatest of all-time in Gregg Popovich of the Spurs and Hall of Famer, Lute Olson, who spent 26 seasons at Arizona. It’s this vast breadth of experience that is helping Stoudamire inform his own burgeoning career as a coach and he believes that their influence on his style has yet to be fully felt.
“I think I’ll see that take effect when I get my [first] head coaching job,” Stoudamire said. “Right now, every coach has been different. They bring their different elements to it…Gregg Popovich, he to me, is a player’s coach. He knows his players. He knew how to push the right buttons. He’s always had veteran teams. We didn’t practice a lot. We didn’t do a lot of the things that you talk about you need to do. His motivational tactics were very different, but I don’t think that everybody can get away with that. I think that having the success and winning all of the titles that he has, that gives him a little more leeway than some other coaches [have].”
Olson’s unique approach also resonated with Stoudamire.
“He didn’t ever curse, said Stoudamire. “He’d never say one curse word in the four years I played for him. It was more about the individual. Our practices were skill development practices – like, we really worked on our skill development. We worked on our build-up. You could always see us getting better. We were never great at one thing, I thought, except rebounding, but we were always in the top 10, top-15 of everything. To me, that was the consistency that we had.”
If anything has taken Stoudamire aback in his second act as a coach, it’s the approach taken by some of his charges in thinking that a future as an NBAer is a certainty.
“The mindset of a lot of the players today - I’m going to use college players as an example just because I’m in college right now – everybody feels like they’re going pro,” Stoudamire explained. “The parents, at times, are unrealistic about the situation. You always are trying to temper expectations instead of building people up. I always thought it was about building people up, but you gotta temper their expectations because, honestly, a lot of people have a lot of unrealistic expectations.”
Stoudamire is trying to stress to his players that nothing is given.
“You’ve got to be careful,” Stoudamire said. “For me, it’s a fine line and you have to be careful with what you’re telling these kids. Because if you’re not careful, ultimately, I can see a lot of them blaming you as to why they didn’t make it to the NBA or whatever. You’ve got to let them know up front that if you want to make it, you’re going to have to work hard. And even if you work hard, there are no guarantees.”
And it is with no guarantees that the Raptors will approach Game 2 on Tuesday evening with Stoudamire watching on eagerly.