Dwane Casey has heard it already, and he knows that over the course of the next year, he will hear it dozens times more.

He is in the final year of his contract as coach of the Raptors, a team that brought in a new general manager, Masai Ujiri. His two-year mark with Toronto (57-91) is unimpressive, leaving open the possibility that, in a time in which owners are changing coaches as often as socks, Casey could be next up on the firing line.

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At this, Casey shrugs.

â€œEveryoneâ€™s on a year-to-year contract,â€ Casey told Sporting News from his home in Seattle. â€œI donâ€™t care who you are, we all are. I am going to coach the same as if I had a 10-year contract or a one-year contract. I canâ€™t get caught up in that. â€¦ The good thing about it is, I have a good relationship with Masai. He is originally from Seattle, he went to high school there. So I have known him for a long time. In the end, I am going to be judged by how we improve. I am not going to spend a waking moment worrying about my contract.â€

Casey, of course, would like an extension. To earn that, he will probably need to get Toronto into the playoffs, and a scan of the Raptorsâ€™ roster compared with the rest of the East shows thatâ€™s entirely possible. But Casey is going to need luck and drastic improvement from three prominent wing players to get there.

In fact, a closer look at last year shows that the Raptors were not all that bad once they got through the first quarter of last season. Casey said that was because the team had a hard time finding its identity early on. In Caseyâ€™s first year, the team had gone from 30th in defensive efficiency to 14th, but in doing so, had seen the offense plummet to 29th in efficiency.

As a response, the Raptors tried to play more up-tempo, tried to run at every opportunity, even though they really didnâ€™t have the personnel to accomplish it. They went 4-19 to start the year. Thatâ€™s when Casey reeled in the Raptors system, and slowed things down.

â€œWe canâ€™t run on makes and misses, that is not us,â€ Casey said. â€œThatâ€™s what we tried to do early in the year and we went 4-19. I said, â€˜Look, we have got to find the right pace.â€™ We can run on turnovers, we can run on steals, but after that, letâ€™s get the ball to our scorers. It was more of a controlled game. And we were .500. I am not too good at math but I do know that 4-19 vs. .500, something was going better.â€

Casey denied the notion that the up-tempo push came solely from Ujiriâ€™s predecessor, Bryan Colangelo, as some have suggested.

â€œA lot of people tried to put a big thing on whether it was Brian vs. me,â€ Casey said. â€œBut no, I was just as much into pushing the ball and getting early, easy buckets. It looked good in training camp. But it didnâ€™t take me long to figure out it wasnâ€™t working once the real bell went up.â€

If the Raptors carry over their better sense of pace, they could get off to a good start and ride that into the postseason, especially if they shoot better from the perimeter (they ranked 26th in 3-point percentage last year). Thatâ€™s where Casey will need some outside assistanceâ€”the team brought in Tyler Hansbrough and Steve Novak, getting rid of locker-room lemon Andrea Bargnani at the same time. Those are not huge additions. But Casey is hoping for improvement from his three notable wings, and he talked about each for us:

â€¢ Rudy Gay. Gay is the big name on the Raptor roster, and though he averaged 19.5 points after coming to Toronto from Memphis in a late-January trade, he shot just 42.5 percent from the field and 33.6 percent from the 3-point line. But Gay has suffered a decline in his 3-point shooting as his career has gone on, and the hope is that the dip is the result of astigmatism in his eyes. He had surgery to fix the problem after struggling with it for years.

â€œIf you look at his career, it has steadily gone down,â€ Casey said. â€œHe has complained about his eyes, he tried to wear goggles, and that didnâ€™t work. He is supposed to be wearing contacts, and he didnâ€™t like the contacts, he didnâ€™t like having anything on his eyes. So they elected to do the surgery. I am keeping my fingers crossed. For some players, they get that done and it is like seeing a new rim. Hopefully, the same thing happens with him.â€

â€¢ DeMar DeRozan. DeRozan had the best year of his career last season, averaging 18.1 points on 44.5 percent shooting, but his numbers from beyond the arc (28.3 percent) were still atrocious. There is a limit on how good a shooting guard can be, especially in todayâ€™s 3-happy NBA, if he canâ€™t shoot from distance. Casey said thatâ€™s been the focus of DeRozanâ€™s summer.

â€œHe worked on it, we worked on it with him all summer,â€ Casey said. â€œGetting the right lift into his shot, being consistent with it, we worked on that. Thatâ€™s been the big next step for him, bringing his game past the 3-point line. That alone will do a lot for him. I thought he got better at making decisions out of the post, making plays out of the post if they double-team, he did a good job reading those situations.â€

â€¢ Terrence Ross. Casey called Ross one of the most talented players he has ever coached, and added, â€œHe probably has the most upside of all our guys from a potential standpoint.â€ But Ross was wildly inconsistent in terms of approach and effort as a rookie last year, and the result was 6.4 points per game, shooting 40.7 percent and 33.7 percent from the 3-point line. Ross could be an outstanding sixth man on this team, but he has not yet earned Caseyâ€™s trust on either end of the floor.

â€œThe talent is there,â€ Casey said. â€œThere is not a better athlete in the NBA than Terrence Ross. But just, bringing it on a consistent basis is his own personal challenge. We pushed him as a coaching staff and work with him till the cows come home, but until he makes up his mind mentally that he is going to exert that same athleticism and effort on both ends of the floor, thatâ€™s when he will make the next step. â€¦ He has been working with a shooting coach this summer, trying to get that consistent, working on his shot. His ballhandling, his defense in pick-and-roll situations, he has been working on that all summer.â€

For the immediate future of the Raptors, the improvement of those three guys will be the key to a postseason bid. For Casey, even if he is not worrying about it for one waking moment, improvement by all three could be what keeps him his job.