These Toronto Raptors are not winning an NBA title, which as obvious statements ranks up there with hey, the city’s traffic could be better. Their global ambassador Drake was supposed to speak to the media before the game but was snarled in a car coming in from the airport, which will probably eventually be the subject of a plaintive song of some kind. Good luck to him.

But that didn’t change the essential mission of their first-round playoff series with the Washington Wizards, after a loss in Game 1. It was simple, really. Don’t be the same old Raptors. Don’t be the team that reaches the playoffs, has all its holes exposed, tries frantically to patch them, and sinks. We’ve seen it, infrequently but enough to remember. Don’t be those guys.

Well, bad news. The 117-106 Game 2 loss was a different sort of failure than Game 1, which was filled with rushed shots, bad shots, missed shots. This time they were the guys who couldn’t guard anybody, who broke down if you leaned up against them, pushed a little, tried. This one was more revelatory, and therefore worse.

YOUR CALL!

The Raptors had a 12-2 run to start the game, and a 12-2 run to start the third quarter, and as soon as the Wizards adjusted Toronto got crushed. Washington ran pick and rolls, got into transition, got comfortable, made shots. Kyle Lowry bombed again, and the Raptors looked like they didn’t have a single idea what to do.

“We have to play like we love the game,” said a muted Greivis Vasquez. “That’s about it. We’ve done it before. Playoffs mean you have to play with everything you got. And I don’t think we did.”

The apparently slow-to-learn crowd chanted “Paul Pierce Sucks” right before the Wizards rolled up 60 points at the half, real easy. In his halftime interview Wizards guard Bradley Beal told the Washington broadcast, “They think that we’re some punks. They think that they can push us around. But we’re not rolling.”

There it is. The Raptors are always the punks, the ones that can be pushed around. Basketball-wise, this city has been getting pushed around for 20 years.

“I see us getting knocked down going to the basket. I don’t see their guys hitting the floor. I see them waltzing in and waving at us, and laughing at us,” said Raptors coach Dwane Casey.

It’s the one immutable rule of the Raptors in the playoffs: when one hole is patched, another opens up. You start Joey Graham at small forward; it doesn’t work, so you try Andrea Bargnani there. Chris Bosh can’t handle the playoffs one year; he can handle it the next time, but Jason Kapono is your second-leading scorer, and you have to hide him on D.

In this game, the holes yawned wide. Toronto got to within two early in the third, and the Wizards pulled away so easily. By the end, Otto Porter and Pierce were laughing on the court. According to Michael Lee of the Washington Post, Pierce walked to the locker room yelling, “I don’t want to go through customs no more.”

“We have to hit them,” said Beal, who led all scorers with 28. “They think they’re a physical team, and they are, but we’re not going to back down from them.”

“Next question,” said Lowry when asked about Beal’s comments.

There were no adjustments that worked, no schemes to fix it, nobody who could drag them through. The Wizards offence ranked 25th in the league after the all-star break, and they had 97 points after three quarters. The Wizards went 17-23 in the second half of the season. The Wizards made the Raptors look like punks.

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The franchise has steeped itself in nostalgia in its 20th season — if you played and people remember you, you probably got honoured. Damon Stoudamire was on TSN Radio Tuesday, talking fondly about his time here before mentioning he was here as a promotional thing with Swiffer, whose products he basically admitted he had never used. Still, hey, brand awareness.

That’s what the Raptors have built, as much as anything: brand awareness. Drake, the Square, division titles in a time of Atlantic Division cholera. You know what the problem was with Masai Ujiri’s red-meat moment before Game 1? It wasn’t the profanity. It was that when he said, “We don’t give a s--- about ‘it’,” that wasn’t the truth. As the general manager of this team, that’s exactly what he cares about. He wants to achieve escape velocity from the past.

Last season, the Raptors had to race to figure out what the hell they were up against. This year, it’s a race to try to overcome exactly what they are.

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