Cory Joseph tried his absolute best Tuesday afternoon, but he couldn’t hold a straight face long enough.

Monday night marked the Pickering-bred point guard’s debut as a Raptor (a pre-season win over the Minnesota Timberwolves) at the Air Canada Centre.

Asked to revisit what he felt, a familiar, if not grumpy face popped into his head.

“I mentioned it (Monday) night. You can’t ask me again,” he said, his demeanour giving way to laughter. “That’s my Pop impersonation.”

Joseph’s impersonation of Gregg Popovich, the San Antonio Spurs’ long-tenured and excessively successful coach, isn’t the intangible that the Raptors were interested in when they signed him to a four-year deal over the summer.

Through four exhibition games, Joseph is settling in as the team’s backup point man and showing what he learned playing under Popovich the last four years.

He’s brought a steady, calming presence to the Raptors in relief of Kyle Lowry and averaged 10.8 points and 2.5 assists in 21 minutes in the pre-season. He had 14 points and four assists against Minnesota on Monday and played a key part in closing out the Lakers in a win out West last week. Coming to a new team and asserting yourself at a leadership position isn’t an easy thing, Raptors coach Dwane Casey said.

“(It’s a challenge to) understand what’s going on and to be able to verbalize it, to be able to tell everyone else what to do and have the confidence to do it and he’s done that,” Casey said. “You need that type of leadership from your point guard.”

While Lowry gave Raptors fans a Thanksgiving treat with a 40-point night, Casey decided to use his two point guards together in the backcourt.

“Everything he was shooting he was scoring,” Joseph said of Lowry, “so I can get in and do what I do: get into the paint and facilitate and find open guys.

“I feel pretty strong, I take pride in my defence so I feel like I can guard (shooting guards) and it gives us a different dynamic out there on the court. Me and Kyle . . . can dribble it up and push the pace a little.”

As the Raptors sort out their front-court roles in their final three pre-season games — they’re in Ottawa for a rematch with the T-Wolves on Wednesday — that Joseph-Lowry combo could push DeMar DeRozan to the small forward spot for a three-guard rotation.

“I liked that,” Casey said of the Lowry-Joseph pairing. “Cory has the size and the grit (he’s six-foot-three, 190-pounds) . . . they’re both tough, gritty guys. They’re going to try to post them up and find them in the post, so I like that. The ball got moving, the game became faster and we may see that some more this year.”

Of course, when you have Lowry scoring the way that he has, shifting him to the shooting guard spot isn’t as difficult an adjustment either.

“You can make any move when a guy’s going for 40 but we can’t rely on that,” Casey said. “Even with that said, I thought he got to 40 within the offence. I know that sounds crazy but . . . it wasn’t like he was dancing one-on-one and jacking it up. I commend him for that.”

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ROSS OUT: Raptors guard Terrence Ross didn’t make the trip to Ottawa for Wednesday’s pre-season game. Casey said that Ross’s sneaker caught on the freshly-waxed court of the ACC on Monday night and led to him turn his left ankle, which he had surgery on May.

The surgery was to remove bone spurs and loose bodies. The team said that the injury didn’t impact anything from the May procedure.