Go ahead, kick the Raptors. Take your best shot. Just about everyone is doing it.

LeBron James is already talking openly about how much fun it would be to take on Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference final. ESPN spent part of the morning talking about LeBron — a daily subject on the network — playing against his former team and old friends.

This isn’t new. In fact, it’s quite old.

But it is real and occasionally discouraging and predictable and all too typical. Part of it is geographical. Part of it is more historical than hysterical. Part of it is just the scale of relevance.

The NBA is a league of cool kids and superstars and the Raptors have yet to show themselves as being cool enough or superstar enough to matter anywhere but here.

“That’s fine,” said Dwane Casey, who had already been informed of LeBron’s words by Wednesday afternoon.

Nothing stays quiet in the NBA, the league that has always been part basketball, part gossip. Everybody talks about everybody everything.

The thing with the Raptors, though, down one game to the Miami Heat, is that nobody talks much about them at all. Most of the time, they have yet to matter.

“Nobody respects us,” said Casey. “Everybody has written us off. The people in the locker room over there are the most important people to believe that ... Our guys should take offence (spelled with a Canadian ‘C’ — to what’s not being said about them).

“You have to do it, “ said the coach, meaning win. “This year, next year, year after that. You build a program. People are looking at us from six, seven, eight, 10 years ago. We’re a growing program. You have to earn that respect. You earn that by winning year after year.”

You don’t earn that by losing the first game of every playoff series in every playoff year. You don’t earn that when you are 0-and-5 in playoff opening games at home. You don’t earn that when you have two apparent stars, and one is making fun of himself for the fact he has the worst shooting percentage in playoff history and the other can’t seem to string together two great quarters, let alone two great games. This is run-your-hands-together material for the local supporters who have mastered in rubbing their hands together over the years.

But we interrupt this coronation of the Miami Heat with a brave announcement: The Raptors lost Game 1 to Indiana and still found a way, albeit barely, to win the series. And they lost Game 1 to Brooklyn two years ago and went to the final seconds of Game 7 — Kyle Lowry, who was actually making buckets back then, had his shot blocked because Terrence Ross ran the wrong play and Paul Pierce wound up in the wrong place.

This is what the Raptors have to overcome to be relevant in the country that doesn’t debate every hockey hit with the game of Suspension or No Suspension.

They have to make some shots. They have to run the right plays. They have to play some defence, especially against Goran Dragic and, in a more difficult way, against the seemingly ageless and rather smooth, Dwyane Wade. They have to even this best-of-seven series before they leave for Miami and a Game 3 on Saturday afternoon.

None of this, for the record, is necessarily easy.

What the Raptors don’t do often, though: Lose two games in a row. They managed it once in the last 29 games of the regular season and eight in the playoffs: That’s 37 games played, two losses in a row just once.

But that’s not enough to get them noticed or appreciated much, even after becoming the first 60-win team in franchise history. The thing is, they’d like 64 wins, and maybe more after that and then somebody down south might stop sneering. Or worse, ignoring.

“It’s been like that since I’ve been here,” said Patrick Patterson, the power forward and the Raptors’ director of Toronto tourism and public relations.

“It’s nothing new as far as not getting the respect that I feel we deserve. It’s something we face every day and something that we’re OK with because, at the end of the day, it’s us in the locker room versus the world.”

So far, the world is winning. The Raptors can change some of that in this playoff series. They can win and really mess with LeBron’s dance party of an Eastern Conference championship.

And how much fun would a drive to Cleveland be?

Email: ssimmons@postmedia.com

Twitter @simmonssteve