The Raptors as we know them are done. Do they realize that?

TORONTO — When the Raptors were swept by the Cavaliers in the second round of the playoffs last year, general manager Masai Ujiri famously set forth his mandate for a ‘culture reset.’

Self-reflection trickled through the organization, fostering trust. Coach Dwane Casey loosened his rotation. DeMar DeRozan shot threes and facilitated. Kyle Lowry took a backseat. The offense modernized and the defense became more switchy and versatile. The youth movement culminated in the NBA’s best bench. The Raptors grabbed the East’s No. 1 seed, and with home-court advantage, they were favored to take down LeBron James.

A year to the date after his initial bold proclamation, Ujiri took the same podium at the BioSteel Center after the Raptors lost to the same team in the same number of games. The only appreciable change? After a year of flattening out their edges, the Raptors finally found out the truth about themselves: they aren’t good enough to win a championship.

It just hadn’t seem to hit them yet.

In Wednesday’s exit interviews, Casey and Ujiri fixated on the randomness of Game 1, which they both saw as a turning point. In their eyes, that loss featured two open potential game-winning threes, four tip-ins that rimmed out at the end of regulation, a blown double-digit lead, and a missed flagrant foul call on Kevin Love late in the game.

“If a flagrant foul is called and looked at, does it go a different way?” asked Ujiri, who got fined for confronting the officials in Game 3. “I don’t know. I know one thing: we’ve come to a point in this league where we deserved to go look at that play. That might not be the reason [we lost]. We missed a hundred layups. We had 400 turnovers. But all I’m saying is the margin of error is small. And that’s the playoffs.”

Casey, in the awkward position of advocating for his own job on the same day he was elected Coach of the Year by his peers, echoed his boss.

“One of those 11 shots goes in, I think that takes your mental toughness and confidence up another two levels. Close doesn’t count. That’s another mental hurdle that I think would have helped us. Now you go into Game 2 or the second half of Game 2 with a different personality, a different belief, a different level of toughness.”

Two days later, Casey was fired.

It could have been smoke and mirrors, a placeholder explanation as Ujiri evaluates the best course of action. The fact that the Raptors fired Casey two days after the press conference lends some credence to this idea.

But on Wednesday, Ujiri didn’t sound like a man just trying to get through a press conference. He was testy, forceful, defiant, at one point wondering why he didn’t hear questions about DeRozan and Lowry’s ceilings when the Raptors beat Washington in the first round. He sounded, heartbreakingly, like he believed what he was saying.

Game 1, tip-ins aside, wasn’t random. All that has ever ailed the Raptors, all that they have tried to fix, malfunctioned. The late-game offense sputtered. Lowry and DeRozan took all but one of the Raptors shot attempts in overtime. Fred VanVleet, who missed two go-ahead threes, never should have been in the game in the first place because of a shoulder injury.

They were then blown out in Game 2 and 4, cowering in the face of James’ greatness. In Game 3? Let’s face it: if James didn’t beat them at the buzzer, he would have done it in overtime.

The Raptors were even ready for an unfavorable whistle: they hired Don Vaden, a former head of NBA officiating who also consults with the Portland Trail Blazers, to help players get ready for calls not going their way, multiple players told SB Nation. (Raptors management declined to comment).

The Raptors knew what could happen. They prepared. It happened anyway. All of it.

To lose that point is to lose the plot, but losing the plot is the only way the Raptors can justify running their core back one more time.

“There’s a huge gap I think we closed between the first 4-0 and the second 4-0,” Casey said. “That 4-0 is very, I think, deceiving. You had two games by what, one point and two points. So the gap is closing.”

You wonder who he was trying to convince. In the end, he failed to convince the people that mattered.

Throughout the season, DeRozan was repeatedly asked if he feared the Raptors’ offense would revert to its old, ball-thumping ways. His answer was usually some variation on what he said two days before the playoffs began.

“We did it 82 games. We won 59 games. If that’s not the ultimate understanding of what got us here wasn’t a fluke, it really worked, we’re not gonna sway away from that,” DeRozan said on April 12. “I think that speaks for itself. We know what works for us, what got us here, and what’s gonna take us even further.”

It was self-evident: Why work against self-interest when that mindset change produced a top-five offense? But the Raptors aren’t exactly filled to the brim with sharpshooters, and it was easier to stomach regression in the regular season, when an 82-game process would eventually even itself out.

In hindsight, DeRozan’s philosophy could double as, ‘we’ll keep doing it as long as it works.’ To get a sense of how likely it is that the Raptors will be able to pick up where they left off, one only needs to examine their worst postseason moments: indecisiveness, mistrust, with tunnel vision heading toward the hoop when the shots stopped falling.

When the process stopped being gratifying, the Raptors threw it out. And, well, they just poured their hearts into the process for 365 days and ended up with the exact same result. So now they’re reckoning with the ultimate irony: trying desperately to spin their postseason failures to legitimize their regular-season progress, when in reality the best way to honor and learn from what happened is to accept the truth in earnest.

“It’s incredible where we’ve come in the last five years – and that’s not a pat on the back – but we go through stages of winning, and maybe we’re going through a stage,” said Ujiri, emphasizing the process before waxing poetic on the stamp the Lowry-era Raptors put on the organization, a once-downtrodden franchise in a hockey-obsessed country.

“I believe in this. I believe in the city. When people talk about greats, they come and go. Kobe came and went. Jordan. Casey will come and go. I will. Kyle. But Toronto basketball will be here for 100 years and will stay here.”

He’s right, but the fact that Ujiri had to lean on legacy is telling. This stage is over.

Editor’s Note: This piece was published on Thursday and updated to reflect Friday’s news of Casey’s firing.