UPDATE (6/2/16):
Dwane Casey and the Raptors have reached an agreement on a 3-year extension worth $18 million, as reported by Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical on Yahoo! Sports.
Toronto Raptors coach Dwane Casey has reached agreement on a three-year, $18 million contract extension, league sources told The Vertical.
The Raptors essentially tore up the 2016-17 option on Casey’s deal and replaced it with a new three-year contract that runs through 2018-19, league sources said.
(Original story, 5/15/16)
The second-seeded Toronto Raptors were taken to game seven by the seventh-seeded Indiana Pacers. There was talk of whether or not Raptors head coach Dwane Casey would have been fired if Indiana had won the series. That series loss would have marked Toronto’s third consecutive first-round bounce.
Would the Raptors really have fired Casey? The answer, according ESPN’s Zach Lowe, is: Probably not.
Toronto might have been one gaffe by Pacers coach Frank Vogel in Game 5 away from bowing out in the first round again, a crusher that would have raised questions about Casey’s job security — even with Toronto holding a 2016-17 option they were leaning toward picking up regardless of the Pacers series, sources say.
It’s not likely that the Raptors fire Casey now. Despite an injury to probably the third most important player on the team Jonas Valanciunas, Casey has led this scrappy team to the conference finals. Not only that, they have battled their way back from a 2-0 series deficit to even the series at 2-2 going into game five.
Another factor that has likely deterred the front office from cutting ties with Casey is star point guard’s Kyle Lowry’s attachment to the coach. Lowry has not been quiet about being a proponent of Casey’s. A while back on Zach Lowe’s podcast, The Lowe Post, Lowry said the following of Casey(transcribed by Raptors Republic):
Casey’s an unbelievable person. That man is the nicest man in the world … and on the floor, he’s that old-school, southern, hard-nosed type of coach. Me and him, our relationship has grown throughout the years but he’s learned to trust me. I’ve learned to trust him. That’s why we have a better relationship and the result of this relationship is always going to have ‘oh man, why are you doing this’ but that’s player-coach. That’s everybody. That’s every point guard, every player in the league.
But at the end of the day, you’re on the same page, and if you can talk about it afterward and be like, ‘yeah, my bad alright let’s move on’. And if it doesn’t linger for a whole game, if it lingers for two seconds, then it’s over, then cool, that’s all that matters.
No one’s gonna love each other every second of the day. You’re gonna have disagreements, you’re gonna have miscommunication. But as long as you communicate and fix it, then it’s all good.
…
Yeah, he’s done a good job man. They always say, ‘the grass ain’t always greener on the other side’, and for a guy that’s gotten me to a situation where I’ve got paid, I’m an all-star – I’m gonna go ‘hey, listen if he’s back, he’s back’ and I want him back.
But that’s not my decision. My decision is to play.
Even if the front office wants to, it won’t be easy to get rid of a coach so beloved by his players.
