The Raptors obsession with WINNING backfired
Today, we explore the Toronto Raptors obsession with winning, the double-edged sword which saw them win a championship and then fade to irrelevance. Are the dinos back on the upswing? Or does this clear winners bias , winner effect etc still taint their perceptions of reality.
We go deep into the neuroscience of winning, and how there's no right path forward for Toronto other than the one they're currently tight-roping.
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‘It is to a tree of ripe mangoes that people throw stones,’ the African proverb goes.
Toronto Raptors Masai Ujiri has often been mocked for his obsession with winning. It's this obsession of course that led to the Raptors 2019 championship, and it's this obsession with winning AGAIN in Toronto that made Masai promise that he would not enjoy the first championship until he won a second.
In explaining the decision to draft Scottie Barnes, the Raptors president spoke glowingly about the fact that Barnes said the word winning over 40 times in his pre-draft interview. Darko Rajakovic, the teams newly hired coach also seems to have an unhealthy obsession with winning - speaking about winning on and off the court, how winning is key.
When you hone in on how the Raptors navigated the 2024 draft, winning was again a high priority. The Houston Cougars guard was the winningest player in college basketball. Davion Mitchell, who has been a part of the winning culture in Sacramento had a 80-14 record between Auburn and Baylor.
Even when you consider Ja'Kobe Walter coming off a 24-11 season, Jonathan Mogbo is coming off a 23-11 season with San Francisco, and Ulrich Chomche has basically all but won in life at every stop.
Consider the 3 players Toronto traded for that actually stuck around; RJ Barrett, Immanual Quickley and Bruce Brown. Brown won the 2023 Championship with Denver, RJ and Quickley were a BIG part of the winning in New York, and then you factor in RJ's u17 win with Canada and the current run he's on, you start to see a CLEAR BIAS towards winning.
But why does winning even matter? Why does it matter that Rajakovic is coming from organizations like OKC and Memphis, or that his lead assistant Jama Mahlalela just came off the 2022 championship with the Warriors and was instrumental in sparking WeTheNorth the first time around? Why did the Raptors choose winners like Danny Green, Kawhi Leonard and Marc Gasol to join winners like Kyle Lowry, Serge Ibaka and company to win the championship?
It boils down to one thing; the winner effect. The neuroscience of winning dictates that winning breeds more winning, and that conversely, losing breeds more losing. This is due to the ways in which winning changes our bodies and minds.
This isn't unique to humans. The “winner effect” is a term used in biology to describe how an animal that has won a few fights against weak opponents is much more likely to win later bouts against stronger contenders.
We can sumarize Ian Robertson's book the winner effect as follows;
a single victory in a competitive situation can lead to increased confidence, altered brain chemistry, and a higher likelihood of winning subsequent competitions. This effect extends beyond the immediate context and can influence an individual’s overall sense of power, behavior, and decision-making.
This holds true in sports. After winning a close set in Tennis, the victor is 60% more likely to win the next set. This can also be seen in anecdotal examples like shooting streaks - how a player who starts the game 0/3 is more likely to have a bad game than the player who starts 3/3.
The flipside of the winner effect is that for all the confidence winning creates, it can also breed arrogance. The Raptors saw that side of it too. On the one hand, they had more regular season success in the year FOLLOWING Kawhi's departure, which of course makes no sense at all given how much older they got, and the fact that they replaced Kawhi effectively with Stanley Johnson. That's the winner effect doing its job.
The Raptors followed that season up by missing the playoffs 3 out of 4 seasons, losing their minds making win-now moves to preserve some semblance of power they were slowly losing grasp of. In a sense, trying to AVOID becoming irrelevant, they chased relevance to their detriment and effectively became irrelevant.