Some thoughts on 2.5 quarters of the Toronto season opener

First, and I cannot stress this enough, the departure of the reprehensible Chuck Swirsky is the best thing that has ever happened to Canada. EVER. Matt Devlin is energetic, has a great network broadcast voice, and most importantly, actually understands the game of basketball. Swirsky isn't good enough to call games in the Filipino league. The Bulls hired Scott "You make me wanna PUKE!" Skiles, so I guess that explains why they hired Swirsky.

I love 76ers fans. Early in the second half, Sam Dalembert gets the ball off a pick and roll and is sensibly left wide open by the Raptors. Dalembert fakes a shot and the whole arena (about 11,000 people) yells "Noooo!" (UPDATE: The Globe's Michael Grange attributes this howl of protest to Philly point guard Andre Miller. Since Grange was actually in the arena, I'll defer to his version, but I still think some of the crowd was yelling too.)

Toronto's positional defence looks good, but their defensive rebounding still leaves something to be desired.

Good Joey Graham came out and brought that nice little spin move in the paint. Muggsy Boz shits himself with rage.

Chris Bosh is playing out of his mind, Jermaine O'Neal is doing exactly what they got him for and Jose Calderon looks like a 10-year pro. With 3:50 left in the third, Bosh and JO have 32 points and 17 boards. Nice.

Bargniani does look stronger and in better shape. He's still missing some shots, but he's playing aggressively, which was his main problem last year. If he keeps this up he'll be okay.

Plenty of ball movement for TO in the third quarter. Largest lead of the game so far for TO. Plenty of ball movement for me too, but I attribute that to the boxers. What?

Theo Ratliff just destroyed a weak layup attempt by Roko Ukic. It looked like a volleyball spike. Ukic comes back and makes a stupid foul. Rookies.

Reggie Evans is rocking a razor-bald top with a shaggy beard. I think I might give it a try.

Holy shit, did Jason Kapono just block a shot? I'll watch myself though because he's been shooting the lights out tonight.

Jermaine O'Neal and Elton Brand playing volleyball for a rebound is a beautiful sight. Brand's been pretty quiet tonight though.

Kapono drains a three with 1:41 left to give Toronto a 93-82 lead. All 30 people left in the stands go to watch the Phillies-Rays game. This looks like the type of game the Raptors braintrust had in mind when they traded for O'Neal. Good (though not great) team defence, terrific ball movement, and contributions from the role-players to take the load off the big three. They also made a much-hyped Philly team look pretty pedestrian. The janitors waiting to clean up at the arena booed the Sixers pretty heartily.

That's all for our first liveblogging adventure of the season. The jokes were okay I think, but maybe we'll try adding Boz and some beer. Probably the result will be more dick jokes.