Detroit Pistons head coach Dwane Casey isn't losing sleep for his former team winning it all the year after he was fired. The former Toronto Raptors coach finished out the 2017-18 season as the Coach of the Year recipient, but was let go by the organization after being swept out of the playoffs at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Yet the longtime coach argued there was no feelings of jealousy when seeing the Raptors win their first-ever title under his former assistant Nick Nurse.
“I think everybody thought I would be, ‘Woe is me.’ But I looked at it the other way,” Casey recently told Michael Lee of The Athletic. “What it did, it reinforced what I was I doing. And that group took it over the hump and finished it. The foundation, what we were building, how I was building it, was good. Running the same offense, same defense, same philosophy, same things we built there for seven years, so it enthused me. I was happy for the players, for the country and the team. It really energized me, that what we were doing was right. I took that with it, more than jealousy.”
It was Casey who reinvented that offense from a guard-heavy offensive team with Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan to a more balanced team approach, with the likes of Serge Ibaka and Jonas Valanciunas (now with the Memphis Grizzlies) chipping in with assists of their own.
That system ultimately only needed a championship-caliber player, which they got when the Raptors traded for Kawhi Leonard, who wound up being the missing piece of the puzzle.
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