Hollinger's Team Forecast: Toronto Raptors

That came to a sudden end, however, when a blow from Atlanta's Al Horford knocked out Ford, who has a history of neck and spine problems. In addition to scaring the bejeezus out of everyone present, the injury kept him out action for nearly two months.

Act II, however, saw the Raptors fail to skip a beat. Calderon took over as the starting point guard and played even better than Ford, registering near-nightly double-doubles in points and assists while hardly ever turning the ball over and shooting over 50 percent from the floor. Toronto went 18-14 from the Ford injury until late February, when he'd been able to work his way back into a regular rotation spot and back into his time-share at the point with Calderon.

At this point, the Raptors looked like a dark horse to make a deep playoff run -- they'd even had an impressive road win in Boston -- and the general thinking was "imagine how tough they'll be when Ford is back at full strength."

Instead, their season went off the rails. Ford tried to force the action at every opportunity and bristled at coming off the bench behind Calderon. He was such a distraction that eventually the Raptors put him back in as a starter, but by then the damage had already been done.

From Feb. 25 -- the first game where Ford saw more than half the action -- through the end of the playoffs, the Raptors went 13-20, closing with a five-game dismissal at the hands of Orlando in the first-round of the playoffs. Toronto was 3-17 on the road in that stretch, lost home games to Indiana and Charlotte, and generally bore no resemblance to the cohesive, efficient unit that played the first 54 games.

L'Affaire Ford dominated the headlines, but the other interesting story was the development of Andrea Bargnani … or rather, the lack of it. The first overall pick in 2007 was handed a starting job and major minutes after a solid rookie year, in anticipation of a possible breakout in Year 2. Instead the Raptors got a very different break -- a total breakdown in his shooting and confidence. Bargnani shot 38.6 percent from the floor with a 10.68 player efficiency rating; given his defensive shortcomings, he was one of the worst players in the league to see regular minutes.

Compare him to the Raptors' other big men and you can see how costly his playing time was. Rasho Nesterovic shot 55 percent with a 16.23 PER; Kris Humphries shot 48.3 percent and had a 15.72 PER; and little-used Maceo Baston also shot well and posted a strong PER. Had the Raptors simply benched Bargnani and played the other three guys more, they would have projected to win 3-to-5 more games, depending on your playing time assumptions for the others. That, in turn, might have been enough for them to finish fourth in the East and host a first-round playoff series.

Instead, Bargnani played 1,856 minutes, and for the most part he played them quite badly. His situation immediately brought up echoes of the last guy the Raptors gave heavy minutes to solely because he was a first-round pick, but let's not start the Rafael Araujo comparisons just yet. Unlike Hoffa, Bargnani demonstrated considerable ability in his rookie season; it's just unfortunate that he regressed so much last season.

Despite Bargnani's struggles, the Raptors were one of the league's best shooting teams overall. Toronto was second in the league in 3-point shooting at 39.2 percent, and was also second with an 81.2 percent mark from the line.

Unfortunately, they didn't attempt either shot in large quantities. The low free-throw rate won't surprise longtime Raps fans, who have watched their team play largely outside the paint for years -- as a result, Toronto had the league's lowest rate of free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt, pretty much undoing any advantage from shooting so well from the stripe.

More surprising is that the Raptors' 3-point rate was slightly below the league average; you'd think a team full of jump-shooters would find a way to get three points more often. The shining example here is Jason Kapono, a free-agent flop despite shooting 48.3 percent from downtown -- largely because fewer than a quarter of his attempts were 3s.