Raptors 2012-13 End of Season Links

Well, that's that.

The 2012-13 Toronto Raptors' season came to a close Wednesday night and while the team finished with a win, and a fifth straight at that, as my compatriot Scott Campsall noted yesterday, there are still many questions that remain unanswered as the club heads into the off-season.

We'll start examining those one by one, and begin doing many of our other typical season-end features.

For this morning though, I thought it would be useful to provide a big summary of all the end-of-season pieces that have been written, as there are lot out there right now.

We'll start things off with the full piece of what you may have only seen segments of, during Wednesday night's final game; a chat between Sportsnet's Michael Grange, and the man under the gun right now, Raptors' President and GM, Bryan Colangelo.

More on BC, as this Hoopsworld piece has him already warming up the PR bus regarding how the season unfolded, and why the team failed to meet the expectations of many.

Colangelo gets a full piece via The Toronto Sun's Steve Simmons, who makes a number of very interesting points about the team's "success" under BC's tenure...

...not to mention the bombshell that Colangelo may have tried to fire Casey at one point this season, something the Raptors' President and GM has since categorically denied.

BC of course is part of many a season recap, so let's jump to them, starting with The Toronto Sun's look back on Toronto's season, courtesy of Mike Ganter. Ganter looks at a few of the more notable stories at season's end, and concludes that while the final stretch of the season was nice, we'd be wise to see if it can be duplicated next November, a sentiment echoed by Joseph Casciaro at Raptorblog.

The National Post's Eric Koreen doles out his end-of-season grades for the Raptors, and looks back at his personal highlights and lowlights of the 2012-13 campaign.

The Toronto Star's Cathal Kelly does likewise, but sticks with the positives, including Bargnani and Primo Pasta.(Hey, at least he got a reply from the company, our inquisitions went unanswered!)

And Josh Lewenberg at TSN focuses on one of the major issues that observers saw this season with the Dinos; an identity crisis that may not be resolved by the start of next season.

Finally, John Chick at CBC Sports sums things up in pretty much the same manner that we've been doing it for the past few seasons; at best, this Raptors' team is currently on a path to sustaining mediocrity. (Although I'd add, if that.)

Whew...not a lot of positives in that link dump is there.

Let's finish with a few happy thoughts then before capping this one off, including DeMar DeRozan's post-game making Zach Lowe's season-ending "30 Things" list, and DeRozan and Raptors' rookie Terrence Ross, making the NBA's top 10 dunks of the year list.

See, the season wasn't all bad...