For the Raptors, accountability is not a synonym for responsibility

Though their playoff faults are legion, never let it be said that the Toronto Raptors are not accountable.

Up and down the organization, people expend enormous energy taking the blame when things go wrong.

“It’s on all of us, there’s no one person,” coach Dwane Casey said after two miserable losses in Washington, as if he and the towel guy were the ones passing the ball to opponents in the open court.

DeMar DeRozan was able to think of one person.

“I blame myself for a lot of mistakes,” he said on Monday.

This might be heartening if it weren’t so familiar. Accountability is not a synonym for responsibility – not when you keep making the same errors over and over again.

For the Raptors, every game in April and May has high Groundhog Day probability. Anybody who follows the team knows the pattern.

When things get tight, DeRozan starts trying to tunnel through people to the basket, tossing up blind shots once his forward momentum stalls. Kyle Lowry handles the ball like he’s being paid per second of possession, running futilely along the perimeter. Everyone else stands around in a daze, hoping those two will save them.

It has never worked at this time of year. And yet, there we were at the end of Game 4, watching Toronto’s clunky version of hero-ball fail again.

After morphing back into the 2014-15 Raptors, the team also reverted to off-court type. The regular-season ease evaporated.

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Lowry pretends calm defiance, which usually comes off like brittle worry – he’s taken to whistling as he enters the postgame pressers after a loss. DeRozan begins self-flagellating – Monday’s talk began with a lot of weary face rubbing and sighing.

The rest of the team rushes in to bolster the confidence of its two biggest stars, which only seems to accelerate the cycle.

The Raptors are no longer a tactical puzzle. The coaching staff figured that one out in the off-season.

What they have is a chemistry issue: The elements of the roster are inexplicably combustible when combined. This doesn’t happen every night, but it happens often enough that you have to wonder if something is wrong with the mix.

Good teams lose playoff games. That’s inevitable. But they should not lose them the way the Raptors lost Sunday – a basketballing hara-kiri, as Toronto players repeatedly turned the ball over while under no discernible pressure or passed up open looks in order to give the ball to someone wearing defenders like clothing.

Casey called the mistakes “unexplainable.”

“It’s not like [Washington] is doing something that’s confusing us,” he said. “We’re confusing ourselves.”

Unfortunately, auto-confusion cannot be smoothed out during a video session.

At this level, and at this time of year, it may happen for a single sequence. Then you call a timeout, and everybody starts to breathe again.

But the Raptors come out of breaks in play looking even more discombobulated. If it happens late in the game, forget it. You could say a lot of nice things about the Toronto Raptors. “Clutch” is not one of them. At best, they are “hang on and pray.”

The solution here is simple: Do what you did all season long. Move the ball. Let the secondary players have their shots. No one person should try too hard.

All their feedback in this regard has been glowing – the cult that’s built up around the bench players, the 12-man rotation everyone in the NBA is talking up as a paradigm-shifting approach to roster construction.

The Raptors could not possibly be getting more positive reinforcement for their new, better way of doings things. None of which prevents them from reverting to the old, bad way at the worst possible times.

If the share-and-share-alike game the Raptors played was anywhere near as good as the one they talk, this team would be the Showtime Lakers.

“Every one of my teammates, I don’t care if they miss 20 shots in a row, if you’ve got a shot, shoot it,” DeRozan said.

How does that theory work in real life? The Raptors put up 12 shots in the last six minutes of Game 4 – the point at which Washington tied the game.

DeRozan took eight of them. He made two.

Clearly, his “shoot your shot” message is getting lost somewhere along the line. Someone (Delon Wright, twice) passes up an open three, so DeRozan begins his me-against-the-world act. When he does that, everyone else fades back further. Once established, the pattern spreads contagiously. By the end, it’s DeRozan (and, occasionally, Lowry) running around in a panic like he’s trying to win a half-court challenge during a TV timeout.

Regardless of whose fault it is – “Yeah, yeah,” Wright said cheerfully when asked if he “defers” to DeRozan – the point is it doesn’t work.

This isn’t a situation where one or two players claim to be on board with a strategy but refuse to carry out orders on the court. You can see that in DeRozan’s face. He’s not playing silly buggers.

That doesn’t make things better. It makes them worse. It means the issue is somehow fundamental to the Raptors’ collective on-court psyche.

How do you fix that? Well, they’ve tried. They’ve not only tried, they’ve succeeded. And yet

If you were a betting sort, you’d still lay money on the Raptors to win this series. They’re that much better than the Wizards. If that happens, this issue will be pushed to the side again until the next series. And on and on until they lose.

Maybe they’ll show their best and fall to a more talented team. That would not be a disaster.

But if they lose the way they’ve lost against Washington, it’ll be time for the next round of blame acceptance and promises to be better. Which won’t solve anything.

At some point, you either change or prove you’re incapable of it. Once more, the Raptors as currently constructed are getting close to that dividing line.