RAPTORS’ FATE MAY REST ON INCREDIBLY UNLUCKY SEQUENCE
Odds say Toronto should have drained one of its five chances in final 7.5 seconds
If the Toronto Raptors are unable to bounce back Thursday night with a win against the Cleveland Cavaliers, there is undoubtedly one single stretch from Game 1 on Tuesday night that will haunt them. Haunt them for months, really.
Here is how the official playby-play describes the sequence, which begins with 7.5 seconds left and the game tied 105-105, the first time since the opening tip in which the Raptors had not led:
Fred VanVleet, three-point shot: missed.
DeMar DeRozan rebound. DeMar DeRozan, tip layup shot: missed.
C.J. Miles rebound.
C.J. Miles, tip layup shot: missed.
C.J. Miles rebound.
C.J. Miles, tip layup shot: missed.
Jonas Valanciunas rebound. Jonas Valanciunas, tip layup shot: missed.
That last one, which came with 0.6 seconds on the clock, ended up in the hands of LeBron James. Valanciunas fell to his knees with his hands on his head. If that last sequence is the stuff Raptors nightmares are made of, then that image of Toronto’s seven- footer having fallen to the court in disbelief is the still shot that could yet define their season.
Basketball is not usually a sport where strange, statistically unlikely instances end up turning the course of a game and a series. We are used to that in hockey, where even the best shooters score on only 10 per cent of their attempts and cruel bounces routinely break hearts.
But as much as Toronto’s Game 1 loss has kicked off 48 hours of speculation about whether the Raptors have a thing in their collective heads about James and the Cavs, about whether these are still the same old Raptors, about whether a team with this core will ever be good enough to get out of James’ Eastern Conference fiefdom, what happened in that 10-second stretch was, simply, the flukiest of flukes.
It matters not a whit in the final result, with the Raptors having squandered their home-court advantage, and it doesn’t excuse all the other missed chances in a game that Toronto led by 14 early and by 10 pretty late. But if the wholly unexpected doesn’t happen in those closing seconds, all those familiar narratives about the Raptors wouldn’t have been broken out of storage on Tuesday night.
How unlikely were all those missed chip shots at the rim? According to the data-friendly sports site FiveThirtyEight, there was a 95 per cent chance one of the putback attempts as the clock wound down would find the right part of the hoop. (The first from DeRozan looked to be halfway down.)
Toronto also shot an abysmal 20 per cent from the field in the fourth quarter and an astonishing 3-for-17 from the restricted area in the final period of regulation.
According to ESPN’s Stats and Information, that is more misses from the restricted area than any team in any quarter in the previous 20 years of the playoffs. It’s like spotting a unicorn, except the unicorn doesn’t fly over a rainbow, but instead rips out your heart and leaves you for dead.
“We just didn’t make the shots down the stretch,” coach Dwane Casey said after the game. “I know it sounds simplistic, but we had our open looks, had our opportunities that we didn’t cash in on.”
He’s not wrong. And the Raptors all said they would learn from the mistakes, that they would continue to trust in their system, which turned them into one of the most efficient teams in the NBA this season on both ends of the floor. After all, it worked beautifully for most of the game. Right up until it didn’t.
That closing stretch was a hockey game in which the home side hits two posts and a crossbar in overtime. It was a baseball game with two lineouts to third and a fly ball to the warning track in the bottom of the ninth. It was a football game with a goal-line fumble with no time on the clock.
Those things won’t happen again. The Raptors could play for another 23 years and not have that kind of awful luck in a 10-second stretch at such a key moment in their season.
But that doesn’t much matter now. The result is booked. The fruits of Toronto’s 59-win season have already been neutralized. Whatever else happens, the Raptors need to win a game in Cleveland if they hope to advance.
James, meanwhile, has lost just two of his last 25 playoff games at home against Eastern Conference teams.
The Raptors will probably need some luck to win in Cleveland. The good news is they are due.