CURSE OF JAMES CONTINUES TO MESMERIZE RAPTORS
Come crunch time, Toronto hasn’t got an answer for game’s best player
There isn’t a better illustration for how the mood around the Toronto Raptors has changed over the past couple of weeks than the sight of Kyle Lowry, alone at an interview podium late Saturday night.
“I’m lonely up here,” Lowry said, the sounds of a party in the lounge area of Quicken Loans Arena still audible. (When your legendary player hits an impossible last-second shot to win the game, you stick around to have another drink or two and revel in it.) When a few reporters chuckled at Lowry’s line, he said he was serious: “I miss my guy,’’ he said.
His guy, in this case, was DeMar DeRozan, exiled to the bench for the fourth quarter after a dreadful shooting performance (eights points in 28 minutes) and inconsistent defensive effort. Lowry was left to answer for him on Saturday, to say that he still believed in him, that he would bounce back.
It was a sharp contrast to multiple times in the Washington series, when Lowry and DeRozan would share the podium and bicker at each other like siblings. Even after losses in that series, they were relaxed and casual, insisting that they were confident, and then they would go out and show it.
Now they must know they are doomed. Nothing kills the cheery vibe like that. No team has ever come back from an 0-3 hole in the NBA. That’s where this one stands after LeBron James’ game-winning basket in Cleveland’s 105-103 victory on Saturday night. The Raptors have pride to play for, but the result of this series is just a matter of time.
And while there will be plenty of time to consider the wreckage of a season that once again crashed on the shoals of Lake Erie, it is hard to know what, exactly, this series has told us about the Toronto Raptors. The easy answer is that they aren’t good enough. But it’s also not quite that simple.
If the Raptors had just managed to finish off Game 1, a game they led until the last 30 seconds, in which they had an almost impossible series of near misses at the rim in the final minutes, and in which the officials blew a technical foul call on Kevin Love at the end that probably would have avoided overtime, this would still very much be a series.
It would still be a struggle, to be sure. But there would be a different way to frame what the Raptors had accomplished. They played well on the offensive end in Game 2, but were destroyed by a monster — and, frankly, mean — performance from James. Sometimes that will happen. And then in Game 3, they started poorly, and closed the first half poorly, and in between they fought like the dickens and Lowry proved again that he’s the team’s best player and when they needed three points at the end, they ran their ball-movement offence and found OG Anunoby in the corner. The rookie drained the shot, and it could not have underscored Toronto’s new offensive philosophy more: they passed it to the open guy. Then the Cavs did the opposite, giving the ball to James and letting him try to hit a miracle shot, and that worked out, too.
So, two games that came down to the final possession, and one in which LeBron schooled them on a night when the Raptors shot 50 per cent from the field and 40 per cent from three-point range, which will almost always win a team a game. It hasn’t been like other attempts at playing the Cavaliers in the playoffs, when LeBron and Co. have casually brushed them aside like pocket lint, routinely beating them by 20-plus points. The Raptors were redesigned into a team that could, in theory, trade punches with the Cavs, and for the most part they have. They just don’t have any results to show for it.
That doesn’t matter in the end, but it’s meaningful in terms of what might come next. President Masai Ujiri has always talked about the Raptors in a big-picture sense, and to step back and look at this season so far is to see significant progress, albeit progress that threatens to come crashing to a halt thanks to the best player in the league.
The second round has been a harsh reminder that in Lowry and DeRozan, the Raptors have a couple of all-stars who are in the tier below the league’s true superstars. But that much was already known: Lowry and DeRozan have each made the year-end All-NBA teams just once in their careers.
The idea, here, was to build a team with a deep roster of talented players, one that could compete in the short term while developing young players who would be around for years to come. It might not feel like it, on the precipice of another LeBronled sweep, but that idea has come to pass. The losses in this series mark the Raptors’ first threegame losing streak of the season. Lowry and DeRozan each said on Sunday they didn’t think these losses have totally exposed them, even though certain fans no doubt feel otherwise.
It is, to be clear, a results business, and the Raptors have only themselves to blame for the lost opportunities of a series they could easily be leading.
Ujiri might yet decide that it is time to press the large red button on his desk that says: Kaboom.
But if he didn’t do it two years ago, or last year, it would be a little surprising to see him do it now, on the evidence of an awful, and exceedingly ill-timed, week.
… a harsh reminder that in Lowry and DeRozan, the Raptors have a couple of all-stars who are in the tier below the league’s true superstars.