A ho-hum night with the Hornets sees Raptors struggle, but still win
With little on the line on a sleepy Sunday, East’s best give Charlotte too many breaks
Not even Dwane Casey could get properly lathered up over this one.
You know the NBA season has reached the point where it’s tough to stay enthused when the Toronto Raptors flirt dangerously with losing to a team that has no business playing with them, and the best Casey can manage is: “I would say last year we probably would have lost that game. But we were mature enough to make plays, the right plays.”
Casey is not wrong.
His team deserves credit for fighting through the doldrums of an early March game and finding a way to put it in the win column, which the Raptors did Sunday with a sketchy 103-98 win over the visiting Charlotte Hornets.
There was nothing pretty about it, from the 15 turnovers Toronto committed to the 35 times they put Charlotte on the line.
Charlotte was no more locked in, but then they haven’t seen the right side of .500 in quite a while.
Casey knows better than most how long an NBA season can be and what can happen with even a good team when you reach these dog days of the season with the playoffs still in the distance.
Instead, you lean on your ability to stay in a game and your professionalism that come crunch time you have the ability to get the job done.
The Raptors did that against the Washington Wizards on Friday and then again Sunday, albeit against a lesser opponent.
“We got to understand that whoever’s out there, we’re playing for something bigger than just now. It’s an opportunity for us to be able to understand, learn something new about ourselves and find whatever edge we need no matter who it is we’re playing against, and try to build off that,” Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan said.
Sunday marked the first start for Malcolm Miller as Casey and his staff avoided stealing from a successful bench, filling the shoes of injured starting rookie OG Anunoby with a guy who would not disrupt the reserve unit.
On Friday in Washington, the start went to Norm Powell, another player who does not really have a defined role these days.
Casey said for Tuesday’s game against the Atlanta Hawks it will probably be someone else.
DeRozan made the point that Toronto’s starting five should be at the point where Casey can mix and match with anyone and still see results.
“We could go out there and start you,” DeRozan said, pointing to a reporter.
When it was suggested by that same reporter that might not be a good idea, DeRozan agreed.
“No, it wouldn’t,” he said. “But we could make it work.”
As for the game itself, DeRozan said the Raptors allowed themselves to be lulled into playing Charlotte’s style for a while. That and some rather strange bounce-outs around the rim made for a rather trying evening.
“It was probably like the movie (The) Sixth Man,” DeRozan said. “Somebody ’s sitting on the rim just plugging it up. I don’t know. There were a lot of shots went in and out.”
And the energy normally so obvious in Toronto’s game just wasn’t there.
“There’s going to be moments like that when we feel like nothing’s going our way,” DeRozan said, “feel like we could be playing hard, but just the feel for the game wasn’t all the way there for us. But we still managed to do the things we needed to do to get a win.”
If nothing else, these past three games have at least given Toronto an opportunity to work on their late-game situations, with strong finishes in each required to avoid a loss. Eventually time will inch forward to a moment where the playoffs really are just around the corner. Until then, the Raptors will work on the opportunities as they present themselves and hope that no bad habits creep in.