LEONARD MAKES HIS MARK FOR RAPS WITH BIG VICTORY
Crowd serenades Toronto newcomer with MVP chants in convincing win over Celtics
The MVP chants might have been a bit premature, but you couldn’t really blame the fan base.
From the beginning of the third quarter until he came out with 3:55 left in the third, Kawhi Leonard gave the Toronto crowd its first real glimpse of the player he can be leading the Toronto Raptors to an early-season 113-101 win over the pre-season favourite for the Eastern Conference title, the Boston Celtics, Friday at Scotiabank Arena.
After another slow start in the first half when he was limited to nine points, the offence Leonard can provide was on full display for the first 8:05 of the third.
He scored 15 points in the frame in every which way imaginable.
It started with a driving dunk, then there was a 10-foot jumper, a turnaround fadeaway jumper, a three-pointer, a couple of freebies from the line, a running layup.
He then coaxed Kyrie Irving into a three-shot foul and made all three before finishing off this eight-minute tour-de-force with a cutting drunk off a nice feed from Kyle Lowry.
The MVP chants began in the middle of those three free throws and got louder and louder as each free throw found the mark.
For the game, Leonard ended up with 31 points to go along with 10 rebounds and three assists.
His first-half shooting struggles kept the numbers from getting too inflated but that third quarter was easily the best we have seen from Leonard in a Raptors uniform.
And that’s to say nothing of his defence as he took turns on both Celtics young guns in Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum and frustrated both.
Joining in on the scoring parade after a tough opener was Serge Ibaka.
Ibaka, who got the start at centre, couldn’t get a shot to drop in the opener until midway through the fourth quarter. Friday night he was hard-pressed to miss, finishing the evening with 21 points on 10-of-14 shooting.
Head coach Nick Nurse made a point of praising Ibaka for his defence and his rebounding after the Game 1 shooting struggles.
With Leonard shouldering a lot of the offensive load, Kyle Lowry became much less scorer and more all around facilitator.
Lowry’s biggest sequence of the night may have been standing in and taking a charge from Tatum with two minutes to go and then heading down the other end and hitting a three to extend the Raptors’ lead to eight.
Lowry wound up with 13 points on 4-of-7 shooting.
END-OF-QUARTER WOES
The Raptors need to work on this part of their game. The end of the first quarter was bad as the Celtics opened up a sevenpoint lead in the final minute and a half. The second quarter was equally bad. The end of the third saw the Raptors fail to get a shot off with the ball and the shot clock off and almost give up an uncontested three. None of it was real pretty. Fortunately they were much better throughout the earlier parts of each of those first three quarters and actually had a three-point lead heading into the final frame.
NO REAL SURPRISES
The Raptors’ starting lineup included just the one change from opening night. Ibaka came in with Jonas Valanciunas coming off the bench. That was the expected change with the Celtics starting small with a point guard and three wings along with Al Horford.
Horford is a better matchup for Ibaka, who can get out to the three-point line and defend him there while Valanciunas entered the game when Aron Baynes entered.
Baynes is a more traditional big man like Valanciunas, although he started shooting threes a year ago. The difference is Valanciunas isn’t going to have to chase Baynes out to the three-point line. He’ll just follow him out there.
There was some thought that OG Anunoby might replace Pascal Siakam as the starting power forward, but there still seemed to be some question as to how much Anunoby could play with the bruised orbital bone he suffered Wednesday so Siakam stayed in that starting five.
QUICK HITS
Sloppy play early on from both teams. Even the large mitts of Leonard failed him as he couldn’t come up with a bullet pass from Lowry that wound up in the first row of the baseline seats under the Boston basket ... Raptors were brutal closing out the first quarter without the majority of their starters. Then they were awful (defensively) closing out the half. Only a buzzer-beating three by the cool-as-ice Fred VanVleet got them to the locker-room with their confidence intact and down just four ... In the battle of the head coaches credit Brad Stevens with an early win when he took Tatum out of the game early to get him away from the suffocating defence of Leonard and then brought him back against Toronto’s bench. Tatum came out of the game midway through the quarter and then was brought back with three minutes to go.