LeBRON AND CAVALIERS TAKE NBA SERIES OPENER OVER RAPTORS.
LeBRON DOMINANT AS CAVS TAKE OPENER
The Toronto Raptors said they didn’t want to open the second round by getting punched in the face again. The Toronto Raptors got punched in the face again.
Despite the addition of defencefirst stalwarts Serge Ibaka and P. J. Tucker to give Toronto its most complete lineup ever, the Raptors were rolled again in Cleveland by a Cavaliers team that can go on offensive runs like few in the NBA.
Cleveland blitzed Toronto with a pair of 10- 0 stretches in the first quarter alone, as the Raptors scrambled on defensive assignments and often left Cavs shooters wide open. Cleveland hit four three- pointers early and LeBron James, doing LeBron James things, killed Toronto down low. When Kyrie Irving threw a pass off the backboard on a fast break that James finished with a left-handed dunk to give Cleveland an early 10-3 lead, sending Quicken Loans Arena into shouts of joy and wonder, it was a sobering moment for Toronto fans who had convinced themselves that this year would be different.
Cleveland 116, Toronto 105. Maybe not so different.
Perhaps Toronto will still put up a fight in this series. Perhaps the Raptors, a puzzling squad that has rebounded from more than a few playoff stinkers over the last two years, will do that thing where they can’t really play desperation basketball until they are, in fact, desperate.
Perhaps it was too much to ask a team that was 1-11 in playoff series openers, including nine losses in row, to break the streak on the road against the defending NBA champions. Perhaps all of that is true, but for one night at least the gap between these two teams still looked considerable.
When the Cavs get good threepoint shooting from their array of bombers, as they did in Game 1, where they were 41 per cent from distance, it feels like the Raptors are trying to hold back a flood and always coming up several sandbags short.
Someone runs out to the line to cover Irving, and the ball swings over to Kevin Love, standing alone in the corner. Someone gets close to Love, and suddenly Irving or J.R. Smith or Kyle Korver is standing there loading their rifle. Sometimes the Cavs even ended up with open three-point looks when they weren’t trying to get them.
That the Raptors were struggling to defend the Cavs on the outside, though, was a direct result of James being such a handful on the inside. His 35 points came on 61 per cent shooting from two-point range, the bulk of those coming in the paint. Late in the third quarter James was fouled on a layup attempt, and when the ball spun off the rim he theatrically waved his arms in frustration and then grabbed a bottle of beer from a woman at courtside. He didn’t actually drink the beer, but it was a bookend to the off-the-glass dunk from two quarters early: the Cavs, relaxed and confident, just playfully punking the visitors from Toronto. One of those nights.
Despite the result, there were a few glimmers of hope for the Raptors. Kyle Lowry had one of his best playoff games for Toronto, with 20 points and 11 assists. He was particularly effective in finding Ibaka, who recovered from a cold start to score 15 on the night. On the whole, the Raptors managed to go on some runs of their own on the night, whittling several big Cleveland leads down into the single digits. They can score on this team.
They haven’t shown, yet, that they can stop them. The Cavs dusted the Raptors in last year’s Eastern Conference Finals by averaging 113 points in three wins at Quicken Loans Arena, and then dropping 116 points on them in Game 6 in Toronto.
On Monday, Cleveland scored 30 in the first quarter and 62 in the first half. The Raptors were the little brother and the Cavs were the older sibling, sitting on their chest and telling them to stop hitting themselves.
So much of that abuse, as it often does, came from James.
Asked before the game what the Raptors needed to do to slow down the Cleveland offensive machine, coach Dwane Casey said it all begins with LeBron. “He changes the whole dynamic of everything,” Casey said, with unfortunate prescience for his team. Afterward, he noted that his guys were a half-step behind all night, slow to get out on the shooters and unable to impede James’s frequent trips to the hoop. This has been Toronto’s problem with Cleveland in the post-season: even when they don’t leave Cavs wide open behind the three-point line, they haven’t been able to stop James.
But the Raptors coach bristled in his post-game comments at the suggestion that his team has been dominated in Cleveland. “Dominated, that’s a tough word,” he said. “I wouldn’t use that word.”
“There’s a lot of things that we can do better that we didn’t do tonight,” Casey said after the loss.
On this, there was agreement all around..