Raptors pushed closer to extinction
Dwane Casey said the other day that his team wasn’t here to play horseshoes. If only it was. The Raptors finally managed a close game — for a while — in their secondround series against the Cavaliers, but they still ended up with a third straight loss, thanks this time to another hot performance from the best player in the world and some unfathomably cold shooting from Toronto.
Coming into Friday night’s Game 3, the Raptors had lost two straight to Cleveland and neither was close. The Cavs were on a nine- game playoff win streak over two seasons in which LeBron James was averaging 35 points. DeMar DeRozan was lost and Kyle Lowry, the best Toronto player in the first two games, was hurt.
The end result was about what you would have expected, even if the manner in which they got there was not. Toronto scratched and clawed to a halftime lead, only to see it erased when Cleveland cranked up its three- point shooting and the Raptors could only clank theirs. The numbers that matter from Game 3: Cleveland 57 per cent from distance for 39 points, Toronto 11 per cent from distance for 6 points.
And two more numbers: 115-94, Cleveland.
For several days now, the talk had been not about whether the Raptors would win, but whether the Cavs were troubled by them in the least. James had called for an off-the-glass alley oop in the first quarter — the FIRST quarter! — of Game 1, and later in that contest he mimicked drinking a courtside beer, and said afterward he might have had a sip if was, say, a nice Chianti. After his Game 2 ball-spinning in the face of Serge Ibaka before draining a three- pointer, the basketball world had seen enough.
James didn’t respect the Raptors, and before this series was over he would be playing in sandals and a floppy sombrero.
Casey, the coach, said before Game 3 that Toronto should use some of that for fuel. Makes the Cavs respect you, was the thinking.
The ball- spinning, the beer, the Globetrotters- style fast break: “All those things should get you upset,” Casey said. “That should get your hair up on your neck.”
He also said it was up to the Raptors to play tougher, to make it so the Cavs weren’t comfortable enough to showboat.
“It’s not hockey, where you can take your gloves off and do something about it,” he said, and later slipped into what one assumes was a metaphor. “To beat the champs you’ve got to throw punches ... maybe a couple below the belt, but you’ve got to box.”
Casey was talking about taking open shots in this analogy, something that Lowry had also said Friday morning before he was ruled out with the ankle injury suffered in Game 2.
“Sometimes you gotta be a little more selfish,” he said, alluding to the fact that Toronto shooters passed up more than a few open chances over the first couple of games.
After all of that talk, the Raptors mostly lived up to the promise in the opening half, forcing eight Cleveland turnovers and holding the Cavs to 40 per cent shooting instead of the gaudy numbers they posted at home. Toronto also t ook open shots, but couldn’t make them.
Almost any of them. The Raptors were 0- for- 9 from three-point range in the first half, but plenty of inside scoring — and 21 first- half points from a resurrected DeRozan — gave Toronto a 52- 49 lead at the break.
But all those missed shots, the punches of which Casey had spoke, loomed like something that would come back to haunt them. When the Raptors bounced back from an 0-2 hole with a win in Game 3 at home last year, they hit 12 three pointers to Cleveland’s 14, and the Cavs attempted 10 more than the Raptors.
If there was ever going to be a way to hang with this collection of outside bombers guided by the exceptional all-around game of James, those bomb sights were going to have to be a tad off — and the Raptors would have to convert their open looks.
But even as DeRozan rebounded from his terrible eight- point effort in Game 2 — he finished with 37 — there loomed a pressing question: would someone else on the Raptors hit a shot?
Not very often, it turned out. Norm Powell, who couldn’t miss from distance in the Milwaukee series, went 1- f or- 7 f rom threepoint range. Serge Ibaka was 0-for-3 and Cory Joseph was 0-for- 4.
James, meanwhile, authored another casual destruction of the Raptors. Despite aggressive, shadowing defence from Powell for long stretches, LeBron scored 35 points on 56 per cent shooting and he got to the freethrow line 16 times.
In the end, i t was too many Cleveland shooters and not enough Lowry, as Joseph, his replacement in the starting lineup, could only muster four points and six assists on woeful 2- for12 shooting. For Toronto, it was also far, far too much LeBron.
James might say he respects t he Raptors, but there’s no reason to believe that he means it.