‘We gotta make them feel us’

“All that’s in play,” Casey said. “We gotta get a little closer (to them). I don’t know if they felt us last night whatsoever. We were half a step off, respecting their speed a little too much. We gotta make them feel us a little bit better.”

It was almost the most common of hockey coach cliches: take away the opponent’s time and space. But it suggested one possible adjustment for the Raptors: obstructionist playoff hockey, except minus the sticks to the head.

But Casey and his players didn’t sound like they expected to turn this series into a bunch of 85-82 games either. Kyle Lowry said the Raptors need to crank up the pace on offence and push the ball up the floor even when the Cavaliers make baskets. Toronto tends to run in transition only off turnovers and misses, but Lowry said they can do that at other times, too.

“They made a shot, we took our time,” Lowry said.

Casey agreed that increased aggression didn’t just have to take place on the defensive end and he said in today’s NBA, sometimes you are going to have to deal with scoring explosions. The way to deal with them is to match with an explosion of your own.

“The game is changing,” Casey said. “We can’t get caught up in, ‘We gotta stop them.’”

Some of this can be said to be Casey trying to remain positive about his team surrendering yet another huge total to the Cavaliers — Cleveland has averaged 114 points against the Raptors in home playoff games and almost 64 points in the first half of those games.

The coach made a couple of references to San Antonio getting drilled at home Monday night — Houston scored 126 on the Spurs — which was another way of saying, ‘Hey, we weren’t that bad.’ But his overall point, that the NBA is becoming more of scoring league, is valid. Certainly when you get deeper into the playoffs, there are lot of teams that can score in streaks. The Raptors need to do more of that themselves and stop the Cavs from going on so many of them.

“We have the confidence and the understanding of how to get back on our feet,” DeRozan said.

This is fair enough. It’s not the playoffs until the Raptors are rebounding from adversity.

The coach feels the same way.

“I have a belief that we will play better and get to that next gear next game,” Casey said.

They had better if they plan to make this a series.

Dwane Casey