NBA’S BATTLE OF ATTRITION
Raptors on verge of franchise history
The Toronto Raptors have the Miami Heat right where they do not want them.
That is, if there has been one consistent thing about the Raptors through 12 games in which they have changed more quickly than Irish weather, it’s that they have done a much better job of playing desperate basketball when they have in fact been pretty desperate.
Through two series that have proceeded in almost identical fashion, Toronto has lost the games it didn’t really need, but won those it did.
They play well when the stakes are dire, but they aren’t great at faking a crisis.
Which brings us to Game 6 of the second round Friday in Miami, where a win would be historic — the franchise has never before made it to an Eastern Conference final — but not explicitly necessary.
Fortunately for the Raptors, they just might be able to fool themselves into playing with an extra sense of urgency given that the locker-room has turned into something of a field hospital.
DeMarre Carroll went down hard on a drive to the hoop in the third quarter of Toronto’s Game 5 win on Wednesday night, and he stayed prone on the court for several minutes. The sight of him writhing and kicking his legs in pain was not the least bit promising. When he eventually got up and proceeded to the locker-room, his head bowed and holding his left wrist immobile, it didn’t look much better.
But Carroll’s news has been mostly good since. There is nothing broken, X-rays showed, and a late-night trip to hospital for an MRI test also produced good news. He is officially listed as questionable to play in Game 6, but Carroll himself didn’t sound like he had many questions about it on Thursday.
At the team’s practice facility on the Exhibition grounds, Carroll said he had “talked to my so-called Dad” — trainer Alex McKechnie — “and we’ll see what happens.”
McKechnie and Carroll spent a lot of time together this season while the Raptors forward recovered from knee surgery, at one point touring the United States to seek multiple opinions when the knee starting swelling as he tried to work his way back. It would have been an interesting roadtrip buddy comedy, in which McKechnie would definitely have been the straight man.
“He said let’s take it day by day,” Carroll said Thursday. “Me being who I am, I’m pretty sure I’m going to fight him to play.”
The same goes for DeMar DeRozan, who is dealing with a jammed thumb that can’t be all that pleasant since he likened it to putting his hand under a blowtorch on Wednesday night. But by wrapping it in a red shoelace when he was off the floor in Game 5, DeRozan was able to keep the swelling down.
It was another idea from McKechnie, who has access to all kinds of fancy equipment worth thousands of dollars but got the job done with a $10 shoelace. Maybe $20 — it looked like a pretty high-end shoelace. And it certainly did work. DeRozan was 9-for-9 on free throws down the stretch as Toronto staved off a Miami comeback attempt, and scored 13 of his 34 points in the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, the cuts above each of Kyle Lowry’s eyes — apparently the Heat have sharp elbows — are distracting enough to make you forget about his bum elbow, and Jonas Valanciunas was seen at the Air Canada Centre on Wednesday night with his right ankle still encased in a large boot cast.
Lowry will of course play, and Valanciunas almost certainly will not, unless the Raptors are pulling an all-time hustle by ruling him out of the series only to bring him back early.
It should be enough, really, for the Raptors to feel like they will need to be extra sharp in Game 6. (No one tell them that the Heat also have a pile of injuries.)
Game 5, though, made clear what has been long suspected as the Raptors bumbled through the playoffs with occasional fits of competence. If Lowry and DeRozan both play well, no one in the East outside of Cleveland should give them much trouble.
Miami’s Dwyane Wade has been doing enough to make things interesting all on his own, but the Heat are not a team that is constructed to play catch-up, or win shootouts, so if the Raptors can score at their normal pace, it’s hard to see where Miami gets enough points to stay close.
Both Lowry and DeRozan scoring is, admittedly, a big hypothetical. But that’s how weird these playoffs have been: Each of them has had five games in which they shot worse than 30 per cent on at least 10 field-goal attempts. According to Basketball Reference, no team has had two players do that in the same playoff season since 1984. And yet the Raptors are a win away from the East final.
Given all that has happened with them, it’s a remarkable position to be in. Raptors fans should hope they don’t realize it.