One awful quarter stings Raptors
Toronto played well against Knicks ... aside from span when they just couldn’t score
The Thanksgiving turkey probably didn’t go down quite as easy, not after a third quarter like the Raptors forged Wednesday night in Manhattan.
But the one constant in every NBA season is there are going to be stinkers and the 108-100 loss to the New York Knicks was just that, a stinker.
Another constant, barring it coming on the final day of the regular season or an elimination game in the playoffs, is there’s always a chance at redemption, no matter how bad a beating it was. And this one’s going to take significant redemption.
The finger got pointed squarely at the starters both by head coach Dwane Casey and the starters themselves.
A third quarter in which the Raptors both forgot how to shoot and how to defend resulted in the Raptors scoring just 10 points in the quarter and giving up 41. The lone successful Toronto field goal — yes, there was just one in 16 attempts — came via a three from the corner by C.J. Miles who was on his way out of the lockerroom as the media was being let in and on his way to hopefully getting home in time for the birth of his first child.
You could hardly blame Miles either for his hasty retreat or the smile that kept coming to his face as he made his exit.
Casey talked of disappointment and needing more fight from his first unit. Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, the two starters who make the starting five go, bore the brunt of the blame but simultaneously reminded one and all that every once in a while these things are going to happen to a team.
It was the perfect storm, really. A confident — Casey might say over-confident — group came out of the locker-room following halftime with an 11-point lead. They were shooting 50 per cent from the floor and 44 per cent from behind the arc.
Defensively, they held Kristaps Porzingis, the engine of the Knicks’ offence to just 10 points.
All was going along quite nicely, and then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
Exactly 1:23 into what would tie for the worst quarter differential in Raptors team history, Toronto had pretty much hit their highwater mark for the frame with three of four made free throws. They would not score again for the next 8:24, a run in which they were outscored 28-0.
In that 8:24 span, the Raptors would turn the ball over six times, commit 11 personal fouls, and miss a total of 13 consecutive field goal attempts.
Defensively their resistance was just about nil.
The Knicks in that same 8:24 would make 9-of-15 attempts, out-rebound the Raptors 14-5, and go 7-for-7 from the line.
In short the Knicks were hardpressed to miss a shot and the Raptors couldn’t make one.
There was no point in sugarcoating this one and the Raptors didn’t try.
“I think they did a great job of making shots and then they crashed the boards,” Lowry said of the third quarter. “They were really aggressive and they did a good job. Sometimes the other team is just better than you in a quarter and they did everything they needed to do to us. They turned us over, they made us take contested shots. They made shots. They were just better than us in the third quarter.”
As bad as it was, it really was just one truly awful quarter. The Raptors did win the other three, not that it matters when the one you lose, you do so by 31 points.
The key is going to be coming back from that humbling 12 minutes and in that regard the Raptors have been quite adept.
Only once this year have the Raptors followed a loss with another and that was the start of that two-week trip out west when they lost winnable games in both San Antonio and Golden State.
A bad loss in Denver on that same trip, possibly the worst loss of the year until the Knicks pounced on them Wednesday night, was followed up by a character win in Utah. A loss to a John Wall-less Washington team in the first home game after that trip was followed by wins over Chicago and New Orleans. Even the buzzer-beating loss in Boston was followed by a thorough victory in Houston.
The Raptors have shown a penchant for bouncing back, but they will have their work cut out for them against a rested and confident Indiana side that was won five of the past six and been off since a win in Orlando Monday night.
A good turkey dinner alone isn’t going to rid them of that awful lingering taste of a Gotham beatdown.