Raps fumble another series start
Fourth-quarter surge by Bucks snatches home-court advantage away from Toronto
The bad starts we knew about, both in games for most of the regular season and starting a playoff series historically.
But a poor fourth quarter — a quarter the Toronto Raptors have owned like no other team in the NBA this year — just wasn’t expected and without that, the bad run of the opening game of first- round series continued as the Raps dropped another Game 1, this time to the No. 6-seeded Milwaukee Bucks by a 97-83 score.
Toronto backed into Saturday’s game as it normally does, giving up 30 in the first quarter, but it’s happened so often most Raptors fans are likely numb to it by now.
Following the season-long script, they rallied with a big second quarter, holding the Bucks to just 16 and taking a 51-46 lead into the second half.
Then it got weird and the offence all but disappeared.
The Raptors appeared to be in control midway through the third and then, with just under five minutes to go, got a gift when Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo picked up his fourth foul and had to go to the bench for the remainder of the quarter.
It should have been time for the Raptors to make some hay and put some distance between themselves and the Bucks, but the opposite occurred.
The Bucks dug in defensively and went on an 11-2 run to take control of the game.
Toronto would make just 7-of-35 field goal attempts in the second half combined, scoring a total of 32 points in the final 24 minutes to put themselves in the familiar spot of having to come from behind in a playoff series.
“Our second half was just abysmal,” Raptors head coach Dwane Casey said. “We didn’t play with any pace, any rhythm, any movement. You got to give them credit for doing a good job defensively. We got to figure out how to get a better rhythm, a better pace, spacing once the ball gets in the half court we got to get better movement.”
Through a half DeMar DeRozan was a force, attacking the basket with regularity and piling up 18 points.
But in the second half he, like the rest of the Raptors, were stymied time and again. Eventually they collectively almost stopped going to the rim and started settling for long or contested jumpers and with little to no success.
“You keep playing that way, it’s always going to bite you in the behind,” Casey said. “That’s what happened tonight.”
Antetokounmpo, the best player on the floor all night, wound up with 28 points on 13-of-18 shooting. He added eight rebounds, three assists and two steals for a banner night in just his second taste of NBA playoff action.
After that stellar second quarter by the Raptors, Milwaukee just muscled up and took the game over.
“I don’t know if we played hard enough to deserve to win,” Casey said. “I thought they outplayed us. I thought they played harder, longer than we did. No matter what you do offensively, your rhythm is off or whatever, you can still run back on defence, make them feel you defensively which I didn’t think we did. I thought they played with more force longer than we did.”
Casey’s counterpart, Jason Kidd, a guy he coached in Dallas, saw things pretty much the same way.
“I thought our defence was up to par this evening by just playing hard,” Kidd said. “We’re a young team and it starts with playing hard and trusting one another and they did that this evening.”
DeRozan wound up with 27 points in the game, but was clearly disappointed with the result.
No less so than Kyle Lowry, who struggled in just his fifth game back since wrist surgery took him out of action for 21 games.
Lowry played just under 34 minutes and wound up with four points on 2-of-11 shooting and a teamworst minus-22 for the night.
Wasted in the loss was a strong first playoff performance by Serge Ibaka in a Raptors uniform. The 28-yearold was playing the 90th playoff game of his career and looked right at home, putting up 19 points and 14 rebounds.
Overall, though, it was yet another disappointing start to a playoff series, stretching the Raps’ mark for ineptitude in these opening games of a first-round series to a truly woeful 0-9.
Also gone with this loss was the built-in excuse of those poor performances being at least partly attributed to those horrible early starts.
The league did away with the 12:30 p.m. tipoffs this year, much to the delight of everyone in a Toronto uniform after the team annually got those early starts almost automatically, or so it seemed.
The 5:30 p.m. ET start time, though, made little to no difference.
The Raptors will now have two more days of practice to work out the kinks before the two teams do battle again on Tuesday.
If there is a reason for optimism it is that the Raptors streak of poor starts has also routinely been followed by strong bounce back games.
“It’s on us,” Casey said. “We will figure it out. We have been there before. it’s not a good feeling but they are things that are correctable as far as our offence is concerned.”
For now, though, that home court advantage they worked so hard for is gone.