Raptors need to put Bucks away
Veteran Toronto team can still prove they’re a force after surviving opening-game scare
ITORONTO t is a curious thing to watch the Toronto Raptors win a playoff game the night after the Toronto Maple Leafs did the same thing.
In the latter case, the result brought unbridled exultation, the kind of joy that should be expected when cheering for a team that’s doing things it isn’t really supposed to be doing.
And in the former, when the Raptors survived a tense Game 2 against the Milwaukee Bucks to even their NBA series, the result brought something quite different. Relief, for one. But also some tugging-atthe-collar anxiousness. The Raptors are also doing things they’re really not supposed to be doing, but not in a good way.
An analyst on ESPN Radio in the U.S. was asked before Game 2 for his biggest surprise in the early part of the NBA playoffs, and he didn’t hesitate to name Toronto, even though these have been a playoffs where the top-seeded Boston Celtics dropped their opener — at the time of the interview they hadn’t yet dropped Game 2 — and the defending champion Cleveland Cavaliers looked, at the least, vulnerable as they eked out close wins.
But the Toronto start was a surprise because, even though it marked the fourth straight year in which the Raptors dropped a series opener at home, this time it came after the basketball world had spent a couple of months warming up to the idea of Toronto as a threat to Cleveland in the East, thanks to president Masai Ujiri’s late-season trades.
Instead, more of the same. Kyle Lowry was lost, again, and a decidedly weaker opponent had once more stolen away Toronto’s home-court advantage. Bring on the flop sweats.
Tuesday night’s 106-100 Raptors win went some way to easing those tensions, but only a little. The comparison to the Leafs is again instructive. Where the hockey team is just getting started, with a very young lineup that will be good for a long time, their corporate cousins are now in their fourth playoffs and still trying to prove how good they can be. If you’ll excuse the tortured poker analogy, the Leafs are playing with house money and the Raptors are still trying to show they belong at the highstakes table.
As they head to Milwaukee for Game 3, they’re playing for the right to be taken seriously.
There’s every reason to believe they’ll do just that. Lowry found his shot in Game 2, and the team as whole reacted better to Milwaukee’s aggressive pressure. It’s basic stuff: pass out of the double team, keep the ball moving, take the open shot. Toronto’s shooting percentage jumped from 36 per cent in the opener to better than 48 per cent in the second game — with the threepoint percentage soaring from 21 per cent to a gaudy 48 per cent.
The lineups that coach Dwane Casey can now deploy are simply able to do a lot of different things, and almost on his own on Tuesday night, Serge Ibaka provided the kind of interior defence that this contingent of Raptors has never had.
It’s also worth noting that Toronto is sorting a lot of this out on the fly, after Lowry went down with an injury right as Ibaka and P.J. Tucker arrived.
It’s understandable that they’re still learning each other’s tendencies, but that curve had better be short and steep, because an inability to put away a young Bucks team will reignite the same questions that dogged the Raptors last year.
This space recently argued that it was folly to consider a post-Lowry Raptors roster, and that hasn’t changed because he’s still their best player and they’re a veteran team that has to be built around someone.
The Bucks, as it happens, are a good example of going the other way: a 22-year-old future MVP in Giannis Antetokounmpo and a whack of players no older than 26.
Given a blank canvas, Ujiri would rather build a roster around Antetokounmpo than anyone on the Raptors, but his canvas is far from blank. At the trade deadline, it seemed like he might even have assembled something that had the look of a contender.
And maybe he did. Lowry, DeRozan and colleagues have wobbled, but so did Cleveland, and especially Boston. That chance is still there, for the Raptors. Now all they have to do is take it.