Crunch time
Will the real Raptors please stand up?
Before Game 1 we were all out of good questions, more or less, so I offered a last one to Dwane Casey before the thing began: Do you have any idea, Dwane, how your team is going to play?
“We’ve established a playing personality, defensively, offensively, that I expect that we’re going to play,” said Casey, whose Raptors lead the Indiana Pacers 3-2 in their best-of-seven series. “Now, whether the ball’s going in the basket or we can challenge a shot on Paul George hard enough to stop him, that’s what I don’t know.
“But I know how we’re going to play on both ends of the floor, I know what we expect of each other on both ends of the floor . . . It’s a playoff game, yes, but we can’t go out there and be paralyzed because it’s a playoff game and get outside of ourselves and not play to our personality.” Well, that went out the window fast. Game 1 was an exercise in frustration until late in the fourth quarter when the Raptors panicked, in their own words, and fell apart.
Game 2 was a grind, but a productive one. Game 3 was a tour de force, in which the Raptors finally played like the selves they imagine themselves to be. As Luis Scola said, those two games were “much more realistic.” And then came the no-show in Game 4 and three-quarters of a no-show in Game 5. Asked who his best player in Game 4 was, a member of the coaching staff wondered for a second and said, “Norm?”, after Norman Powell had played 14 largely garbage-time minutes.
Now the Raptors find themselves in the odd position of being able to close out a best-of-seven series for the first time in franchise history without playing very well at all.
“We’ve been a roller-coaster,” Casey said Thursday. “One guy’s had a good game, the next guy’s had a bad game. Whenever we get that consistency and sense of urgency from everyone . . .”
They have talked like that since the series began.
DeMar DeRozan kept saying it would be scary when he and fellow all-star Kyle Lowry finally made shots, though that hasn’t happened in tandem yet. Team officials have wondered what to expect, even when knowing as much as they do about their players. Lowry’s largely passive Game 5 was seen by some not as a result of his swollen shooting elbow, but that he was just tight.
It’s amazing, in its way. Toronto has spent a year compiling the fourth-best record in a strange year in the NBA, where the top two teams were so far away that 56 wins felt like the upper middle class, not the elite. But in this series, against a team with one star and a defence and a stubborn coach, it’s been impossible to know what to expect from these Raptors. You don’t know; they don’t know; their coaches and executives don’t know.
The last time they were here, they didn’t know who they were, either. The Raptors as a winning team were a new thing, and Paul Pierce had clambered inside their heads with the simple truth: that they were not a team to be afraid of. And he was proven right.
That Brooklyn series feels a long time ago now, but it was the real start of all this. Then, the Raptors had nearly blown a 26-point lead in Game 5, rather than come back from a 17-point deficit to win it; Pierce and Andray Blatche, a journeyman, guaranteed the Nets would win Game 6, and they did. The Nets guaranteed a Game 7 win, too, and got it by a fingertip. The Raptors, at least, felt like there were better days ahead.
Well after last year’s humiliation, here they are. The Pacers are trying to collect themselves after blowing Game 5, and George is challenging his teammates to be better. The Raptors are shooting .401 from the field, and a playoff-team-worst .266 on three-pointers. Lowry has had to be a heart-and-soul guy to win, rather than the Lowry who controlled games so often this season. DeRozan has looked like an all-star once. Not one Raptor has been near his best in every game. They are still one good game away.
Everybody inside this organization knows that the bar is a first-round victory. Everybody knows. “Somehow, someway we have to flush what happened two years ago or 20 years ago to this franchise,” Casey said. “What’s the most important thing is now. The sense of urgency of now. Not two years ago, not thinking about what happened, those ghosts or demons, whatever, we’ve got to do that, that’s the most important thing right now.”
The ghosts or demons, whatever, they might matter. But the Raptors are a better team when they play with more focus, with more purpose, with less fear. That’s it. They just need one more win, and Game 6 is right there. The Raptors need to decide what kind of team they are, this time.
Everybody inside the Raptors organization knows that the bar is a first-round victory. Everybody knows