Going up against LeBron ‘great test’, Carroll says

For a daunting task, DeMarre Carroll can’t wait to take his shot at it.

The Toronto Raptors forward will be asked to do the virtually impossible Friday night and guard the astonishing LeBron James, a task many shy from but a job Carroll welcomes.

“It’s a great test for me physically to see where we’re at,” Carroll said Thursday. “To see where my body is at, try to guard this guy, to see how much I can sustain with the knee.”

Checking James, the engine that drives the NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers, is a job for neither the faint-hearted nor those who eschew help from teammates.

While it’s nice that Carroll is confi- dent in his abilities, those around him are realistic enough to understand the breadth and depth of James’ talent and that one opponent stopping him — or even slowing him some nights — is a virtual impossibility.

“One guy is not going to stop (LeBron),” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said. “It has got to be five guys tied together understanding timing, when to come (to double-team James), when to rotate, when to get there. It’s going to be huge and it won’t be just the guy guarding him. It’s going to be the guy coming off Tristan Thompson and the guy coming from the elbow to help, from the weak side. And then the rotations out on the weak side are going to be huge. So it is a timing, more of a zoned-up situation to guard him.”

If there is one thing that sustains Carroll going into Game 2 of the regular season for each team, it’s that he is as healthy as he has been when James has been his primary concern in the last two years.

Carroll was just coming off knee surgery when the Raptors faced the Cavaliers in last year’s Eastern Conference final; and he was also banged up the spring before that when the Atlanta Hawks tried to derail the Cavs on their march to the championship series.

Now Carroll says only his sense of game rhythm keeps him from pronouncing himself 100 per cent fit.

“Yeah, I would not advise others to try,” Carroll said of guarding James while not at full speed. “I just want to be healthy one of those times we go to the playoffs and we play those guys. That’s the NBA, life in the NBA. That’s what we get paid the big bucks to do, to go out there and put our bodies on the line and try to win games.”

The juicy storyline would be that Friday’s game is a chance for Toronto to extract a modicum of revenge on the Cavs for the Eastern Conference final. It’s also dead wrong and trite; it is Game 2 of 82 and more a litmus test than a statement.

“It’s a good opportunity to go against the best team, in my mind, in the league,” Casey said. “They have every weapon that you could look for. The best player in the world, one of the best rosters put together in the world, so it’s a good test for us.

“I would rather have it now, early in the season to let us know where we are.”