Playing through pain
Questionable to even play, point guard leads Raptors out of Bucks’ defensive traps
Lowry won’t back down,
Kyle Lowry stood in and took a charge by a guy they call Moose, and he threw himself on the floor chasing loose balls, and he got knocked down a couple of times by the bulky defenders waiting for him at the rim.
Just another day at the office for the Toronto Raptors point guard, right?
Not quite, considering it was the most important game of the season to date and Lowry didn’t know in the morning whether he’d be able to even walk by game time Monday night.
Wracked with back stiffness that caused him to miss the morning shootaround, sent home after getting treatment, Lowry had 16 points and tied his career playoff high with 10 assists as the Raptors routed the Milwaukee Bucks 118-93 in Game 5 of their NBA first-round playoff series at the Air Canada Centre.
“You’re going to have to take an arm and a leg off of him before you keep him from playing, but I thought he fought through it,” coach Dwane Casey said of Lowry, who propelled Toronto to its most dominant performance of the series.
The win gives the Raptors 3-2 series lead and they can close it out Thursday in Milwaukee. Game 7, if necessary, would be Saturday in Toronto.
Lowry spent the 12 minutes he didn’t play sprawled out on the baseline at the end of the Raptors bench trying to make sure the back didn’t tighten up during the game.
“Just go out there and play, once you stop, it sucks,” he said. “You’ve got to keep going, at the end of the day I want to be out there with my guys, I want to keep fighting, it gives me a reason to stay on the floor longer.”
And a reason for his teammates to appreciate him.
“That’s what he’s about, that’s what he does,” P.J. Tucker said. “He goes out and sacrifices himself for the team to get the win. He’s done what he has to do for us to get the win. That’s Kyle Lowry.”
Lowry’s teammates definitely gave him reason for wanting to play with the way the dismantled the young Bucks, who looked shell-shocked most of the night.
All five starters and backup Jonas Valanciunas scored in double figures — Norm Powell led the way with 25 points — and the Raptors dished out 28 assists. That’s more than they’ve had in playoff game in the current four-year run they are on and was quite the opposite of the way the team usually plays.
There were any number of times when the Raptors made not only the right first pass out of Bucks trap but an even smarter second one that yielded an even better shot.
“That comes from getting a rhythm against some of their traps, some of their double teams,” Casey said. “But again, at end of the day, at the end of it, you’ve got to be ready to shoot the basketball. They (Bucks defenders) get there so fast, but tonight we had a better feel for it.”
The Raptors also beat back any run the Bucks made at them with a de- fence that wasn’t consistently good but one that was solid when it had to be. Giannis Antetokounmpo got loose for 30 points and Malcolm Brogdon added 19 but no other Milwaukee player was effective.
“I don’t know how many layups and dunks (Antetokounmpo) had, we’ll have to chart those, but we have more bodies back and give ourselves abetter chance of having a number of guys back in front of him in transition,” Casey said.
And every time the Bucks looked like they were getting back in the game, they either miss a couple of shots or commit a couple of quick turnovers and play a bit tentatively.
“I think . . . we’re lacking the experience of what’s coming,” Milwaukee coach Jason Kidd said. “We can talk about it but we have to go through that process, we have to walk through that door.
“For a lot of these guys, they’ve never seen this. You’re talking about a (Toronto) team that’s been to the Eastern Conference finals. They’ve been there and their coach has seen this before.”