DeRozan daggers don’t stick (it happens)
BOSTON— It is a hill on which they are all prepared to die: the coaches, the shooter, his teammates.
If the game’s in the balance and the Raptors need a bucket, the ball’s going to find its way to DeMar DeRozan come hell or high water, and they will sink or swim with what he does.
He’s fine with it. His coach is fine with it. His teammates are fine with it.
They can zing the ball around for 46 minutes and get up as many three-pointers as they can in that time, but in a one-possession game, a DeRozan15-footer is a shot they will live with. Or die with.
DeRozan missed a couple of shots in the dying seconds here Sunday afternoon, the last coming just as the final buzzer sounded as Toronto dropped a 95-94 decision to the red-hot Boston Celtics at the TD Garden.
“Man, (a) great look,” DeRozan said. “I make that in my sleep. Felt good. I thought it was going to roll in, but you know, it didn’t.”
The Raptors remain a group trying to find an offensive balance between old and new, and in a lot of ways it’s working: their assists are up, their three-point field-goal attempts are up, the youthful second unit zips the ball around the floor. But when there isn’t time for that, when you can get one screen to get a switch and put a proven scorer in his sweet spot, you do it.
And that’s what the Raptors did.
First they got a switch that had DeRozan guarded by Al Horford and he missed a shot.
Then, off a Fred VanVleet corner screen, DeRozan found himself guarded by Jaylen Brown and the Raptor veteran took the kid to DeRozan’s wheelhouse. It was a perfectly executed play. The shot just didn’t go in.
“I thought it was a great look,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said. “He shook him, he was wide open, he vaulted up. I’ll that look 999 times out of a thousand.
“He came up short. He got to where he wanted to go. We got him open. The play was well executed by everybody. A guy just missed a shot . . . The best player taking the shot he wants at that time.”
But as is often the case, the final shot is just what everyone remembers, and other issues have to be taken into account.
The Raptors were jittery with the ball in the first half, committed 17 turnovers in the game allowing the Celtics to get 18 more field-goal at- tempts, and Boston turned 15 offensive rebounds into 21 second-chance points.
There were many other instances at play than just two late missed shots.
“We have some good possessions and we have some slippages,” Raptor Kyle Lowry said. “We have an opportunity to still get better and grow. That’s what you take from it. You look at it and say, ‘What did we do good and what did we do bad?’ and move on from there.”
Playing without injured Kyrie Irving, the Celtics rattled off their 12th straight win thanks to 21points from Horford, 18 from Brown and 16 off the bench from Terry Rozier.
They only shot 40 per cent from the field, missed 16 of 26 three-pointers and committed 15 turnovers of their own, but were good enough defensively to win.
“They are the best team in the NBA right now, won 12 in a row and they are playing unbelievable,” said Lowry, who finished with 19 points.
“Everyone is picking up the slack. They lose Kyrie, or he doesn’t play, and Rozier, (Marcus) Smart, those guys step in. (Jayson) Tatum stepped up. They all played aggressive. They beat us with 15 offensive rebounds and 21 second-chance points. It’s kind of tough to come back on that.”
The Raptors lost Norm Powell after just seven minutes to what team officials said was a hip pointer.
He left the arena on crutches and will be examined more fully during Monday’s off-day in Houston. DeRozan led Toronto with 24 points and C.J. Miles added 10, but none of Toronto’s vaunted young backups had even an average offensive game.
“For all the mistakes we made in the last couple of minutes of the game, we still gave ourselves a chance to win,” DeRozan said.
“It sucks to lose, but we’ve got to learn from it.”