Dis win counts, but . . .
‘Fragile’ Cavs didn’t show up, so Raps broke franchise scoring mark
This is what disrespect looks like. It’s not dunking on you and starting to bark before the sneakers hit the ground. It’s not throwing passes so extravagant they should be tied with a ribbon, and then making every three. It’s not dispy-doodling, it’s not laughing between plays, it’s not grabbing a beer from a courtside fan and pretending to drink.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have done a lot of those things to the Toronto Raptors over the years. They’ve spotted the Raptors two wins in a series in which Cleveland outscored Toronto by 93 points over six games. They’ve swept them. This is LeBron’s East. These things happen.
But THIS was disrespect. Cleveland had been in town for two full days before Thursday, and were playing a Raptors team without either the injured Kyle Lowry or the suspended Serge Ibaka. The Cavaliers could have come in and done the Raptors the courtesy of a screw-you game. Instead, Toronto scored the most points in regulation in franchise history, and the Cavaliers should have been fined for resting all their players on national television.
“We’re so fragile,” said LeBron James, after a 133-99 Raptors blowout. “I don’t know where it went wrong, or whether the switch went back. But we have to go back and find it.”
“I never really get concerned. We’ve got to be better, we know that. But until we play better defensively, offensive, sharing the basketball,” said Cavalier coach Tyronn Lue. “If guys have agendas, we’ve got to get rid of our agendas and play the right way.”
Oh, no. Not buying it, guys. The Cavaliers do this every year. They stop caring for a while, because caring is hard, and playing 100 games a season is hard. They fool around. They got drilled 127-99 in Minnesota in the game before this one. They have lost six of eight.
And Thursday night on a nationally televised U.S. broadcast, Cleveland mostly looked like a 40-and-over league team playing the first run of the night in a cold gym at the Y. Last year, the conversation about the Cavs hitting the switch didn’t really get going until March.
Spring comes earlier every year. “I don’t play around with hitting a switch,” said LeBron. “That’s not how the game is played. You don’t cheat the game. I also said, you don’t mess around going into the playoffs.”
But there is a long way to go until the playoffs, so in the second quarter the Cavs got run out of the building by a lineup of Fred VanVleet, Norm Powell, Lorenzo Brown, Pascal Siakam and Jakob Poeltl. Late in the half, Siakam drove past a straight-legged Kevin Love from the three-point line, and dunked. Meet the new Raptors, America. They are all famous now, one presumes.
“I love our potential,” said LeBron at the morning shootaround. “This is just us during the regular season. It’s been four years since I’ve been back and this has just been us. We have great months, we have not so good months. We have times where we’re not playing well, times where we are playing well, but this is just us.”
Cleveland’s defensive rating is 29th in the league, and they played Montana defence: wide-open spaces and empty highways without much of a speed limit. Yes, White Vegas and whatnot. It’s a fun town.
But, c’mon. It’s a long season, and the Cavs have no doubt they can beat even the new-look Raptors when it matters. But they didn’t even pay the Raptors the respect of pretending that they mattered. Jeez.
Now, this is the best Raptors team Toronto’s ever seen. The bench is so fun: a Swiss Army knife of a bench, or rather a Cameroonian-Austrian-Californian-Illinoisian-Californian knife of a bench. DeRozan barely showed in this game, but he is in the midst of his greatest season ever. Jonas Valanciunas, in this game, tore the smaller Cavaliers apart.
So the Raptors beat them, which is all they could do. They played with energy, commitment, teamwork. They showed the hell up. This entire Raptors season is about process: about sharpening the instincts of a team that is passing more, shooting more threes, even as they surround the next-level work of DeRozan. The Raptors will need Delon Wright and OG Anunoby to make the threes they missed in this game; they will need Lowry to be healthy, and Ibaka to be in the lineup.
Because this entire Raptors season is about two things. Developing their shadow team while still running with their $93-million U.S. starting lineup, and trying to shape and polish a group that, when the real games come, is not watching the other guys dunk, talk trash, can threes and pretend to swig a beer.
So this time, this game had everything. A big round of applause for former Raptor Jose Calderon, who remains the nicest guy in franchise history. An appearance from Bebe. You know when movies or TV shows get rebooted and they stick crowd-pleasing nostalgia in there? It’s called fan service.
This game was Toronto Raptors fan service.
Masai Ujiri’s mission in Toronto has been simple. After the postVince years of being the kind of backwater team, the Raptors president has worked to create a team and franchise that, in a league that would really prefer not to put Toronto on American TV, has to be taken seriously. Cleveland didn’t do it Thursday night. But maybe they’ll get another chance.