Raptors should want LeBron
Plenty of reasons not to fear the King if Cavs edge Pacers
In the wake of advancing beyond the first round of the NBA playoffs for the third straight year late Friday night, Raptors all-stars DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry were asked if they had a preference for a second-round opponent.
The Raptors all-stars did what most athletes do in such instances. They said no. No preference.
But anybody connected to the organization with a pulse and a competitive spirit ought to be thinking: Yes. Bring on Cleveland. Bring on LeBron.
As the old saying goes: If you want to be the best, you’ve got to beat the best. And there’s no more glorious route to where Toronto hopes to go than through the cold-blooded heart of the NBA’s self-proclaimed King.
The Raptors aren’t in a position to control this matter, of course. They’ll find out the identity of their next foe Sunday afternoon, when the Cavs play the Indiana Pacers in Game 7. No matter who emerges, the Raptors, as the East’s No. 1 seed, will begin their Eastern semifinal series on Tuesday night at the Air Canada Centre.
And I know what you’re thinking: Shouldn’t every Raptors fan be hoping it’s the Pacers who arrive in town for Tuesday’s tip? As tough covers go, Victor Oladipo seems a wee bit more manageable.
And it’s the Cavaliers who’ve eliminated the Raptors from the post-season the past two springs. It’s the Cavaliers who trounced the Raptors in a secondround sweep a year ago. It’s the Cavaliers who still employ James, who has led his team to the NBA final seven straight years.
To which I’d reply: Every empire crumbles. If you’re the Raptors, you want to be the one crashing through the gates the moment this one does.
The way it’s been looking since the post-season opened, the Cavaliers’ cracks are too gaping to be imminently repaired, even by the game’s greatest player.
Cleveland is wobbling. The eternal underdog city James transformed into Believeland is morphing back into He’ll-leaveland. If the Cavaliers are to pull off a Game 7 win over the Pacers on Sunday, they’ll require what they always require now: another superhuman performance from James.
He’s been providing those regularly this season, but he’s already showing signs he can’t provide them nightly. The No. 4-seeded Cavs have lost three games to the No. 5 Pacers by an average of about 24 points. They were blown off the floor by 34 points in Friday’s Game 6, when James put up a mundane 22 points and sat the fourth quarter. Carrying a team of nobodies takes its toll, and there’s no rolling back James’s odometer. On Friday he passed Tim Duncan for sole possession of top spot on the NBA’s all-time playoff minutes list. He’ll turn 34 later this year. And even if he appears to sip from the same fountain of youth as ageless wonders like Tom Brady and Roger Federer, he can’t play all five positions at once.
That’s where the Raptors have a clear edge in a theoretical matchup. The Cavs are so bereft of complementary talent that their defensive rating was second-worst in the NBA this season. (Toronto, which can make a case it’s the deepest team in the league, was fifthbest in that category.) And those who figured the Cavs would flip some miraculous offensive switch once the play- offs began will note Cleveland came into the weekend riding the East’s worst post-season offence. Toronto came in with the best. If Fred VanVleet had been around for more than Game 6 of the first-round win over the Wizards, the Raptors would have likely won in four or five.
Now, it’s true the Cavs beat the Raptors in two out of three meetings in the regular season.
And yes, there were a couple of late-season punctuation marks that momentarily called into question the seriousness of Toronto’s season. Maybe you’ll remember the night in early April when James pounded his chest in the vicinity of the Toronto bench and bellowed: “I’m still a problem!” (Don’t forget, mind you, how that Toronto loss came a day after Lowry jetted to San Antonio to watch alma mater Villanova win the NCAA men’s basketball title. Lowry didn’t blame his 2-for-11 shooting night on the trip, but everyone else did.)
It’s also true the Raptors dropped another confidenceshaking game at the hands of LeBron a couple of weeks earlier, blowing a 15-point lead en route to a disheartening shaming. Still, it’s worth remembering that the Raptors hung 79 first-half points on a sieve-like Cleveland defence that night. And to eke out that narrow win, Cleveland needed to shoot 63 per cent from three-point range, Jose Calderon going a blistering 4 for 4 from deep.
If you’re a Raptors fan it’s reasonable to have Clevelandrelated nightmares. But nobody’s having nightmares about ol’ Jose setting a game ablaze at age 36, especially now that Calderon is back to looking like his usual past-prime self in the Pacers series, wherein he’s shooting 32 per cent from the field and 27 per cent from behind the arc.
Outside of the potentially potent Kyle Korver, name the members of the Cleveland roster who terrorize your basketball dreams. Kevin Love, labouring with an injured left thumb, is shooting 32 per cent and appears incapable of better. Brampton’s Tristan Thompson has faded into irrelevance in every universe but TMZ’s. Mercurial J.R. Smith can’t consistently carry a load, and that’s the problem. Kyrie Irving’s off-season departure meant that, beyond James, the Cavaliers were left with zero reliable heavy lifters.
The question now isn’t: Can James lug these sadsacks to his fourth title? It’s: How long before James, knowing the ring’s ungettable, tosses in the towel. The most likely outcome of this Cleveland post-season run, after all, involves James repeating a quirk of his personal history: the pre-free-agency checkout series. We’ve been witness to it twice before, in the lead-up to his two previous changes of NBA address, so you know the drill. Something changes. The wrong kind of switch gets flipped. And suddenly LeBron’s gone — first mentally, and later via moving truck. Hollywood shoots a lot of movies in Toronto. Why not a 30 for 30 on King James’s last days as a Cav?
This season’s been about a lot of things in the north. It’s been about the beauty of continuity. It’s been about the strength of the group. And it’s also been about growing the reputation of the franchise on the other side of the U.S. border. Beating the Pacers, hardly a gimme, won’t help much on that front. As for the opportunity to capture unprecedented eyeballs, new-found stateside respect, or at the very least a smidgeon of revenge — that only comes with giving LeBron LeBoot. This time around James doesn’t seem to have the support to avoid it. The Raptors have never had a better team make it so. Now they just need the chance.