They meet again
Raptors will face LeBron James and the Cavs for third straight time in NBA playoffs.
You might hear it a lot in the next couple weeks: If you come at the King, you best not miss. The Indiana Pacers could have beaten LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in their seven-game series. LeBron James had never lost in the first round. He came damned close.
So now, all we have is the defining moment in the history of the Toronto Raptors. Not just these Raptors, though it’s that, too. But the whole franchise. That’s all. “When you are in the moment you don’t feel like it, but you look at the history of the league, there has always been a team that you had to leapfrog over,” said Raptors coach Dwane Casey, two days before Game 1 of Toronto’s second-round series with the Cavaliers. “And that has not changed. It’s always been that way. The years I was in Seattle (with the Sonics), we had to go through Chicago.
“The years before that it was Detroit, and before that it was Boston, so there’s always going to be a great team you have to go through. And … we have worked hard to get to where we are, and we just have to continue to go, and not get caught up in the hoopla of who we are playing. Just do what we do and play our game as hard as we possibly can, no matter who it is.” It’s LeBron, of course. He is the defining player of this age, and might be the greatest ever to pick up a basketball. In wins against Indiana, LeBron averaged 41.8 points, 11 rebounds, 7.5 assists, 1.75 steals, 1.2 blocks, shot 62.1 per cent from the field and 84.6 per cent from the line. He is nearly unfathomably great.
But he is dragging around his teammates like they were sacks of gravel, and their only great moment came early in the fourth quarter of Game 7, with LeBron cramping.
After eliminating the Raptors in each of the past two years and reaching seven straight NBA finals, Toronto finally feels like he can be had. They won’t say it out loud, but it’s there.
“Obviously, I respect the guy a lot, the type of player he is, obviously the person is,” said backup point guard and team Rosetta Stone Fred VanVleet. “But for me, the most respect I can give him is to not give him any respect, in terms of going out there and just trying to challenge him and take him down. And that’s our job, and that’s what we need to do this week.”
“No question, no question,” said DeMar DeRozan, when asked if this team was better equipped that previous Raptors squads. “And I feel it. We all have that confidence in ourselves. And the way we play now is (because of ) the mistakes that we had from them series (against Cleveland). You know? Going down in them. That’s what made us better, that’s what made us at this point where we’re at now … top of our conference, having the confidence that we have, and the style of play that we go out and play with.”
“You’ve got to have that type of confidence to go against anybody — not just Cleveland, not just Boston, not just Philadelphia,” said Casey. “You’ve got to have supreme confidence in yourself, what you do, in your teammates at this time of year.”
In other words, Toronto has to believe in what has been built. The Raptors have to approach this series the way the Pacers did. Indiana didn’t take a single possession off; they played like they didn’t care who LeBron was or what he could do. They just played aggressive, fearless basketball. If they had made a half-dozen more plays, they win that series.
“Playing hard,” said Casey, when asked what they could take from the Pacers series. “They played their behinds off, put themselves in position to win. They did some schematic things that were relevant, but the most important thing is their persistence, their pursuit of the ball. Their closeouts were on time. They were flying at people. That’s the intensity and physicality and staying with what they were doing that you have to have. You have to respect them, but don’t overrespect them. My hat is off to Indiana for doing that.”
There was that phrase again: respect, but not too much. LeBron has never feared the Raptors. He has never worried. When the Raptors won two games at home in the 2016 Eastern Conference final, the Cavs blitzed Toronto in Game 5 and LeBron said, “I’ve been a part of some really adverse situations, and I just didn’t believe that this was one of them.” They need to show him they’re not the little brothers anymore. The Raptors are better than Indiana, but they have let LeBron and the Cavaliers get so comfortable before. You know those games: where Channing Frye or Kevin Love or, hell, Jose Calderon is stepping into every shot as if there’s nobody else on the court. LeBron can make teammates feel like Superman. If the Raptors want to be the best, they can’t give a LeBron James team one inch. He was already saying nice things about them in Sunday’s post-game interview with Doris Burke on ABC.
“Oh, they’re a great basketball team,” said LeBron. “Kudos to Dwane Casey. They got like 10 to 12 guys who can come in and produce every single night; and we know the head of the snake is DeRozan and Lowry, but those guys on the bench come in with the same attitude and the same confidence as the starters.”
Yeah, yeah. You want to kill the king, you don’t exchange pleasantries. Everything this Raptors team has built — from Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan’s all-star careers, to Casey’s coaching plaudits, to team president Masai Ujiri’s roster construction … everything this franchise has tried to do has led to this place. LeBron James is the King. Every king dies. You just have to believe it can be done.
“I feel it. We all have that confidence in ourselves.” DEMAR DEROZAN ON THE RAPTORS’ MINDSET HEADING INTO THE SECOND ROUND AGAINST THE CAVS