Raps gave ’til it hurt in opener
What you probably remember were the last shots, all of them. Fred VanVleet wide open, three offensive rebound tips, and in overtime, VanVleet again. Any of those shots go in — one flipped coin out of 91 — and the Toronto Raptors are not trying to get over the worst loss in franchise history.
“I’m going to take those shots every time,” VanVleet said Wednesday, the morning after an incomprehensibly bungled 113-112 overtime loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 1 of the Raptors’ best-of-seven second-round series. “If you don’t want me to take them, don’t put me out there, don’t pass it to me, because it’s going (to be) up to me if it does, and it’s the right shot.”
“We played the right way,” said Kyle Lowry, who scored three points and had three assists in 13 fourth-quarter and overtime minutes. “We played our game. We executed the plays down the stretch. Gotta roll with it.”
In one way, he was right: the passes DeMar DeRozan made to VanVleet at the end of the game were terrific plays. They were the kind of plays LeBron James used to get criticized for, making the pass for the open shot rather than forcing something himself. The whole reason the Raptors embarked on this passing-and-depth culture reset was that DeRozan and Lowry did not prove to be good enough to carry a team to significant playoff success alone.
Those were the right plays. They just didn’t go in. As C.J. Miles said of the four misses at the end of regulation, “that play isn’t what lost the game, though. It could have won the game, but it’s not what lost the game.”
No, those misses covered up the fact that the Raptors gave this game away long before those basketballs were in the air, sailing towards disappointment. Choke is a tough word: Professional athletes are under incredible pressures, and every athlete fails sometimes.
But the Raptors didn’t lose this game because of their style of play, or their guiding philosophies, or even their talent level. They just blew it by falling so short of their capabilities. Toronto took 37 shots that nba.com deemed uncontested, and made 11. (Cleveland went 27-for-58 on their uncontested shots, which is a lot of uncontested shots.) The Raptors missed layups — Jonas Valanciunas was 1-of-7 in the fourth quarter, which might have something to do with not being used to being an offensive focal point in the fourth quarter — and they went 5for-23 on uncontested threes.
Any team, of course, can miss shots. And you can blame the incompetence of the officials who failed to review a flagrant foul by Kevin Love on DeRozan late in the fourth. But the Raptors also committed silly turnovers. Defensively, they failed to keep Kyle Korver and J.R. Smith from getting open three-pointers, which is a prerequisite for playing Cleveland.
“Things that were blatantly on our scouting report,” Miles said. “Things that everybody that plays that team knows that you can do, that we didn’t do as well as we felt like we could have. And you can’t do that.”
That is not playing up to your capabilities. That is messing up. This Raptors team took care of business against Washington, other than a mucky ending to Game 4. Then they let Cleveland back into the game over and over by not being sharp enough.
“We gave ourselves an opportunity, even though we shouldn’t have been in that situation,” said Lowry. “We should have kept building and building.”
So what now? The series isn’t over. Toronto remains a deeper team than the Cavaliers, and Love looks like he is a mess. If the Raptors run their offence with patience and purpose and confidence, they should hang 120 on Cleveland every night. That can be enough.
But if Cleveland and LeBron are really in their heads, if the Raptors lack the confidence to finish the plays that are clearly there to be made, if they cannot stick to even the basics of the game plan, then the Raptors are in trouble. They gave away a game to the greatest player on earth, and they did it in a thoroughly squirrelly fashion.
And after giving confidence to the non-LeBron Cavaliers who groaned through the first round, Toronto will find out what they have in the tank very quickly. Lose Game 2, and what is left of the belief Toronto can win?
“For us it’s a really, really important game, a really big game for us as a team,” said Lowry. “But we keep with our confidence that we’ve had all year ... I’m sure they’re happy and they’re going to come out differently. But we’re going to come out and be us, be a better us.”
It’s what they have been building toward all year. And when the right shots come, whether they’re in the first quarter or the fourth, the Raptors need to step into them and believe they will fall.
“When you make it you’re the hero,” said VanVleet. “When you don’t, you suck. That’s what makes making them that great. The pain of missing them and the agony of having to sit through the night and sit on that until the next chance to go out and play, those highs and lows of the game is what makes the game so great.”
It’s a great way of looking at it, really. It just works better when you win.