Talk isn’t cheap for the Raptors
Toronto players say they must communicate more on the floor to end modest two-game skid
It was in the days leading up to the start of the NBA season that Danny Green set the 20-to-30 games in as a good place for teams across the league to gauge where they stood when it comes to rapport and team chemistry.
He hoped the Toronto Raptors would be hitting their stride by late November or early December; that, he said, is when player should feel more comfortable consistently and “kind of gel.”
There have been moments this season when the 12-3 Raptors looked like they might be overachievers in that department, particularly as they clicked over the course of two six-game win streaks. They’ve yet to put together a complete game, but have found ways to win nonetheless.
But Toronto is still at least five games, or a week, away from that mark set by Green, and there is still work to be done, as shown by a two-game skid against the New Orleans Pelicans and the Detroit Pistons at home this week.
“I think just talking, man,” Kyle Lowry said when asked about the Raptors’ lack of execution against the Pistons both offensively and defensively on Wednesday night. “Communication. Open your mouth. We’ve gotta speak, we’ve gotta talk, you’ve gotta say something. Can’t play if you can’t say nothing.”
Building that foundation takes more than just 48 minutes on the court, said Kawhi Leonard.
“Yeah, we’ve got to work toward something,” he said. “We can’t just try to win tonight or the next game. It’s about us building a chemistry, continuity going forward, you know what I mean? We just have to have a mindset and a goal on what we’re trying to be.”
Coach Nick Nurse didn’t see many similarities between the loss to the Pel- icans and the loss to the Pistons. Toronto was on the back foot for much of the game against New Orleans, and left believing it was the second best team on the night, as well as the victim of some unfortunate bounces and whistles.
The Raptors started strong against the Pistons but gave up a19-point lead in the second half. It was a disappointing recurrence, Nurse said.
“I just think we’ve done this a little to often and I was hoping it wasn’t going to bite us in the butt,” he said.
“We’d have these 20-point leads and cut it back to six, and it was a really similar pattern to what we’ve seen. We just took our foot off the gas a little bit defensively and all of a sudden they’re shooting a couple of wide-open threes and that just sparks them. ... All that work you’ve done for, say, 34 minutes is gone quickly because you just took your foot off the gas a little bit.”
Green was in the locker room getting
As they limped along through a 1-4 western road trip, with some discussion of changing lineups and rotations, and some chatter about the way they handled late-game, close-game situations with Kyrie Irving suggesting they needed some kind of calming veteran presence, the Boston Celtics were always the Boston Celtics.
And no one remotely connected with the NBA was thinking something terrible was amiss.
Certainly, it’s taken time for the Celtics to get into the full swing of things, with Irving and Gordon Hayward coming back into the fold. But it wasn’t as if they’d lost all their talent.
They still had Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum and as deep a roster as exists in the Eastern Conference if not the entire NBA — they were going to figure things out.
Now that they’re home, and after they pasted the Chicago Bulls 111-82 on Wednesday night, the corner they have to finish turning might be right in front of them.
And what better tests than a rare home-and-home, back-toback against the Raptors on Friday and the Utah Jazz on Saturday, a couple of NBA heavyweights who’ll give the Celtics an idea of how far they’ve come and how far they have to go.
“That’s just a competitor’s dream to be going against the best of the best,” Irving said of the coming weekend test. “Obviously, early season when we played them in Toronto, it wasn’t who we are now or what we’re trying to grow into, so I think it’ll just be a great test.”
It’s not as if the Celtics, even with the sluggish start, have fallen off the NBA radar. They are still 8-6, tied for third in the East going into play Thursday night and, after the seemingly tough weekend games, they have something of a cupcake schedule coming up that includes games against bottomfeeders like Chicago again, Atlanta, New York and Cleveland.
Things seem aligned for Boston to fully right itself.
“I think that coming into the season, we were all expecting that we would kind of just take over and that we’re very dangerous, and I feel like we’ve been humbled a little bit,” Al Horford told reporters after Wednesday’s game.