DEROZAN BREAKS OUT AS RAPTORS RAMPAGE
Toronto star finds his touch, helps trample Indiana for series lead
DeMar DeRozan remembered how to ride a bike.
After two rough games to start the Toronto Raptors’ playoff run, their leading scorer finally played the kind of game that he was known for all season, and as a result the team blew out the Indiana Pacers 101-85 in Game 3, seizing a 2-1 series lead.
His teammates, and his coach, kept saying this would happen.
“Scorers don’t forget how to score,” Dwane Casey said the other day. He used the riding-the-bike analogy while explaining that he was confident that DeRozan would come around, that his 27 per cent shooting and inability to draw fouls weren’t suddenly permanent conditions.
“We just want him to get going,” Kyle Lowry had said Thursday morning. “We know the time will come. Hopefully it will be tonight.”
And then it was. In the opening minutes at a Bankers Life Fieldhouse bedecked in Pacers gold, DeRozan drew a foul in the paint and raised up for a jump shot that he made. On the next possession, he canned another jumper. That was as many shots from the field as he made in the entire first half of Game 2. In less than five minutes, he had scored seven points and the Raptors opened up a quick five-point lead.
“I came out aggressive,” DeRozan said. “(The shots) went down.” “It was a good sign for us as a team,” said Lowry of DeRozan hitting his first couple of shots. Though he cooled off later when the game was long decided, he finished with 21 points — and nine free-throw attempts after none in Game 2.
From there, it was essentially the first half that Casey sees in his dreams: the Raptors forced 11 turnovers and committed just four, DeMarre Carroll started to look like his pre-injury self, and Cory Joseph and Patrick Patterson continued their deadly scoring from off the bench. With DeRozan’s 16 points on 45 per cent shooting, Toronto rolled to a 53-36 lead at the half that really should have been larger.
Casey said the Raptors had tried some different things to spring DeRozan loose off screens, but that the adjustments weren’t necessarily the reason for his scoring. “At the end of the day, he made shots,” the coach said. “That’s simplistic, but that’s kind of what he did.”
The Raptors wobbled a bit in the third quarter, shooting just 7-for-27 in the frame, but the luxury of a 17-point lead at the half allows such missteps. Toronto entered the fourth still up by a dozen.
Pacers coach Frank Vogel was asked before the game if he thought Indiana had yet absorbed Toronto’s best shot. “No,” was the quick reply. Maybe the Raptors’ bench was playing about as well as it could, he said, “but there are going to be times in this series that Kyle and Demar get going.”
There was something unsaid in there that was an uncomfort- able reality for his team: Neither of Toronto’s two all-stars had played anything like themselves, while Indiana’s Paul George was showing why he’s an All-NBA player when healthy.
And still, the series was tied and Toronto had won Game 2 rather handily.
If either Lowry or DeRozan were to start making shots, the series could get lopsided in a hurry. That’s pretty much what happened on Thursday night. DeRozan sorted himself out right off the start, and Lowry eventually got his shots to fall; he scored 12 of his 21 points in the fourth quarter, including a long threepointer with 5:26 left that pushed the lead to 88-69. Dagger, as they say. It was a long way from the Lowry, and the team, that looked overwhelmed by the moment in Saturday’s Game 1.
Casey had praised Lowry’s overall contributions before the game, noting that he still had some impact even without his shooting touch. “Him knocking down the three-ball would be the X-factor,” the coach said. Lowry knocked down four of them.
“They just outplayed us in most areas,” said Vogel, who got another 25 points from George, and 17 points from rookie centre Myles Turner, but not much from anyone else.
Casey insisted that he wasn’t terribly pleased with Thursday’s game. “There’s so many things that we could do better,” he said, pointing to Indiana’s 33 freethrow attempts — against only 16 for Toronto — as something that needs to be cleaned up.
“We just gotta keep building,” DeRozan said, echoing his coach in that there was much work to do.
This is a fair point. If this series has proved anything so far, it’s that it can swing in a hurry.