ROUTED RAPTORS PUSHED TO BRINK
Cleveland rocks at home, setting up elimination game in Toronto on Friday
Maybe the Toronto Raptors forget to declare their momentum at the border.
Two days after winning their second in a row against the Cleveland Cavaliers to improbably even the NBA Eastern Conference final, the Raptors were blown out of Quicken Loans Arena on Wednesday night, setting up an elimination game for the home side in Toronto on Friday.
The Cavs, behind dominating performances from their triumvirate of LeBron James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving, led early, and by a lot. They were up 18 after one quarter, and by 32 after the second.
The 116-78 loss puts Toronto in seriously dire straits in what has been a historic playoff run for the franchise.
NBA teams that win the fifth game of a tied series go on to take the series almost 90 per cent of the time. So, first the Raptors must take care of Game 6 — distinctly possible — and then somehow figure out how to win a Game 7 on the road, which happens in this league with the frequency of a sensible Donald Trump sound bite.
They have now been destroyed in three straight games in Ohio. It is a tough road the Raptors have given themselves.
The turnaround from games 3 and 4 at Air Canada Centre was not entirely surprising, given that the home teams have won all eight games against each other this season, but the completeness of the reversal was something.
All of the trends that had been established in Toronto were swiftly and fully reversed. The dominant play of Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, who had averaged a combined 60 points at home? Held to 27 points back in Cleveland.
Lowry in particular couldn’t hit any kind of jump shot early as the Cavs raced out to a big lead. Toronto coach Dwane Casey had said that the home rims had been good to his team; if they make it to a Game 7, perhaps he will consider smuggling them in his luggage.
An even more stark change came on the Cleveland side of things, where Love shook off a full week of second-guessing by hitting his first six shots on his way to a remarkably redemptive performance: 25 points on just 10 shots.
Tristan Thompson, the Toronto-area kid who had been soundly thrashed by Bismack Biyombo in his hometown, responded with 10 rebounds and nine points, putting a sizable dent in Biyombo’s sudden folk-hero status. As a team, the Cavs shot 63 per cent in the first half, as they essentially put the game away before the halftime tumbling routine had wheeled out the safety mats. They also killed the Raptors on the glass and in the paint, flipping two trends from Toronto.
All of it made for a fairly convincing repudiation of the notion that the Cavs were in trouble in the series, despite a couple of days of that kind of talk in these parts.
Over and over, both teams had been asked whether the Cavaliers, fat and happy for most of the playoffs, would play more anxiously now that they had suffered their first losses of the playoffs. Not that anyone on either side was particularly buying it.
“No pressure,” said Cleveland coach Tyronn Lue before the game. “We just have to go out and play.”
Asked specifically about the play of Love, who had been an abysmal 5-for-23 in Toronto, Lue responded: “I’m not too discouraged about Kevin missing shots. He just has to keep taking them.” The man is a prophet. None of the Raptors, meanwhile, would say that they thought they had the Cavs on the ropes. Lowry, DeRozan, Casey: all said on Wednesday morning that they felt that both teams had done their jobs at home, even as the assembled Cleveland media kept stressing that the pressure had shifted markedly to the home side.
On some level, at least, the Raptors had introduced doubt into the Cleveland psyche.
Admittedly, this normally isn’t all that hard to do in Cleveland, the city that is working on 52 years without a championship title, despite having teams in three major leagues. The Drive. The Shot. The Decision. So many Purple Hearts of sports wounds.
But if the local fans were worried, the players were not — or they were, but responded extraordinarily well to it.
How it is, exactly, that these teams can play so completely differently in one building versus the other remains something of a mystery. Yes, both crowds are loud and boisterous, but both Toronto and Cleveland had good road records this season. They have previously been able to quiet hostile fans.
But in this series it is as though the home side is shooting at a hula hoop and the visitors are aiming at an ankle bracelet. The home team had shot better than 50 per cent in three of the first four games, while the visitors had never done it, and then Cleveland went and shot almost 60 per cent in Game 5.
Would it be a surprise if the Raptors start hitting shots again back home? Not in the least. But they will eventually have to make some here, too.
At one point on Wednesday morning, a Cleveland reporter took one more run at getting Casey to acknowledge that the Cavs had good reason to panic. Things were falling apart at just the wrong moment, in a city that will take lessons from no one on heartbreak. Didn’t that signal a reason for extra stress?
“No,” Casey said. “They are still the prohibitive favourite, I’m sure.”
There are certainly more enjoyable ways to be proven correct.