Raptors need to show they can rise to occasion
Playoffs are far different from regular season, and Toronto has yet to adjust
When John McKay coached the winless and hapless Tampa Bay Buccaneers way back when, he was asked what he thought of his team’s execution.
“I’m all in favour of it,” quipped McKay.
The Buccaneers didn’t win a game in their first NFL season. But the line has endured nicely over time.
Dwane Casey hasn’t reached the point of trying to be funny about anything that’s gone on in the first two games of their playoff series against the Cleveland Cavaliers — a loss that shouldn’t have been in Game 1, an embarrassing Game 2 blowout defeat — but he is in favour of his team’s execution.
He’s demanding an improvement for Game 3 Saturday night here in Cleveland.
He’s not selling hope. Instead, he’s pulling out the list of coach speak that he needs to motivate his rather lost team.
“It’s pride, it’s toughness, it’s execution,” said Casey, who might well win coach of the year and be swept out of the second round of the NBA playoffs. “I didn’t think we played (very well) last night.
“Do you want to use the word hope?” he asked back to the questioner. “If we’re hoping we win, we shouldn’t be in the NBA. That’s not a good word to use if you’re a professional player. I think grit, pride, playing for your family name and your team’s name. I wouldn’t want to use the word hope because that’s like you’re fishing for something.”
Through two defeats, though, Casey has a long list of what he wants to correct in time for Game 3. But in some ways it begins with an old coaching conundrum. Disappointing power forward Serge Ibaka has to play better to play more, and has to play more to play better, and he’s just one of a long list of difficulties the Raptors face as they go on the road where they have lost five straight playoff games to the Cavs at Quicken Loans Arena.
It’s not just five straight in Cleveland. It’s eight straight playoff games against the Cavs. And it’s not only LeBron James in their heads, never mind his off-the-charts talent, it’s the notion of getting past Cleveland.
First, Saturday night. Then, Monday night. The odds are stacked terribly against the Raptors at this point for any kind of comeback, but the coach has to keep selling, pushing, prodding, trying to find what has gone wrong and what has gone missing through the first two defeats.
One thing is certainly missing, and it’s evident when you go from playoff series to playoff series, professional sport to professional sport: You have to play great to advance from round to round. You have to play at a level you’ve probably never reached before. You have to pick up your game.
NBA playoff games are nothing like the regular season. Stanley Cup playoff games are nothing like the regular season. You have to find a new level, find a new intensity, find a way to execute and compete, and if you can’t, you go away quietly, which is how the Raptors have gone away through two games in the series.
The defeats were so different. The first one came in a game in which the Cavaliers never led once through four quarters of basketball. They won the game in the fifth quarter. James looked tired and unengaged, yet the Cavs went ahead 1-0.
In Game 2, the Raptors and Cavs battled for a half and then James took over, Kevin Love took over, and the Raps looked tired and slow and incapable and possibly intimidated in so many different ways.
In eight quarters of basketball, nine if you count the overtime of Game 1, the Raptors have gone from contending, to believing, to pushing back, to being unable to make a shot of consequence, to getting pushed around and basically laughed at. The pendulum has swung and taken their legs away, and maybe broken their hearts.
Whether they can offer up any kind of resistance at the Q, well, it’s now up to the Raptors players to demonstrate if they have any kind of answer. If you’re making a list after two games, ask yourself this: Who on the Raptors has competed in a playoff-intense manner? Who has picked their game up the way James did in Game 2, the way Love did, the way even some of the disregarded Cavaliers players have?
Kyle Lowry had a strong first half in Game 2. But other than him, who else? James said before the series that every team is dependent upon their star players and the Raptors will go only as far as DeMar DeRozan and Lowry will carry them. So far, it hasn’t been very far. Ibaka has been a big zero to date, and really, maybe only Jonas Valanciunas has played to his level, a contradiction considering he missed all those shots down the stretch that could have given the Raptors a victory in Game 1.
It starts with execution. And who knows, by the end of the series, which could come soon, Dwane Casey might be in step with John McKay. And that won’t be very funny at all.