Nothing goes right for C’s
Effort, shooting off in loss to Toronto
TORONTO — Many here have decried the lack of league broadcast exposure for their talented Raptors — especially with last night’s game against the Celtics a potential conference finals preview.
The Celtics, conversely, would have preferred that all recording devices were turned off.
It was as if everyone had just missed the previous three games, for all the rust clinging to those road white uniforms.
Some momentary leadenness could be expected from Kyrie Irving, who returned after a three-game injury-related absence, and Marcus Morris, back after missing two.
But as Irving returned as the Celtics’ best offensive hope — with 17 points on 6-for-12 shooting — his teammates melted in a 11191 loss to Toronto.
Not only did their fourgame winning streak end, including the last three without Irving, but the Raptors cut the Celtics’ Eastern Conference lead to one game.
But for now, forget about the preview. Not on a night when the Celtics went after 50-50 balls as if they were longshot propositions.
“I’m disappointed every night we don’t play well,” coach Brad Stevens said when asked about his team playing so poorly against a potential playoff opponent.
“So I don’t know that it changes on who you might or may not play. Who knows what’s going to happen when that eventually settles itself out.”
Irving also didn’t have much support in his return. Al Horford shot 1-for-5 for his two points with three assists and four turnovers against intensified coverage. Not only did the Raptors pick him up at midcourt — like the surrogate point guard he has become — they also smothered him on the perimeter with Serge Ibaka, still one of the best defending big men in the league.
“I haven’t seen much of that all year, and they were effective with that,” Horford said of the coverage. “I probably wasn’t able to run a lot of the offense at times, as is expected of the bigs. They did a good job, more aggressive getting to 50-50 balls. We didn’t quite have enough tonight.”
And for a change, the Celtics weren’t allowed to escape from their hole, with the Raptors leading by 29 points on two occasions in the third and fourth quarters.
Toronto point guard Kyle Lowry was superb with the shovel, hitting three 3-pointers during the first eight minutes of the third quarter to begin the burial process.
But the Toronto bench, hailed by Stevens prior to the game as one of the finest in the league, was the group that truly took out the Celtics.
Though Terry Rozier came back from a slow start to score a team-high 18 points in his return to the second unit, overall the Raptors reserves outscored their Celtics counterparts, 59-49.
The true beating, though, was suffered by a Celtics starting unit that scored a combined 40 points on 16for-39 shooting. Irving blamed himself. “Just consistency on our end, myself and my just coming back in the lineup. Me not necessarily playing at the pace I should have been playing all night,” he said. “Also the effort on both ends, that’s the responsibility that I have as one of the leaders on this team of integrating myself as best I can and I didn’t do a good job of that tonight.
“And it kinda led to some of our mistakes tonight, and they got out in transition, their second unit came in and just pushed the pedal to the floor even more,” Irving added. “You have to give credit where credit is due but we made a lot of mistakes on our end as well, which they capitalized on, got every 50-50 basketball and they treated it as a high-tempo, high-intense game. We got hit tonight. We get hit early and they consistently hit you and they buried us, which a good team should do.”