Rockets drop 10th in a row with 122-111 loss to Raptors.
Despite improvements, rally falls short against short-handed foe
The Rockets were trading buckets, led for a while, and seemed to have a chance to win a shootout.
The evidence of the past three weeks, however, argued otherwise.
The Rockets hit their usual offensive slump.
The Raptors pulled away. The familiar run offered a chance to seem as if they were in it again, but nothing really changed. The Raptors brushed aside the Rockets’ rally, beating them 122-111 in Tampa, Fla., to send them to their 10th consecutive loss.
The Rockets came back from down 23 to within six before misfiring again, finishing with 34 percent 3-point shooting, which represented an improvement from the rest of the losing streak, but not nearly enough to outscore the Raptors.
With Norman Powell scoring 30 points on 10-of-15 shooting, Fred VanVleet adding 25 and Kyle Lowry scoring 20 in a triple-double, the Rockets did not have that kind of firepower.
Victor Oladipo led the Rockets
with 27 and John Wall added 21 with 12 assists. But the Rockets could not get nearly enough stops to finish their rally.
The Rockets seemed well on their way to another blowout loss, trailing by as much as 23 in the third quarter, rarely getting stops and missing badly from the 3-point line.
They scored the final five points of the third quarter to reduce the lead to 15 heading to the fourth quarter. Even with Justin Patton’s 3-pointer to close the quarter, the Rockets had made just 4 of 22 3s since a fast start, 3 of 18 since the first quarter.
That did not seem to indicate that a run was coming. The Rockets did, however, close to within seven. And they did it not with a surge of 3-point shooting but by finally stringing together stops as they had not all night or often in the losing streak.
The Raptors made 3 of 12 shots to open the fourth quarter as the Rockets crept in within seven as Lowry headed to the bench with five fouls. Even after the Raptors began to pull away again, Danuel House Jr., Wall and Eric Gordon put in 3s, and the Rockets were down six with four and a half minutes left.
The run ended there. Wall missed a pair of 3s. Oladipo missed from the corner. After Lowry put in a runner and Wall scored on a drive, the Rockets were within six with three minutes left, and Chris Boucher missed a 3-pointer. But Lowry grabbed the rebound, VanVleet drained his fifth 3-pointer of the night and the Rockets could no longer get the stops in the final minutes to steal the win.
The Rockets were fighting off a blowout much earlier.
The Raptors had begun their second-quarter roll to a 15-point lead when things seemed to be getting much worse.
Wall went down after Boucher stepped his right ankle while he was driving. Wall remained down on the court holding the ankle in pain during a time out. But he remained in the game and finished the half, even helping the Rockets’ late surge to within 67-59 at halftime.
He could not stop the bleeding, however, with the Raptors winning the battle of backcourts, even with Wall and Oladipo each getting 10 first-half points.
Lowry and VanVleet both made all three of their 3s as the Raptors went from making just 3 of 20 shots to close the first quarter to knocking down their first seven attempts of the second quarter in a 10-2 run to a 51-40 lead. The Rockets steadied themselves a bit but had won just two of their first 20 games in which they faced a double-digit deficit.
They had shot much better than they have been. Making just 28.8 percent of their 3s in the losing streak, the Rockets hit 8 of 19 (42.1 percent) in the first half. They outscored the Raptors in the paint and in second-chance points. They slowed the usually prolific Toronto break.
But with the Rockets spreading the floor and beating the Rockets off the dribble, they got good shots from deep and lived at the line, scoring too often and easily for the Rockets to keep pace.