Raptors push Pacers to the brink
4th-quarter rally earns comeback win and leaves Pacers facing elimination
For three quarters, they were the same old Toronto Raptors.
And then, in a span of 10 minutes, they reversed everything that had come to be familiar about this group of players, and this franchise, and really most of pro sports in this city.
The Raptors got punched in the face, and then got beaten with a sack of hammers, and still they roared back and defied their history with a 25-9 fourth quarter on the way to a 102-99 win in Game 5 of their playoff series against the Indiana Pacers.
The wild, improbable win, which only came after a last-second three-pointer from Solomon Hill was ruled a whisker late, sends the Raptors back to Indianapolis with a chance to clinch only their second-ever playoff series win in Game 6 on Friday.
The game also featured the resurrection of DeMar DeRozan, who scored 34 points for Toronto, allowing the Raptors to survive 39 points from Indiana’s Paul George, who was unstoppable for most of the night but managed just two points in the fourth quarter.
“That’s what the playoffs are about: fight, toughness, want to,” said head coach Dwane Casey, who deployed a small lineup, without a traditional centre, for most of the fourth. “This is how you make a name for yourself, this is how you build a legacy for yourself, in the playoffs.”
He also said the team had to figure out what went wrong for the first three quarters if it hopes to win another game against Indiana.
But, for now, the win turned on its ear what had been an exceedingly grim night. The Raptors were a 56-win team during the regular season that came into the playoffs as the No. 2 seed in the East. In the 13 seasons since the NBA went to a best-of-seven format in the first round, the record of teams seeded one or two is 48-4.
Counting the sweeps from the Cleveland Cavaliers and San Antonio Spurs this year, the record is 50-4. Put another way, the top two seeds, over a 13-plus-year sample size, win 92 per cent of the time in the first round in the NBA.
It’s not quite as simple as putting your lineup out there and watching it roll to early-round wins, but it’s supposed to be close to that. And there’s a reason for that: Basketball, with all of its possessions, leaves less to luck and randomness than other sports, like hockey.
Coaches like to say that the best team doesn’t always win, but in basketball, when the win disparity between the teams is so large, it almost always does.
And yet, the Raptors came into the fourth quarter on Tuesday down by 13 points, staring directly at the possibility that they would need to pull out two straight games to avoid becoming only the fifth top-two seed in 14 years to be bounced in the first round. Coupled with the first-round collapses in the previous two years, this was a franchise on the verge of disaster. And then, boom. Before the game, Casey had said that the Game 4 calamity was largely the result of a poor start. Indeed, the Pacers scored the game’s first seven points on Saturday and carried that to a double-digit lead that they held for most of the afternoon.
“I thought we got hit upside the head before we got started the other day,” Casey said. “In more ways than one.”
The coach lamented that the Raptors, with a chance to seize control of the series, had lacked “our spark, our fight, our grit, to start the game.”
They were awkwardly prescient comments. Did the players think he wanted more of the same? On Tuesday, the Raptors began by turning the ball over on their first three possessions.
Lowry had a layup blocked by George. DeRozan clanged a mid-range jumper off the top of the backboard. Patterson had a charging dunk attempt blocked at the rim by Myles Turner, and the ensuing three-pointer from George gave the Pacers another quick seven-point lead, this time 13-6. The pattern would repeat itself. Indiana hit seven of its first 10 three-point attempts and raced out to a 35-20 lead. It’s tempting to chalk the huge early deficit up to hot shooting from the Pacers — what are you going to do when a team is hitting almost threequarters of their threes? — but that overlooks the fact that many of those attempts came from a shooter who was wide open.
The Raptors often looked lost on defence, and the Pacers were scoring in transition and, in the half-court, slinging the ball around until they found someone who didn’t have a defender anywhere near him. It’s a recipe for easy points, which explains how Indiana, which had the 25thranked offence in the 30-team NBA in the regular season, could cruise to 61 points in the first half, good enough for a 61-52 lead.
The obituaries for the Raptors were mostly written. They are back in the drawer, for at least one more game.