Ball movement key as Raptors head to Cleveland
Winning ugly is just another way of saying you won.
In the end, it doesn’t matter that a 25-point lead was completely blown. What matters is the Toronto Raptors are moving on having won three straight playoff games in a series for the first time and a Game 6 on the road for the first time in franchise history.
But there are definitely some things the Raptors can take from this past series win over the Milwaukee Bucks into an even more daunting test against the Cleveland Cavaliers, who are lying in wait for Monday’s Eastern Conference semifinal opener.
First and foremost is the all important move-the-ball lesson.
This is not a news flash to anyone who has watched the Raptors.
Game 6 was the perfect example of what ball movement means to this team.
Against a lesser opponent or one not so dug in defensively as the Bucks were, the Raptors’ individual talents have shown they can get by with very little in the way of ball movement. They have done so for a good part of the season.
But in a playoff atmosphere where defence is prioritized, one-on-one or iso basketball just doesn’t cut it against the elite teams.
It’s a little mystifying why a team that has been down this road so many times before and seen the positive results when they do move the ball doesn’t already have that ingrained in their thoughts, but obviously it’s not.
From the midway point of the third quarter Thursday night to about the final three-minute mark of the game, the Raptors were on their heels.
The offence was a series of disjointed one-man efforts to get to the rim — almost all of them unsuccessful — while the defence was life and death to get a stop.
The 25-point lead took exactly 14 minutes and 11 seconds of playing time before it was gone.
Over that span, the Raptors scored exactly seven points — four from Lowry (two of those from the line) and three from DeRozan, one of those at the charity stripe. Other than that, it was bupkas for 14:11.
The defence got raggedy there, too, so you can’t pin it all on ball movement.
But consider the Raptors scored 71 points in the first 30 minutes and 43 seconds of the game and then just seven in almost half of that.
That they closed it out with 14 points in the final 3:06 salvaged the evening. The two biggest baskets of the night — the driving dunk on a give and go between Patrick Patterson and Cory Joseph, with Patterson finishing with authority, and the Joseph three from the corner after the ball went from DeRozan to Lowry and then to the proud Canadian — were set up by the pass. If the ball movement lesson wasn’t learned on Thursday, it may never will be.
The first series also revealed that Serge Ibaka may have a little of the Bismack Biyombo in him that wasn’t so popular with the fan base.
Those would be his road performances. Biyombo was a terror on the home court, particularly in the playoffs last year, but all but disappeared on the road.
Ibaka’s road woes extend more to his offence than his all-around game.
For whatever reason, his good shooting at the Air Canada Centre did not make the trip to Milwaukee, where he struggled to produce offensively.
In three games at home combined, Ibaka was 22-for-39 from the field for a ridiculous shooting percentage of .564. including 6-for-14 from three. In Milwaukee, he was a woeful 9-for-31 (.290). He was just 1-of-11 from three away from Toronto.
If Ibaka is not the third most important scorer on this team behind Lowry and DeRozan, he is the fourth behind Norman Powell and that assumes Powell remains a starter, something that could change with the new series.
We’ve seen how this team can get bogged down when it becomes too reliant on Lowry and DeRozan. The secondary scorers behind those two have to be productive on some offensive level, particularly taking on an offensive juggernaut like the Cavs.
Perhaps the struggles in a first-round series the Raptors survived can benefit them as they make the move from series favourite back to the more comfortable underdog role.
Game 1 tips off Monday in Cleveland.