RAPTORS HAVE A SHOT — IF THEY MAKE THEM
Ahead of the 20th game of the Raptors’ playoff run, we are at the point where certain things are being recited with such regularity that Dwane Casey could print them on an index card, pass them out before every news conference and save everyone a lot of transcription time.
Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, for example, “are all-stars for a reason” and he has total trust in them and, besides, “you don’t forget how to shoot.”
His Raptors “won 56 games for a reason,” but also they are “a young team,” still growing, still learning. Toronto accomplished some things, but they are still trying to get to where (INSERT OPPONENT HERE) has already been in previous playoff seasons.
And, in part because Toronto has shot hot and cold for six weeks, Casey — and many others around his team — have trotted out the expression about the NBA being “a make-or-miss league” more or less every day.
That last one is a hoary old cliche, to be sure, but in surveying the bizarre ups and downs of the Eastern Conference Finals, it really is the single key factor. For all the talk of adjustments and rotations and help defence and whether or not certain members of the team are getting enough sleep, the Cavs have won when they shot the ball well and the Raptors have won when they did so. This was mostly the case in Toronto’s previous playoff series, but the talent level between the Raptors and their opponents was different enough that Toronto could survive some rough shooting nights. Not so against LeBron James and the Cavs.
And while it is true some of those tactics and adjustments can have a tangible effect on a shooter’s ability to get clean shots, it’s also true that hasn’t been the story of this series.
Consider the case of Kevin Love, the 6-10 forward who has at times in his career been one of the NBA’s most reliable rebounders but who, in his two years with the Cavs, has struggled to find a purpose. He’s spent most of his time well away from the paint and become a three-point specialist, albeit a very tall one.
This clicked through the first two rounds of the playoffs and the first two games in Cleveland, but he went cold in Toronto. Like, Toronto-on-all-star-weekend cold. Love shot 21 per cent over two games at the Air Canada Centre and didn’t play in either fourth quarter, which kicked off all sorts of speculation about his role on the team, whether he should be benched for Channing Frye and basically if he was simply the World’s Softest Big Man.
Then he went out and torched the Raptors on 80-per-cent shooting — EIGHTY — in Game 5, rolling up 25 points before sitting in the fourth quarter again, but only because his services were no longer required.
Did Cleveland figure out a way to spring Love from his defenders and give him open shots? Not particularly. In Game 5, he was 4-for-4 on shots in which a defender was playing him tight, and 4-for-6 on shots in which he was open, per NBA.com. And in the two games in Toronto, Love was open for more than twothirds of his shot attempts, but he shot just 25 per cent on those. (Of those, he was only 18 per cent on shots that were “wide open.”)
So, at the Air Canada Centre he missed open shots by the bushel. In Cleveland, he hit almost everything. And because he started hitting shots early, the effect seemed to snowball, the crowd went nuts and the Raptors were run out of the gym long before halftime.
At the other end, the formerly hot-shooting Lowry and DeRozan missed a number of open shots early, in part because Cleveland was sending extra defenders at them whenever they had the ball. But that opened a theoretical counter-punch: get the ball to an open man for an easy shot. The result? DeMarre Carroll was 0-for-4 from threepoint range, Terrence Ross was 0-for-3 and Patrick Patterson was 1-for-3. As a team, Toronto shot 39 per cent for the game and just 18 per cent from three-point range. Of those shots from dis- tance, the Raptors were 2-for-13, or 15 per cent, on open attempts, again per NBA.com.
Everything else aside, that’s the lesson: if the Raptors make shots, they can hang with this Cleveland team. It’s why Lowry and DeRozan have remained confident even when they couldn’t hit water from a boat. They felt things would turn around, and they did.
Love went through the exact same thing. His coach, Tyronn Lue, said he wasn’t worried about all of Love’s misses. Keep shooting, he said he told him. He did, they went in, and the Cavs took the lead in the series again.
The make-or-miss thing is boring, especially when we would rather explain losses due to missing ingredients like focus or grit or sleep. But sometimes, you just need the shots to fall.