Lessons learned from a rough Raptors road trip
Club needs to break the habit of falling behind early
• A few lessons, some learned, some re- affirmed from the just completed six-game road swing that finished up 3- 3, with the Toronto Raptors no longer the league’s top-ranked offence. ❚ 1. The Raptors cannot afford to back into games against superior opponents. They got away with it in Portland and against the Los Angeles Lakers, who are not superior opponents, but big early deficits at Golden State and San Antonio were killers. It’s the one major failing of this team. In 34 games, so far this year they have had the lead at the end of the first quarter only 14 times. It’s the habit that they just can’t seem to break. Falling behind early against elite teams is a recipe they can’t afford to keep following. ❚ 2. Patrick Patterson has to come back and come back healthy as quickly as humanly possible. Without Patterson Tuesday in San Antonio to space the floor and get the ball moving and opening holes in the opposing defence, they had no shot of scoring with the Spurs. Clearly this is not the only area in which the Raptors did not measure up to the Spurs’ high standards but without their offence cooking at its normally high gear, the Raptors had no shot when then Spurs came out shooting the lights out. ❚ 3. Jakob Poeltl is going to be a very interesting player to watch progress throughout the rest of the season. Poeltl just seems to have a knack to be in the right position defensively and that innate ability to shift his defensive focus at just the right time in order to get in the way of opposing would- be scorers. He made his biggest impression in Los Angeles but even in the loss in San Antonio, particularly in his first four minutes, he was making things difficult for the Spurs. Poeltl is still buried on the depth chart but he’s opened some eyes with the opportunity Patterson’s injury has afforded him. ❚ 4. DeMarre Carroll is slowly becoming that player everyone thought the Raptors acquired a year ago last summer before health issues altered things rather drastically. On the trip Carroll finally played a back-to-back and came out of it fine. Barring a setback to his health, the days of him being unable to play back-to-back games are over. Carroll said he felt fine after the back- to- back and the knee was holding up so there is nothing to suggest he’ll have to be coddled any more. It wasn’t a good trip for Carroll statistically but he’s moving in the right direction. ❚ 5. The Raptors haven’t broken the back of the schedule, but they have put the toughest part of it in their rear- view mirror and that can only bode well for the remainder of the season. Just 16 of their remaining 48 games are against teams playing better than .500 basketball heading into play on Wednesday. Twenty- five of those remaining 48 are at home and the team does not travel further west than Dallas the rest of the season. ❚ 6. Oh yeah, Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan are good.