RAPTORS LOOKING TO GO DEEP
Club learned from 2014 playoff exit
TORONTO The crowds get louder. The game gets more physical. The stakes get higher. The playoffs, certainly, provide a starkly different atmosphere than the regular season provides. It is a cliché, but only because it is true.
Still: The game remains the same. It is basketball — one ball, 10 players at a time, and so on. What, fundamentally, is different?
“Every single step on that court means something,” Toronto Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan said on Thursday as the Raptors prepared for their first-round series against the Washington Wizards, which opens on Saturday. “You have to leave everything you’ve got on the court, especially if you want to win.”
Rewind about 50 weeks and it was tough to argue the Raptors did not provide maximum effort. Kyle Lowry was sprawled out on the floor, face down, after Brooklyn’s Paul Pierce blocked his shot at the end of Game 7. It ended the Raptors’ season.
“(It) just motivated me to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” Lowry said. “And if it ever happens again, I’ll make the shot and do something to make sure I finish the shot and we’re not on the floor mad, I’m on the floor happy and excited.”
Lowry’s words are the team’s wager: that last year’s experience have supplied the necessary lessons and motivation to ensure the Raptors will go further in the post-season than a year ago. Of course, the Wizards are thinking the same thing and they won a series over the injury-ravaged Bulls a year ago. The Wizards thought they were just as good as the Pacers, who beat them in the second round. Now that they have added veteran Paul Pierce, they feel like they are better equipped for the playoffs this year than last.
However, if both teams are assuming experience will be a magical elixir, lifting up their play, the next few weeks might be painful. Occasionally, teams with young cores improve upon their first playoff appearances. Over the course of three seasons, the Thunder went from first-round fodder to the Finals, while the Pacers went stepby-step to the conference final.
There are just as many examples of young teams plateauing, though: The Hawks teams led by Joe Johnson, Al Horford and Josh Smith could not make it past the second round, for example. The talent assembled needs to improve and coalesce and past defeat does not guarantee that, as redemptive as that narrative can be.
That brings us to Terrence Ross. He struggled brutally last year against the Nets, shooting 30 per cent from the floor and failing to slow down Joe Johnson before he was relieved of that assignment.
The hope was that Ross would learn from a horrible on-court experience and improve. The summertime signs were promising, but Ross has had a disappointing third season, on the balance.
“He knows. On thing about (Ross), you don’t have to tell him,” DeRozan said. “He felt he let us
Every single step on that court means something. You have to leave everything you’ve got on the court, especially if you want to win.
down last year. He knows what he needs to do this time around.”
The Raptors insist that their greenness worked against them last year — even their own, impossibly loud fans were a detriment, at least in Game 1. They cannot help but be better prepared this time around.
Preparation does not equal execution. It is better to have playoff experience than not, but it does not guarantee a better result. Either the Raptors or Wizards are going to have to confront that in a fortnight.