Tall order
Toronto faces the towering, six-foot-11, 225-pound Greek Freak and his Milwaukee Bucks
Freak? Oh, yeah, he’s a freak, that Giannis Antetokounmpo is. They don’t call him “The Greek Freak” solely because his name’s hard to spell and a nickname is easier to remember.
The Milwaukee Bucks guard/ forward/centre is freakish because he’s towering at six-foot-11 and thick at 225 pounds and as quick as they come, morphing into one of those unicorns that are all the rage in the NBA these days.
And Monday, the Toronto Raptors get to try to figure him out again.
They didn’t do a particularly good job the last time the teams met; Antetokounmpo scorched them for 29 points and 11 assists, providing Toronto coach Dwane Casey with a litany of bad memories.
“They had 16 dunks and layups in the last game,” Casey recalled Sunday of Toronto’s 105-99 win two weeks ago. “A lot of them, I don’t know exactly how many, but a lot of them were him.”
Antetokounmpo’s ability to cover immense areas of the court in a minimum of steps makes him one of the most dangerous ball-handling big men in the game.
It’s simplistic to suggest teams just play off him and dare him to shoot — the one weakness in his game at the moment — because he can close that gap rapidly and still get past defenders.
“He’s long, he gets to the goal in three steps, three dribbles,” said DeMarre Carroll, who’ll be one of Toronto’s primary defenders on Monday night. “We’ve just got to pack the paint and try not to let him get any easy ones.
“That’s the biggest thing, you’ve got to pick and choose when you play off him, he can take one dribble, spin and he’s at the goal. It’s kind of challenging but at the same time we have to do it collectively as a group, one individual can’t do it.”
The Raptors did do a good job defending him late in that earlier game, with Carroll and a second defender squeezing him and a third Raptor trying to dislodge the ball. Kyle Lowry had a game-saving steal in exactly those circumstances that sealed Toronto’s road win.
“He can get to the basket in one dribble from way past the threepoint line,” Casey said of the 22year-old.
“It’s going to be a group effort. It can’t be one guy that has got to be on the ball. The next guy in help position and then Jonas (Valanciunas) and Lucas (Nogueira) have got to do an extraordinary job of protecting the rim.
“When we shoot the ball, our defence starts then. We’ve got to locate where he is, make sure we have a crowd where he is. We didn’t do a good job of that last time.”