The Bucks proved just how good they are
Raptors showed they can play head-to-head against league leaders
The Raptors know who they are and, more importantly, they know who the Milwaukee Bucks are and, even with the disappointment of a regular season loss, fans need to trust that the defending NBA champions are not suffering from any crisis of confidence.
Yes, Toronto lost to Milwaukee, 108-97, in a Tuesday-in-February game that was probably hyped about 65 per cent more than it should have been and no one in the Raptors locker room was feeling too happy with that.
But in their minds — and not at all for public consumption with their names attached to the quotes — the players and coaches are fine with where things stand between the top two teams in the Eastern Conference.
As well they should be, given what transpired at Scotiabank Arena in the first of three meetings between the conference behemoths before the end of the regular season.
The Bucks are good — do not for a minute think the Raptors don’t believe that or that they are somehow pretenders unworthy of the best record in the NBA — but they are not that much better than Toronto in any aspect of the game and a stand-back look at Tuesday night bears that out.
The Raptors took more threepointers in a game, 52, than a Toronto team ever has. The previous high, 50, came on that Sunday afternoon in San Antonio when no one wanted to play because Kobe Bryant had just died and firing up threes is the easy way to play. The 52 on Tuesday was because that’s what the Bucks give you and should the teams meet in the conference final, the Raptors are going to be just fine if they get 52 more.
The trouble with Tuesday, though, was that a plethora of Raptors threes came far too early and too quickly. They looked too often like the shots the Bucks wanted Toronto to take rather than the shots the Raptors had wanted to get. The Raptors know they have to attack the basket more than they did, if only to create repeated drive-kick-swing moves that get the defence rattled. There was maybe one time — a play that ended with Pascal Siakam corner three right in front of the Toronto bench — that came off the most desired “action” of the offence.
“Yeah, and it was a really good possession where we drove it, kicked it, swung it, drove it, kicked it, and there was Pascal standing all alone in the corner,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said . “We needed a few more of those type of multiple paint touch possessions.”
The big thing is, the Raptors know they can get them and even the imposing presence of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez at the rim lessens on the second attack of a possession.
Having, say, a Norm Powell driving from the side, or a Marc Gasol picking apart defences with passes out of the post or at the elbow, changes everything.
The Raptors know that, the Bucks know that and, in the mental part of the matchup, the Raptors know the Bucks know and that’s all-important.
Besides, if Serge Ibaka misses nine of 10 three-point attempts and Kyle Lowry misses six of seven, it probably doesn’t matter because Toronto won’t win.
But does anyone really think that’s going to happen often?
“We probably can’t have Serge go one for 10, Kyle go one for seven, and Fred (VanVleet) go three for nine,” Nurse said. “But in saying that, Serge had like 21 straight unbelievable, great games, right? You know, I’m serious, you’re gonna have one once in a while.
“Probably tonight wasn’t his night, but it’s all right. No big deal. He’s been amazing this year. Kyle has. Fred has. Tonight just didn’t go in.”
The Bucks, rated as the best defensive team in the NBA, didn’t really do much to force Toronto out of what it does best; the Raptors needed to make a few more shots and a minor adjustment or two and they would have been just fine. They didn’t. They weren’t. “Screen a little bit more, maybe screen a little bit harder, play a little faster, a little bit uptempo,” Lowry said. “But if we hit shots — if I hit a couple threes, Serge hits a couple threes — if we make more threes and space them out a bit more the game changes a lot.”
Defensively, the Raptors and Nurse didn’t dig deep into any bag of tricks. A couple of possessions of zone defence, a bit of the pressing, scrambling style late in the game to try and force their way back into it but other than that, they did what they do and didn’t show anything extra special. They held Antetokounmpo to just 14 field-goal attempts and eight foul shots, which is a pretty solid effort.
“Gotta keep being ourselves, learn from it,” was how Pascal Siakam summed it up. “If you got to do things differently, do them differently and if we don’t, we’ll just continue to play our game. And we all know in the playoffs what it takes and, we got to do a better job if you want to take that next step.”
Now, nothing is ever going to be easy and it’s presumptuous to say the Raptors and Bucks will even reprise their 2019 Eastern Conference championship showdown because the Boston Celtics, Miami Heat and, maybe, the Indiana Pacers and Philadelphia 76ers are very capable of derailing what everyone imagines to be coming.