Lowry brings more than the statistics
Kyle Lowry didn’t expect to be out three weeks when lower-back soreness flared up in mid-December.
He figured he would be good to go — for good — by Toronto’s visit to the Philadelphia 76ers on Dec. 22, a game in which he played nearly 31 minutes and scored 20 points but somehow never really looked like himself.
Another six games off, coupled with pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory injections, were necessary before Lowry returned once again against the Indiana Pacers on Sunday night. For good, this time, he hopes; for the first time in weeks, Lowry wasn’t listed on the team’s injury report ahead of Tuesday’s visit from the Atlanta Hawks.
Toronto went 6-4 without its longtime leader, and Lowry was full of praise for the shift his teammates put in in his absence.
“I believe in my teammates in one of the highest ways you can, and I knew they would hold it down,” Lowry said postgame Sunday.
But the 32-year-old’s influence on the Raptors was apparent from the get-go against the Pacers.
It took Lowry less than two minutes to drill a three off a rebound from Pascal Siakam, making a splash with his first attempt of the evening. Within a minute, he drew a charge off Indiana forward Thaddeus Young in the lane. Two charges drawn in 11 minutes of play — bad back be damned — moved Lowry up to 15 on the season, tied for second in the National Basketball Association behind only Detroit Pistons centre Blake Griffin.
And that was only the beginning. The stat sheet will tell you Lowry finished the night with 12 points, eight assists, three rebounds and three steals, that Toronto’s 30 assists were its most since a Dec. 11 win over the Los Angeles Clippers, one game before the point guard went down.
Lowry’s coach and teammates will tell you there is far more to his game that what some stat sheet says.
“Very good leadership,” is what coach Nick Nurse said he saw from Lowry, first and foremost.
“You can just sense and organized attack at both ends . ... There’s about 32 other things out there that you’re not seeing that he’s doing that don’t get recorded on the stat sheet.”
Toronto has been “managing” without its all-star-calibre point guard, but there is no doubt in his understudy Fred VanVleet’s mind that losing a player with Lowry’s talent would affect just about any NBA team.
“He’s just the heartbeat of the team, he’s our leader. Pace, energy, aggressiveness, switching, rebounding, finding guys, making shots — he does it all,” VanVleet said.
Bringing energy, pushing the pace, doing the little things, taking charges, being scrappy; all things the Raptors have struggled with at times over the past few weeks, all things that fellow point guard Delon Wright says Lowry contributes to the team.
It is not like Lowry was completely missing in action while out. He continued to be very vocal in helping his teammates while he was stuck on the sidelines, said Norm Powell. On Sunday, he took that ongoing discourse to the floor.
“You can still see it on the court now ... talking to everybody, getting everybody in their spots,” Powell said. “He’s a big piece of what we’re trying to do here so, to see him come back — and it seemed like he hadn’t missed a beat — it’s really good for us.”
It was the way Lowry returned against Indiana, like he was never out of the mix, that allowed Nurse to breathe — even when the player was sacrificing his barely healed body to draw those charges.
“I probably should (cringe), but when I’m in the game, I’m not really thinking about that,” Nurse said. “I’m thinking about what a play that guy makes for his team.”
It is hard to say just how healthy Lowry is. He has to pay attention to the prolonged back pain. A couple of plays made his back sore Sunday. Lowry lay on his back on the court, sometimes with his feet up on a chair, in front of the Raptors bench when he wasn’t playing. He doesn’t expect the pain to go away completely; instead, he’s looking at a maintenance plan that will keep the soreness manageable. Getting back to his team is incentive enough for Lowry to play through pain.
“It’s always a big deal when you’ve got a guy out and you get everybody back, get me back, and everybody is happy to see you back,” he said. “That makes you feel back, it makes you want to do a lot of things to give more of yourself for the team.”