Raptors have big shoes to fill
NBA PLAYOFFS: With Valanciunas out for series, Toronto needs guards to step up
This was the best two weeks of Jonas Valanciunas’ basketball career. This playoff season, he wasn’t just making a difference, he was taking over. He was flexing his rather large muscles, spreading his wings, no longer the kid we kept waiting for, hoping to develop. He was playing like a man. Beast mode basketball.
And in the best and most important game of his career, he crashed to the floor of the American Airlines Arena. His face contorted, he tried to get up, he tried a second time, he looked both angry and frustrated as he was helped down the tunnel and out of this NBA playoff series with the Miami Heat.
When the Raptors practised Sunday for Monday’s Game 4 in Miami, Valanciunas sat in his hotel room. His series is over. Maybe his season. No one can possibly know at this time as the best-of-seven Eastern Conference second-round set with the Heat takes on a new kind of attrition.
Valanciunas is out with a sprained right ankle. His return date is unknown. Miami centre Hassan Whiteside is out, too, with a sprained right knee. Optimistically, they say day to day. And that’s truly optimistic. The Raptors’ DeMar DeRozan has ice on his thumb: He can barely hold the basketball. He will play. And point guard Kyle Lowry left his tattered elbow behind in Game 3. And Heat star guard Dwyane Wade is carrying around the angst of an entire nation for his unintentional anthem slight. There’s a lot going on here.
You want to know how tough this series has been through three games? Two Raptors coaches left the floor Sunday with ice on their knees. Both are expected on the bench Monday.
And pacing in the tunnel Saturday, his standing seat for most Raptors games, was general manager Masai Ujiri, who had a clear view of Valanciunas’ awkward fall. At first, he wasn’t terribly concerned. “I saw exactly how it happened on his foot and luckily (he thought) he didn’t have too much weight on it.”
Dr. Ujiri will no longer be diagnosing his patients or his players. Valanciunas wanted to go back into Game 3 and why wouldn’t he? He was unstoppable. He was scoring and rebounding at a pace he had never known before. But will couldn’t carry him back to the court.
He couldn’t put weight on the ankle, any weight at all.
And so what’s left of the Toronto Raptors plays what’s left of the Miami Heat Monday and may the best guards prevail.
There has to be so much disappointment for Valanciunas and for the Raptors even though they won 16 of 22 games he missed in the regular season. Code word there: Regular season.
Bismack Biyombo is more than a capable replacement. But he can’t change games with his offence and can’t play the old-school game Valanciunas has grown comfortable with.
“He’s down,” said Ujiri, talking about Valanciunas. “When you have a guy that’s playing that well, you feel the sky is the limit.
“I think sometimes we’re impatient (with players). I don’t get it. But as a big guy, he’s skilled, he’s young and it takes time in our league for these guys to develop. You see it coming with him and we see him every day. We see his work ethic.”
Now the Raptors are going to have to learn to live without him. That’s not easy. This is a tight team with a real warmth for each other. But they have an expression: Next up.
“That’s kind of how we play,” said Lowry. But he said that knowing how big Valanciunas has been against the Heat. In 21/2 games, he averaged 18.3 points, 12.7 rebounds and his shooting percentage is .649. “It sucks for him ... He was hitting such a great peak.” said Lowry.
So it’s next man up and that man is Biyombo and maybe Patrick Patterson, possibly even James Johnson. There is some depth to play with here. “The NBA,” said DeMarre Carroll, “is all about opportunities, all about stepping up. Everybody wants a chance.”
Dwane Casey thought Valanciunas was playing the absolute most dominant game he had in four years as a Raptor when he went down and Lowry went on to play easily his best playoff game as a Raptor.
Next up. That’s the motto now. Until there is no next player or no next game.