Lowry’s turn to step up
With Siakam possibly out, Raptors are going to need more scoring from their point guard today in Game 4
The right play is me shooting sometimes. I’ve got to be a little bit more assertive.” Kyle Lowry
In early April, in the dark, quiet hallways of the Spectrum Center in Charlotte before a morning shootaround, Kyle Lowry stopped to talk to a reporter.
The Raptors had won five straight at the time and, in the previous four, Lowry hadn’t made more than three baskets in any of them.
Was he comfortable not having to be a scorer?
“Man, I haven’t scored all year,” he said. “It’s fine.”
It was noted that in previous playoff appearances, the Raptors point guard had taken on a lot of the shooting burden. Last year, he was the team’s leading scorer in their final series against Cleveland.
Whatever the coach wants, Lowry said. “If they need me to score, I’ll score.”
And now, they need him to score. The degree to which they need him to hit some shots will depend on the health of Pascal Siakam, a surprise addition to the injury list on Saturday with a bruised calf. He is listed as doubtful, although he could yet appear for this afternoon’s Game 4 at the Wells Fargo Center that the Raptors need to win to even the series with the Philadelphia 76ers at 2-2.
If Siakam is out, then the need for Lowry to step into the scoring void will be a matter of some desperation.
“I’ve got to step up way more than I have, and that will be the challenge for us,” Lowry said.
That will mean more than the two field goals he made on Thursday night in Game 3, his first playoff appearance with the Raptors in his hometown, and more than the zero he managed in the first game of this post-season against Orlando. Those clunkers have rekindled the lazy argument that Lowry is a poor playoff performer, which is true only if you ignore the times in which he has been excellent in the playoffs.
He had a 36-point game way back in his first playoff run against Brooklyn. He dropped 35 on the Cavaliers in the East final in 2016, and he had a masterpiece of a 35-point, nine-assist Game 7 against Miami in that same playoff run, the perfect example of a game in which he had to step up and shoot confidently and he did exactly that, hitting five of seven three-point attempts.
Those games are all part of his playoff resume, too. They just aren’t the kinds of games he has had in a long time, largely because he has not been required to have them. So, does he feel like he can turn it on again?
“I’m going to take what the game gives me, to be honest with you,” Lowry said Saturday. “Be a little bit more aggressive. I might take some shots that I haven’t taken in about a year and a half. Forcing — not forcing, but taking some shots that may be a little bit tougher than they usually are, but I’m gonna play.”
If this sounds frighteningly like someone who is going to start bombing away when the circumstances do not call for it — a situation with which Raptors fans are familiar — then understand that Lowry’s coach agrees with him.
“I think that the opportunities have possibly been there for him to generate some offence a little bit more,” Nick Nurse said on Saturday. “If the opportunities are there, we have to take them, right?”
This is has been the Raptors’ offensive philosophy for a couple of seasons now, when a Nurse-designed ball-movement system replaced the isolation-heavy sets of the DeMar DeRozan era.
“It’s like we say all along, in the first series and in this series, even in the (regular) season, when multiple guys are going at your primary scorers, you’ve got to get off it and get it to the other guys. (They) have to step in and take the shots and make the plays. That’s just how it is.”
After the first game against
Orlando, Nurse says the coaching staff sent Lowry out for Game 2 with a plan to have him try for some quick buckets in the paint, assuming, not unreasonably, that the Magic wouldn’t expect the guy who had just gone scoreless to be the primary scoring option. Lowry scored a dozen early points, and that loosened up the Orlando defence enough that Kawhi Leonard romped to 37.
But while that contest set off a fivegame playoff winning streak in which Lowry was doing all the Lowry things such as taking charges and deflecting balls and running a team that consistently outplayed opponents when he was on the court, his scoring dipped again.
After the team’s ugly Game 3 loss, Lowry admitted that he needed to help Leonard by scoring more himself. He said that in always trying to find the right shot, or the right play, he can overthink things a little and pass up good chances.
“The right play is me shooting sometimes,” Lowry said. “I’ve got to be a little bit more assertive.”
Nurse has admitted that, with Leonard and Siakam both creating so many shots on their own, it might have made the guys playing with them prone to ball-watching, waiting for one of them to do something.
Lowry wasn’t really having much of that.
“No excuses,” he said. “As other players around those guys we need to step up in general, make some shots, be more aggressive, draw some more fouls, try to do some more things to help relieve the little bit of the scoring burden off of them.”
Lowry repeated the line about taking what the Sixers give them.
Then he thought about it, and changed his mind.
“As a matter of fact,” he said. “We’re going to take whatever we can take.”
It’s an assertive mindset, at least. That’s a start.