LABEL SHREDDED
After years as the face of Raptors heartbreak, Kyle Lowry is redeemed
Kyle Lowry did not lack for big playoff moments before the 2019 playoff season.
There were the 71 combined points he scored in back-toback games to finish the second-round series against Miami four years ago, or the two 35-point games he had against Cleveland in the following round, or any number of games against LeBron James and the Cavs in the last couple of years when Toronto’s bulldog of a point guard often seemed like the only player in a Raptors uniform who rose to the occasion.
But when you are the unquestioned leader of a team with an unfortunate habit of theatrically slipping on a banana peel right when the playoff pressure is ratcheted up, a lot of people who don’t pay close attention to the Raptors — which, as we learned this season, includes an awful lot of the American NBA-watching public — you end up getting the bad-in-the-playoffs label.
No one remembers the good performances in a losing effort, but everyone remembers the sights of Lowry searching for answers in a post-game interview after another thrashing. This probably reached its nadir just last season, when James hit that running, floating bank shot to win Game 3 against Toronto and all but finish off the Raptors, and Lowry took to the interview podium alone.
His usual partner in such sessions, DeMar DeRozan, had been benched while the Raptors roared back into that game against the Cavaliers in the fourth quarter, and he had been spared the indignity of the formal interview.
Lowry said he was lonely at the podium, and the mood was about as grim as it gets in such a setting. “I miss my guy,” he said. It would turn out to be some unintended foreshadowing.
There is a bounty of interesting stories to emerge from the shock NBA title run that the Toronto Raptors completed on Thursday night, but the final redemption of Kyle Lowry has to be the one most dear to the hearts of longtime fans of the team named for a dinosaur movie.
Consider the year the 33-year-old, in his 13th NBA season, had. Eleven months ago he found out that DeRozan, his best friend and backcourt partner, had been shipped to San Antonio in the Kawhi Leonard trade. Lowry, never one to signal messages through the media, went into full retreat. Team president Masai Ujiri made no attempt to claim that everything with Lowry was tickety-boo, and when Lowry attended a USA Basketball camp last summer, he declined to answer any Raptors-related questions.
That was that until training camp, when Lowry came to Scotiabank Arena and met the media for the first time in the 2018/19 season — and promptly zipped a KL-branded hoodie over his Raptors jersey.
Was it a coded message that he was angry at the organization with which he had signed a three-year contract, matching his tenure with that of DeRozan? Or was he maybe just chilly?
Lowry offered no clues, and professed that there was
nothing unusual about his utter lack of public reaction to the trade of his pal. He said the off-season was a time to do his own thing, not deal with Raptors management or his new head coach.
One didn’t need to be an expert in interpersonal relations to figure out that Lowry, stung by the trade, did not appear too interested in smoothing things out for his bosses. He never endorsed the idea that changes were necessary, stating merely that he understood that basketball was a business and that his job was to play with whomever was on the roster. That the wounds were raw was understandable. The DeRozan trade, and the firing of head coach Dwane Casey, were tacit admissions from Ujiri that he had decided the team that Lowry helmed with pride simply was not good enough.
But, true to his word,
Lowry did his job.
When new coach Nick Nurse shifted Serge Ibaka to centre and platooned him with Jonas Valanciunas, Lowry immediately capitalized by playing an aggressive pick-and-roll game with whichever big man was on the floor with him.
Ibaka flourished in the new role, a particularly welcome development given that he had been a non-factor in both his Toronto playoff runs, and Lowry deserved a lot of the early credit for making it work.
For all he did on the court, though, he was still far from sunshine and rainbows off of it. As the Raptors roared out of the gate to a 20-4 start, Lowry was often asked, in different ways, if he recognized that the ceiling for this group of players seemed higher than previous Raptors teams. But, ever the clever point guard, Lowry sniffed out these questions for what they sought: an acknowledgment on his part that the Raptors were better with Leonard than they were with DeRozan. It was an acknowledgment he avoided giving, choosing instead to offer some version of “it’s a business” or “we’re all professionals” when the touchy subject of the trade was raised.
To the extent that lingering bitterness over the trade needed to be addressed, Ujiri and Lowry had a meeting before the February trade deadline, with the president telling his team leader that if he was going to upgrade the Raptors roster with another all-in move, he wanted assurances that Lowry would, in fact, be all-in.
“We sat down and we really talked about what we wanted to accomplish, and it’s a tough conversation but these are conversations that you have to have,” Ujiri said on the eve of the Finals.
Once Ujiri brought in Marc Gasol at the trade deadline — at the cost of three rotation players — Lowry embraced a changed role in which even less of the offensive burden fell on his shoulders. Gasol’s passing ability allowed the Raptors to run certain actions through him, and when the big Spaniard was eventually moved into the starting lineup, the two-man game that Lowry had been running with Ibaka became an ancillary part of the Toronto offence.
Asked on a late-season road trip about how the team was winning games easily even with Lowry only sparingly taking shots, the point guard gave a slight smile. “Man, I haven’t scored all year,” he said. “But if they need me to score, I’ll score.”
Then the playoffs began, and Lowry didn’t score. At all. He took a bagel in the opener against Orlando, missing all seven of his shots and even his two free throws. More ominously, he was lit up by D.J. Augustin in the first half of that game. When it was over and the Raptors had somehow managed to lose a series-opening game again, it was Lowry who took the brunt of the ridicule. Zero points for a five-time all-star will do that.
When Lowry got on the board in Game 2 with a free throw — he had missed his first attempt from the line — the Scotiabank Arena exploded in a cheer that at once showed the crowd’s love for Lowry but was also a touch embarrassing, like it was a parent loudly cheering a toddler’s wobbly first steps: “You made a free throw, Kyle! Good for YOU.” Lowry would go on to score a tidy 22 points in that second game, and the pattern would occasionally repeat itself as the playoffs wore on.
He would have a bad shooting night, there would be a frisson of Lowry-doubt in the off-day coverage, and then he would come back with another strong performance. He was 1-for-7 from beyond the arc in Game 7 against Philadelphia, but in Game 1 against Milwaukee he was 7-for-9 from distance on his way to a 2019 playoff high of 30 points.
Lowry had been up and down in the Finals, too, until the Game of His Life on Thursday night, 26 points, 10 assists, and the usual large handful of clever momentum-swinging plays that Peak Lowry has a knack for making. He scored Toronto’s first 11 points, and after the championship was in hand various Champagne-soaked Raptors said those early buckets had been crucial. They needed him to score, and Kyle Lowry scored. Over the last two playoff rounds, he averaged almost 18 points a game and shot an important 42 per cent from three-point range.
Perhaps even more important than all that, Lowry kept it cool when he was shoved by a Warriors fan, who later turned out to be a minority owner, in Game 3; had he lashed out he could easily have been forced to miss time. And keeping up the heady off-court work, he rescued Ujiri late on Thursday night after an altercation with security, pulling the Raptors boss to him and wrapping him in an embrace. If you knew the history and the context, it was about a nice a sports moment as it is possible to see.
Before the Finals kicked off, Ujiri had offered this about Lowry: “I’ve seen him grow. I’ve seen him grow as a person, as a leader on our team, and he can only get better from here.”
He would soon be proven right. But, that’s no surprise. Masai Ujiri has been making a lot of correct calls.
When you are the unquestioned leader of a team with an unfortunate habit of theatrically slipping on a banana peel right when the playoff pressure is ratcheted up ... you end up getting the bad-inthe-playoffs label.