Wizards have some magic left yet
WASHINGTON 122 TORONTO 103 (Raptors lead series 2-1)
WASHINGTON — Pascal Siakam sat at his locker after Friday night’s loss, holding an ice pack on a bloody, stitched-up lower lip.
Trailing Toronto 2-0 in their the opening-round playoff series, the Washington Wizards came out swinging Friday night. Siakam’s lip, with three stitches thanks to what he believed was an errant Kelly Oubre elbow, spoke of just a little bit of the carnage.
“They came out and punched us and we allowed them to,” coach Dwane Casey summed it up.
Bradley Beal and John Wall scored 28 points apiece and the Wizards roughed up Toronto 122-103, cutting the Raptors’ lead in their first-round playoff series to 2-1.
The Raptors, meanwhile, couldn’t hang onto the ball, coughing up 28 points on 19 turnovers, the result of both their own sloppy passes and the Wizards’ defence.
“That’s the ball game,” a surly Casey said. “Some of it was selfinflicted, making passes that weren’t there, soft passes. But a lot of it was their intensity. We knew they were going to come out in a desperate mode, I thought we met it in the first quarter, but after that we didn’t.”
DeMar DeRozan scored 23 points to lead the Raptors on a chippy night, while Kyle Lowry had 19. Jonas Valanciunas finished with 14 and OG Anunoby had 12.
The Raptors, who were swept by Washington on the same court in the opening round of the 2015 playoffs, never led by more nine points, falling behind for good early in the second quarter. And when Ty Lawson drilled a three with less than a second left in the third, it sent the Wizards into the fourth with a 101-82 advantage.
The Raptors pulled to within 13 points on a three-pointer by Lowry with 7:06 left to play, but any hopes of a comeback were short-lived, and by the time Mike Scott sank a wide-open three with 3:06 to play, the Wizards were back up by 19 points, and Casey subbed off his starters.
“We didn’t take care of the ball at all, and that was the game. They fed off that,” DeRozan said. “They got out in transition. . . and it killed us. We gotta understand they’re going to come out aggressive and play passing lanes and be more physical. That’s what they did and we weren’t prepared for it.”
They also let the Wizards shoot 55 per cent, Beal and Wall shooting 22-for-42 combined.
“They’re both all-star talents,” Lowry said. “Brad got off and played well, John got himself going. [Marcin] Gortat got some easy ones, Mike Scott got easy ones. But John and Brad are the heads of the snake, and we’ve got to cut them off.”
Pacers 92, Cavaliers 90
INDIANAPOLIS — Bojan Bogdanovic scored 30 points, leading the Indiana Pacers back from a 17-point halftime deficit for a 92-90 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers on Friday night for a 2-1 lead in their first-round series.
Cleveland was 39-0 during the regular season when leading after three quarters.
This time, the Pacers delivered a devastating blow to the three-time defending Eastern Conference champs — on a night LeBron James joined Michael Jordan as the only players in playoff history to record 100 double-doubles. James finished with 28 points and 12 rebounds.