Lack of finish foils Raptors again
‘Same mistakes’ costly as team lets victory slip away in final seconds
You don’t lose games because J.J. Redick buries a tough jumper right in your face with the game on the line and less than 10 seconds to go.
No, you lose games because when you creep back within three points with about five minutes to go you ...
Get a bad Demar Derozan miss and watch Dwight Howard score at the other end
Get a bad three-point attempt that goes awry and when you grab an offensive rebound you commit an offensive foul before you get another shot.
Throw a diagonal crosscourt pass that ends up in the first row of seats.
Get another empty trip sandwiched around a basket and all of a sudden a three-point game is a nine-point game and the night is, for all intents and purposes, over.
Welcome to another night in Raptorland, where the home team is just good enough to make it close and just inexperienced enough to lose, a story that’s played out consistently all season.
“I feel for our guys,” coach Dwane Casey said after the latest setback, a 92-88 loss to the Orlando Magic at the Air Canada Centre, “because they are putting themselves in a position to win, executing for big parts of the game, making plays . . . but that one stretch where we have a four-possession run where we come up with nothing got us.” As it has all year. The enduring storyline to this Raptor season has been the inability to make “winning basketball plays,” as Casey likes to call them, when the game is truly in the balance. The failure comes from a combination of reasons — the inexperience of the players and their talent level primarily — and it is something that cannot be fixed quickly or easily. Sure, it was all well and good that the Raptors got it to a two-point game with 10 seconds left before Redick inserted the dagger with a three-pointer and it is to Toronto’s credit that they made it a game. But they could have easily made it a win had they not botched four straight trips late in the fourth quarter when they were making their last good run.
It is same old, same old for a team that’s now 3-18 in games that are within five points with a minute to go.
“I wish I could explain it,” said Casey “We’ve shown them and done it and made some of the same mistakes 36 or however many games it is into the season. That’s troubling but we started at ground zero with this program and we’ve made strides and to be in some of these games with some of the teams we’re playing, my hat is off to our guys.
“I’m looking at it from a glass half full rather than a glass half empty.”
Not surprisingly, the Magic were led by Dwight Howard, who bulled his way to 36 points while Ryan Anderson added 19.
The Raptors were okay with Howard’s production because they held the Magic to just 9-for-28 shooting from behind the three-point line and took Hedo Turkoglu (zero points in 35 minutes), Jameer Nelson (11 points) and Jason Richardson (six points) out of the mix.
“Our goal was to make him (Howard) work, make them go inside and take away the three-point line and we executed that part of our game plan,” said Casey.
“We knew if we were taking away the three, something was going to be open but our whole thing was to take them off the three.”
Derozan led the Raptors with 23 points and James Johnson had 13 but Jose Calderon, feeling the effects of some bug, struggled to add just nine points and the normally productive bench was off a little bit. And without Amir Johnson — who would have drawn the assignment of guarding Anderson primarily had he not missed the game with a sore knee — there wasn’t enough offensive pop to steal a win.