Raptor grit goes for naught
Over the first six games of the season, the Raptors were experiencing problems with, in order: talent, execution, experience, depth and good luck.
After finding a way to put up their best performance of the year and still lose 140-133 in triple-overtime to the Utah Jazz, they can add two more trouble spots: God and his evil agent on the temporal plane, Al Jefferson.
It was Jefferson — a big, birthing-- hipped galoot whose jumper operates like a boulder being rolled over the edge of a cliff — who undid an entire night’s worth of good work by this patchwork Raptors team.
Coming into the game, Jefferson had sunk one three-pointer in a nine-year pro career. And somehow, after a flurry of volleyball under the Raptors’ basket, it was Jefferson who found himself behind the arc with the ball in his hands and five seconds left on the clock.
It was Jefferson whose three-pointer tied a game that, until that late point, the Jazz had never led.
“Yeah,” DeMar DeRozan said afterward, considering the unlikelihood of that outcome. “And it would be against us.”
Jefferson would say later that the ball only ended up in his oven mitts because teammate Randy Foye couldn’t convince any Raptor to foul him.
“It was a great shot,” Jefferson said modestly, confusing outcomes with aesthetics.
This is what Toronto’s season is coming to — they’re getting beat by shots that land as often as meteor strikes.
Jefferson scored again to tie it in the first overtime. Another outlier, Toronto’s John Lucas, took it to three extra periods (Lucas entered the game shooting 2 for 25 on the year). And then Jefferson made the final basket that put it out of reach.
Afterward, it was time to practise that favourite game of all Toronto sports franchises — accentuating the positive.
“We keep playing hard, everything’s going to go our way,” DeRozan said. This (and an enormous amount of money) is the sort of thinking that keeps men whistling in the salt mines. What made the loss so much harder to take than any of the wretched efforts that preceded it was the sense that this was a team playing as well as they are capable of — with real commitment — and still finding ways to lose.
There was no shortage of merit badges to be passed around. DeRozan deserved the first of them for logging two games’ worth of minutes (60, on the nose) in one night, moreso than for his 37 points.
Jose Calderon had an urgent, Panavision sort of game, distributing 17 assists to go with 20 points. Linas Kleiza reminded everyone that the Lithuanian pro-basketballing community is a two-man village. His 17 first-half points were the initial catalyst.
Andrea Bargnani showed up for a physical shift, looking as if he were seeing the ghost of that emotional double-OT performance he logged in Utah last year, a game that was both the high and low point of his season (the injury that would end his season became something more than a twinge that night).
You’d need a sewing committee to get all these things pinned on. The unsung hero badge goes to Amir Johnson, whose aggressive commitment to taking back his ball on each possession put some muchneeded fear into the Utah bigs. Maybe that’s why Jefferson was hiding out at the perimeter.
It was heartening, entertaining stuff, but NBA has no playoff exemption for “good tries.”
“We’ve got to have a sense of urgency because with four years without making the playoffs, and now we’ve got a bad record (pause for recalibration) but we definitely have to be worried and have a sense of urgency,” Bargnani said afterward.
Bargnani has an odd, in-and-out accent. Words he’s familiar with he can rhyme off with idiomatic precision. Unfamiliar words he has to wrestle with. It’s disconcerting how like a native English speaker he sounds when he says “sense of urgency.” As a Raptor, he’s used to saying that. That sense of urgency was evident on the night, but we can already feel it sliding it into malaise as the hill gets higher. Maybe the playoffs were never very likely, but we’d hoped to keep that dream alive for a few weeks at least. After a 1-6 start and with word that injured standout Kyle Lowry still needs a few more tests on his ankle (“Someone order in some barium”), it’s going to be dead before American Thanksgiving. And now they’re downgrading the organization’s emotional state from “cautious optimism” to “leaden reality.” “A decent exhibition season sort of got our expectations out of whack a little bit,” Casey said, a few hours before he took this gut punch. “I was preaching the whole time that we’re not where we need to be and how much we have to improve. And we are. We’re taking steps, believe me.” They are taking steps. Sadly, for this season at least, they circle round to back where we’ve been before.