Hurting NBA heavyweights create healthy advantage
The disruptions that come along over the grind of an NBA season are many, and a rash of them have developed over the last few days. Dwight Howard may miss up to two months, and his absence will be a severe blow to the Houston Rockets.
Blake Griffin could be on the sidelines for a month, and the paper-thin Los Angeles Clippers may wind up fighting for their playoff lives rather than harbouring any legitimate championship aspirations.
Losing Steven Adams for three weeks, along with the myriad physical woes of Kevin Durant, compounds the troubles of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
All of those teams — and several others to come along the way — face a difficult task at a difficult time with the unofficial second half of the season approaching after this weekend’s all-star festivities in New York.
It’s never a good time for a team to lose a star player, but this is the point when teams generally make their moves to solidify spots in the standings and being at full strength is paramount. An injury early in the year can be withstood, but there are times when teams need to be whole. Like the Raptors are now.
They were able to tread water for the quarter of a season they were without DeMar DeRozan and the half-dozen or so games after his return, when he was just getting back to full speed.
Now they have everyone and they know it’s time to keep moving forward.
They took what they think was a giant step with Sunday’s stirring victory over the defending champion San Antonio Spurs.
“I think we set the bar high, and we’ve got to keep going to that standard,” James Johnson said after starring in the Spurs game. “We can’t go back to playing (like we did) in that little slump. We know what we’re capable of. We’ve got to keep playing that way.”
With consecutive wins over the Clippers and Spurs setting them up for a big pre-all-star finish in Wednesday’s home game against the Washington Wizards, there does seem to be a sense of normalcy around the team now that it’s whole.
Coach Dwane Casey has settled on anine-man rotation, it would appear, and that will help define roles. For the most part — and it could change some nights, but only because of early foul trouble or another injury — he’s gone to just four backups rather than the five he’d been using for the first half of the season.
Tweaks to the starting five notwithstanding — and, really, who finishes is more important than who starts — going with nine players allows him to get more out of his best.
“Yeah, it’s easier,” he said. “That’s what the tough thing about it is: Ultimately you’re going to cut somebody’s minutes (with 10) men, whether it’s Kyle (Lowry) or DeMar (DeRozan) and they’re just too valuable for us to do that.”
The important thing now, and in juxtaposition to the teams that are just starting to deal with serious ros- ter issues, is that the Raptors seem primed to finish strongly. There will be blips — because there always are, games where they simply don’t play well — but they can focus on what’s important with all of their important players.
“We have to get back to our defensive roots,” said Casey “What did we score (Friday) night, 123 points? We’re going to score. Wwe’ll find a way. It may look ugly a little bit, and we’ll have some games where it’s not there, but innately, we’ve got guys who are scorers by nature.
“But to make a dent, to do anything of substance in the post-season, we’ve got to defend. The game is going to slow down. It’s going to be 80and 90-point games, and it’s going to be the team that can defend (that wins).”