Raptors go cold, shot down by Rockets,
HOUSTON— Just one night after steamrolling the NBA East-leading Atlanta Hawks, the Raptors took their foot off the gas.
They paid for it by being on the other end of a blowout, crushed 98-76 by the Houston Rockets.
League-leading scorer James Harden was relatively quiet in the first half, but exploded for16 points in the third quarter as the Rockets pulled away.
“If you don’t come out in this league ready to play mentally and physically, I don’t care who you are, you’re going to get your behind handed to you,” said a frustrated Raptors coach Dwane Casey after seeing his side cough up a season-high 25 turnovers.
“It was one of those games you dread . . . It was one of those nights,” said an equally disappointed DeMar DeRozan. “It’s definitely frustrating, especially when we understand we can’t have games like that. We just can’t. There are no excuses whether it’s back-to-back or whatever.”
Casey said he saw no sign of the ugly loss coming, no suggestion that his players weren’t mentally prepared for what they knew was going to be another tough game. It was, he admits, a little puzzling.
“I’ll tell you what, if I knew that I’d be sitting in New York in Wall Street somewhere, making a million dollars a day. That’s the thing about sports, the psychological standpoint. You can do everything as a coach, we showed them film, we talked about how fast they were going to play, how hard they were going to play. Guys have to take it on themselves mentally and be ready,” said Casey.
Whining to the referees won’t cut it, Casey warned.
“It’s the mental sharpness and feeling sorry for ourselves. They got up into us and the first thing we did is started to complain to the officials. You’ve got to take matters into your own hands,” Casey said after a loss in which DeRozan, Kyle Lowry and James Johnson were assessed technical fouls.
Harden had just four points in the first half, but picked the Raptors defence apart in the second.
On a night when they were missing Lou Williams, the lights-out shooting hero of their blowout victory over the Hawks, the Raptors simply had no answer for Harden’s offence.
James Johnson, in fact, was the Raptors’ leading scorer on the night, winding up with 27 points despite guarding Harden for most of the game. The rest of Toronto’s offence didn’t have much success, shooting 32.5 per cent from the field.
Harden, who came into the game averaging a league-high 27.4 points per game, also had five rebounds and seven assists.
The Raptors led by as many as eight points in the first half, but once the Rockets started firing in the third quarter it was all over.
The loss stopped the Raptors’ winning streak at four games, and dropped them to 1-1 on this road odyssey of four games in five nights.
After struggling in the first half, Harden went on a roll in the second, shaking off his shadow Johnson for a couple of big three-pointers. After one of them, Johnson shook his head in frustration.
The second-half meltdown was disappointing, admitted Raptors forward Patrick Patterson. The Raptors simply didn’t fight back, Patterson said.
“You have to be physical. I think anybody who was watching that game knows we weren’t physical. They punched us in the mouth. By the time we fought back it was too late,” Patterson said.
A few hours before the game, the Raptors announced Willams, who led the way with 26 points against the Hawks, would be sitting out against the Rockets. The preliminary diagnosis was a sprained ankle. Shortly before the game, Williams walked into the Raptors locker room, but wasn’t noticeably favouring his right ankle.
“He turned it, I think, in the third quarter and it got sore (Friday) night,” Casey said.