Raptors’ Lowry may be hitting the wall
The alarming thing about Kyle Lowry’s forgettable Sunday afternoon at the ACC is that it didn’t look particularly unfamiliar.
Lowry, let’s be clear, is the beating heart of Toronto’s NBA team. At his best, he’s a bulldog on both ends, an indomitable force, a magnetic performer who can wow packed houses. He is also the single biggest reason why Saturday was a not-to-bemissed moment — why Raptor fans were jammed into Jurassic Park on a spring day for the second straight year, revelling in the buzz that comes with post-season home court.
But for all his street cred, and all his charm, there’s no denying the truth: The past few months haven’t been kind to the Raptors’ best player. Lowry, don’t forget, sprinted out of the gate this season, eager to prove to the world that the Raptors didn’t err in giving him a four-year contract worth $48 million (U.S.) in the off-season. To his credit, he looked lean and mean in training camp. To his credit, he scorched the league in the early going of the regular season, this as the Raptors were reeling off a 24-7 win-loss record to begin the campaign. And when DeMar DeRozan went down with a torn groin at November’s end, Lowry transformed himself into a team-carrying giant. He was the Eastern Conference’s player of the month in December. That was around the time the franchise and its best player began devoting considerable energy to making sure Lowry was voted as an all-star starter. They were successful. It was a big moment for an ascendant squad.
But somewhere along the way, between that torrid beginning and here, Lowry hit a wall. On Saturday afternoon, Lowry looked like he was repeatedly running into it, again and again.
He missed eight of the 10 shots he took from the field before he fouled out late in the fourth quarter. He had nearly as many turnovers (three) as he managed assists (four). And his seven points barely usurped the six fouls that permanently nailed him to the bench with 2:36 to play in regulation.
“I’m very mad and very upset, but I’ve got to deal with it,” Lowry said after it was over. “It’s something I’ve dealt with before. It’s something that comes with who I am. At the end of the day, one bad game is one bad game. I’ve got another one Tuesday.”
If you’re a Raptors supporter — and, along with the sellout madhouse of 19,800 that found their way into the building, 8,000-some more parked themselves outside the arena on Saturday — you’d like to be able to say that Lowry’s off day a one-off. You’d like to chalk it up to a tough day in a long series.
And there are those who will tell you that’s exactly what it was.
“He’ll be OK,” Toronto head coach Dwane Casey said of Lowry. “Be- lieve me, he’ll be ready next time to come around and make those shots. His timing was just a little off, but he will be OK.”
Certainly the Raptors need him to be OK; they’ll go nowhere this postseason if Lowry isn’t driving the bus. But it’s easy to get the feeling that he has, in his first season as a big-money all-star, overextended himself beyond recovery.
If you examine Lowry’s game log in the days since the all-star break, what’s concerning is that Saturday’s 2-for-10 shooting line isn’t all that much of an aberration. In the 17 games he’s played since he was the East’s starting point guard at Madison Square Garden — a stretch that has been interrupted by battles with a back injury — he’s had nine games in which he has shot over 30 per cent from the field. And he’s had eight in which he’s shot 30 per cent or worse.
In other words, he’s been unleashing clunkers similar to Saturday’s nearly every other game. In other words, the season-opening mad dash has, more often than not, devolved into a springtime limp.
Lowry was asked for an update on his health on Saturday: “I’m good,” was his response.
That sounded about as believable as the post-game assessments of teammates Terrence Ross (“We played well”) and Lou Williams (“It wasn’t a really ugly game”).
For the record: No, they didn’t. And yes, it was.
But that’s irrelevant now. The concern that lingers, beyond Toronto’s all-time 0-7 record in Game 1 of first-round playoff series, is Lowry’s decided lack of jump.
It’s concerning, especially, when you compare the heart-and-soul ingredients of the competing teams. On Sunday, for the Wizards, the pulse was dictated by Paul Pierce, the 37-year-old battleship of a veteran. He picked his spots, and surgically inserted pins into Toronto’s collective balloon. Pierce scored 20 points on 10 shots. He was efficiency personified.
And when the game was over, he punked the Raptors as only he can. He referred to Toronto GM Masai Ujiri as “Uri” — this after Ujiri responded to Pierce’s pre-series assertion that the Raptors lacked “It” by telling the crowd outside the arena that he didn’t “give a s--about ‘It.’ ” A year ago, in the wake of Ujiri’s “F--- Brooklyn!” outburst, Pierce referred to Ujiri as “Bryan Colangelo.”
Say this for the Toronto executive: He’s edging ever closer to household-name status outside the GTA. Pierce, meanwhile, needs no introduction.
“He was hyping us up a lot,” Wizards guard Bradley Beal said of Pierce. “Whenever he gets himself going, there’s no turning back.
If the Raptors are going to win this series — and there’s plenty of reasons to believe they can, not the least of which includes the braincramp play-calling from Washington coach Randy Wittmman that ensured the Wizards’ offence stagnated regularly — Lowry will need to be far more of a factor than he was in Game 1.
As it was, on Saturday he was bid adieu by Beal, who drew the shooting foul that sent Lowry to the bench for good and, as Lowry left the game, offered a taunting and dismissive wave in the Raptor’s direction.
“It was a ‘Bye-bye. You got six fouls.’ It calmed the crowd down a bit, too,” Beal said. “It was important (to get Lowry out of the game). He probably didn’t shoot the ball well. But he’s still a factor. You never know what would have happened down the stretch (if Lowry didn’t foul out).”
Anybody who’s watched the Raptors knows exactly what’s going to happen if Lowry doesn’t raise his game as the series continues. Whether or not he possesses the requisite gas in the tank to be the engine that drives Toronto to the second round — well, now that’s the crux of the matter.