If reputations are made by a player’s playoffs . . .
Luis Scola, the basketball philosopher who occasionally takes the court for the Toronto Raptors, was attempting to turn down the volume on the sports-talk hysteria in Raptorland.
Kyle Lowry is slumping! The Raptors squandered home court! And LeBron James isn’t paying them their 56-win respect!
It’s all true, to be sure. But Scola made a polite suggestion that the citizens of the Six might consider conducting themselves as if they’ve been through this fire drill before. And certainly they have. The Raptors are down 1-0 in another playoff series? Big deal. They’ve dropped the opening game of nine of the 10 series in which they’ve played — an NBA record they now share with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
And what’s to be made of Lowry slouching through an offensive slump for the ages? Scola took a deep breath.
“I know we all think this, ‘Oh my God, (this is) so unique.’ But these things happen,” Scola said. “Nothing really is unique. Everything has happened before.”
Actually, Scola was on shakier ground with that assertion. Lowry’s inability to find the bottom of the bucket is bordering on singular. It’s been more than half a century since somebody took 100 or more shots in an NBA post-season and had less success than Lowry, according to numbers at Basketball-Reference.com. He’s on a .306 clip for these playoffs – excellent if only he played for the Blue Jays. As it is, Lowry’s 3-for-13 work in Game 1 of Toronto’s second-round series was the latest in a line of dismal brickfests that have put him in the company of some of the biggest postseason duds in NBA history. You know what Hubie Brown, the timeless narrator of the game’s history, always says about NBA reputations: They’re made or broken in the playoffs. Right now, Lowry’s is mud.
“It’s mind-boggling to me,” Lowry said Wednesday. “It’s like, ‘Dude, how are you not making these shots?’ ”
There’s still plenty of time for a redemptive turnaround. But until Lowry authors one, there’s a disturbing pattern emerging. Lowry is shooting 31% from the field in these playoffs. He shot 32% in last year’s.
A year ago, Lowry was granted a relative free pass because the popular perception had him physically exhausted from carrying a team during a season that saw DeMar DeRozan miss 22 games. Back then the organization fingered various Toronto role players as not built for the rigours of the NBA’s championship tournament. So GM Masai Ujiri added depth pieces of significance. And if the results don’t change, there’ll be those who draw the conclusion: Maybe, as franchise-propelling engines go, it’s Lowry who’s just not built for this.
“In the regular season, a slump like this is a pebble on your back. Now, it’s a boulder,” said Jon Barry, the former NBAer who’ll be working as an analyst for Games 2 and 3 on ESPN in the U.S. “Everybody watches the playoffs. This is the stage that everybody wants. Hey, sometimes you forget your lines. But if the great actors are forgetting their lines — it’s a bad time for that to happen.”
It seems everybody has advice for the stammering man in the spotlight. Coach Dwane Casey figures he just needs to keep shooting. (“We’re not going to change the offence, or anything like that,” Casey said).
Forward DeMarre Carroll says he should “man up” — macho code for “quit feeling sorry for yourself.” In that that vein, Scola, though he insists he’s sure Lowry will turn things around, said Lowry ought to straighten up his hangdog body language. It says “he’s beaten,” Scola said.
Barry, 46, who played 62 NBA playoff games as an off-the-bench shooting specialist, assumed Lowry would catch fire after he made the half-court shot that sent Game 1 to overtime. Alas, it didn’t happen. And while many observers continue to reference Lowry’s swollen elbow as the root of the problem, Barry, like Lowry, says it’s not a factor.
“I had (the same injury as a player), and I didn’t even know it happened. I had my long sleeve shooting shirt on at halftime and I didn’t even notice (the swollen elbow). And when I took off the shirt, I looked at my elbow and it was the size of a cantaloupe. But I played,” Barry said. “There’s really no effect. It’s just a weird thing. He says he’s healthy, and we’ll have to take him at his word. Things don’t look different mechanically. It’s just a different guy mentally.”
Speaking to Scola’s theory that everything has happened before, Raptors assistant coach Jerry Stackhouse , a former teammate of Barry’s, is one of the few players to weather a post-season comparable to Lowry’s mess in progress. His advice to Lowry has been consistent: Keep shooting. Certainly it was Stackhouse’s personal mission statement as a player. Stackhouse shot 32% for the 2001-02 playoffs — a spring that saw him face the Raptors in a first-round series best remembered because Toronto guard Chris Childs forgot the score in the dying seconds of Detroit’s decisive victory.
The parallels between the assistant coach and the current star are striking. Stackhouse, like Lowry, was a two-time all-star. Stackhouse, like Lowry, saw his team advance to the second round of the playoffs in spite of his absent offence in round one. And Stackhouse, like Lowry, faced questions about his place in the hierarchy of NBA leading men.
“It’s all that talk again, ‘Is Jerry Stackhouse really a superstar player?’ ” Stackhouse said at the time, this with the Pistons down in a secondround series. “But you know, if we win the next three games, it’s gonna be how well the team played. And if we lose, it’s gonna be ‘Stack loses.’”
Stack lost, ending the post-season run riding the bench. In this case Lowry might get the benefit of sharing the blame with his fellow all-star DeMar DeRozan, whose own struggles have been momentarily become a secondary concern. That amounts to the iciest of comforts in the midst of this coldest of streaks.