We’ll get ’em
Raps can’t clinch in Miami, head home for Game 7
MIAMI— One day, maybe it will be easy. One day maybe the Toronto Raptors won’t take it to the limit, won’t torture their fans, won’t find the mud instead of the road. Wait long enough, and maybe the Raptors won’t be a test.
Not yet, though. With a chance to advance to the conference final, the Raptors got beat off the dribble all night and lost 103-91. They got good offensive performances from both their stars at the same time, and they never got closer than six points the entire second half. The Raptors have had the best three regular-season seasons in franchise history the last three years. But they have played three Game 6s in that stretch with a chance to close the series. They are 0-3. In franchise history they have played seven games when leading in a series. They are 0-7. They make you, and them, work for it.
“Whatever’s necessary right now,” said Heat coach Erik Spoelstra. “It’s a darned good opponent that’s challenging us, testing us, pushing us, making us uncomfortable. We think we’re doing a little bit of that to them as well. As a competitor this is what you want. You want the games to really have meaning, and it doesn’t happen all the time to be part of a seven-game series that’s supercompetitive like this.”
The whole series has tested, pushed, and discomfited the teams, their coaches, their training staffs, and their fans. In Game 6 the Raptors had the only rim protector in the building, but they didn’t have a single man on the perimeter who could keep his man in front of you. Forget pick and rolls, the Heat just drove and the Raptors got beat.
“It was just one-on-one defence,” said DeMar DeRozan, who finished with 23 points. “Everyone on our side has to man up and play one-on-one defence.”
“Obviously, defensively we weren’t at our best,” said centre Bismack Biyombo, who had 13 rebounds and two blocked shots.
The Heat went as small as they could reasonably go to start, with six-foot-nine forward Luol Deng and his injured left wrist at centre, and maybe the officials felt sympathy, because Bismack Biyombo was robbed of a put-back dunk by a bizarre offensive goaltending call in the first quarter. The Raptors gave up corner three-pointers on what felt like every second or third possession, but survived them. Nobody was throwing knockout punches; it was more of a defensive crouch.
Miami did come around, though, the old-fashioned way — dribble drives, over and over, and all the chaos that results. With Goran Dragic blazing either Lowry or backup Cory Joseph, the Heat expanded the lead to eight early in the second quarter. The Raptors couldn’t keep anyone in front of them, and the Heat pulled Biyombo away from the basket whenever they could. Miami owned the paint, and dropped 32 in the second.
But Toronto hung around, thanks in part to team director of sports science Alex McKechnie relieving the swelling on DeRozan’s right thumb with the red shoelace he now carries around in his pocket. McKechnie uses the shoelace because in traditional hand clinics they use string, but NBA hands are that much bigger, and a shoelace, wrapped precisely and tightly, temporarily pushes the extra fluid out, and gives the thumb its range of motion back. The idea is to do it every chance you get, and in the second quarter DeRozan helped keep the Raptors hanging around, with nine points, as the rest of the Raptors missed free throws. The lead was still nine at halftime, but it could have been worse.
Still, it was a strange inversion: Lowry and DeRozan back and attacking, and everyone else an extra in the play. DeMarre Carroll has an injured left wrist, and the rotation is down to seven guys. But a two-man team won’t do it.
So another Game 6 wasted, and the third Game 7 in Toronto in three years left to go. Before the game, Wade was asked if he expected one of these teams to start hitting shots, easy and free, and he said, “Yeah, you can’t say that. We would love it to, just like they would love it to, but it’s probably not going to happen in this series. The biggest thing has been timely shots, timely makes, on both sides. That’s the mentality, and if the ball goes in for you, great. But the rhythm of this series is not as fluent.”
He meant fluid, but neither team has displayed basketball fluency. The odds for the NBA title were updated the other day, and one version went like this: Golden State a prohibitive favourite, then Cleveland, then Oklahoma City, at a mere 6 to 1 odds. The Raptors are 50-1 long shots. Miami, 100-1. This is the junior varsity, the other series, and maybe it was always going to come down to this: With matching pieces removed or damaged, with the games inevitably veering sideways before getting close at the end, these teams will have to go the distance to decide who will survive. Asked about all the injuries, Wade said, “There’s only so much you can do. You’ve just got to keep going.”
Onwards, then. One more. Game 7 is Sunday afternoon. Dwane Casey likes to talk about the plaque on Barack Obama’s desk that says, Hard Things Are Hard. One day, maybe the Raptors will do things the easy way. But not this year.