Spurs win hunger game
Raptors can’t spoil Popovich’s dinner in fourth straight loss
So, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich: You’ve presided over five championship teams, won a thousand-plus NBA games, made millions becoming the man Dwane Casey, your Toronto Raptors counterpart, proclaimed on Tuesday “the best (coach) in sports.”
So what is it, at age 67, that keeps you stomping the sideline with your trademark stooped venom in a late January stop when the important games aren’t played until June?
“Each game’s a different animal . . . You never, ever know,” Popovich was saying at the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday night. “You make adjustments, make substitutions, get certain groups on the floor, call timeout, yell and scream, beg, love, be crazy. Then you win or you lose. “And then what happens? You get to go to dinner. Sometimes the best part of the evening. With a nice glass.”
Sounds like a wonderful life. Sadly for Toronto’s hoop fans, Popovich didn’t depart for his reservation at Yorkville’s Sotto Sotto on Tuesday until after his team ate the Raptors for lunch. Actually, the 108-106 victory by the visitors wasn’t quite so emphatic. But even without the services of their best player, Kawhi Leonard — not to mention point guard Tony Parker and big man Pau Gasol — the Spurs still zipped the ball around with their usual selfless efficiency to heap Toronto with its first four-game losing streak since March of 2015.
Toronto ultimately couldn’t make the big bucket. Terrence Ross missed a three-pointer with 11 seconds remaining that could have given the Raptors the lead, and Norman Powell failed to get a clean look after the Raptors rebounded a LaMarcus Aldridge missed free throw with five seconds to go.
Playing their first game of the season without leading scorer DeMar DeRozan, who the team announced will also miss Wednesday’s game in Memphis with a sprained ankle, the Raptors often built their attack on Kyle Lowry flinging himself into the lane with more-regular-than-usual flourishes of his bulldog-like abandon.
For Lowry, who came into the evening having played the second-most minutes per game in the league after LeBron James, the DeRozan-less offence meant heavy labour en route to 30 points. And it certainly didn’t do much for his energy on the defensive end.
Mind you, Lowry wasn’t the only member of the home team that didn’t provide much resistance to San Antonio early. The Spurs shot 55 per cent from the field in the first half to put the Raptors in a hole that got as big as 13 points. And the matador act was on trend. Toronto’s defensive rating, through the 12 games in January that preceded Tuesday, ranked eighth-worst in the league, on par with the likes of the Knicks and the Magic. The swoon had plenty to do with the intermittent absence of various big men, among them Patrick Patterson, who returned Tuesday from an injury that kept him out all but two games this month. Patterson’s reinsertion into the lineup, which saw him chip in 12 points on 5-for-6 shooting on a night he was restricted to 21 minutes, ought to bring up the level.
Tuesday’s second half brought bright spots that suggested there is still more upside for Toronto’s ball-stopping hopes. Thanks in part to a unit anchored by the rim protection of backup big man Lucas Nogueira — not to mention considerable run from the likes of Jonas Valanciunas, Norman Powell, Terrence Ross and Lowry — the Raptors held the Spurs to 26 per cent shooting in the third quarter and 35 per cent for the second half.
“If we play with that defensive intensity we had in the second half, I like that,” Casey said after it was over. “I’ll go to war with that.”
As the franchise looks ahead to another post-season run, defensive progress will be a focus. In the playoffs last year the Raptors were often done in by their inability to get stops. They allowed opposing teams to shoot 46 per cent from the field, the highest of any team that made it out of the first round. The Cavaliers shot an astonishing 50 per cent in the East final.
“If we go back to all our playoff series since I’ve been here, it comes down to defence,” Patterson said in the lead-up to Tuesday’s game. “Going all the way back to the Brooklyn series (in the first round in 2015) — we knew we could score, and it came down to defence . . . Washington (in the first round in 2016), we got destroyed, because we played no defence whatsoever.
“Then last year we went to Game 7 those first two series (against the Pacers and Heat) because we didn’t play defence. It comes down to playing defence and playing it well . . . If you get stops, if you know who you’re guarding, if you realize what they’re trying to do and take away something, you’re going to be fine.”
That’s a lot of “ifs” on the theoretical path to being fine. There’s plenty of work to be done, then, for a team that still doesn’t collectively know the answers to the important questions on the harder side of the ball. (And certainly a trade-deadline addition to the fold wouldn’t be unwelcome). On Tuesday Casey said “communication” remains a problem for Toronto’s defenders.
“When you’re not sure sometimes you don’t say anything. My thing is, say something. ‘Screen. Right. Left.’ There’s only two of them — right or left,” Casey said. “I tell ‘em all the time they get on cellphones and talk all day, or text. Texting may be the problem. I don’t know. But we’ve got to talk. We’ve got to communicate. Especially in transition.” Texting may be the problem, indeed. That, and the fact there’s not yet an app that pushes up-to-the-second alerts of optimal pick-and-roll Xs and Os. Against the Spurs on Tuesday, the Raptors could have used one.
Popovich, for his part, was seen tapping his watch before the game. He had a reservation in his near future. “I’ve got to make sure I’m not late. That’s the best thing about the game — 7 o’clock start.”