Been here, haven’t done that

Raptors will try to dig their way out of same hole

CLEVELAND— Having a phone is helpful, partly because it has a calendar app on it, and it’s helpful when you want to check what day or year it is. The Toronto Raptors just got blown out in Game 1 against the Cleveland Cavaliers? Oh. They talked about having to defend better? Ah. They said, it’s just one game? OK, what year is it? Who’s the president? Oh, crap. Well, it’s 2017, and it just feels like we’ve all lived this timeline before. The Raptors are down 1-0 and talking about being a better version of themselves. Round and round we go.

“I’m never happy when we lose,” said Kyle Lowry, the day after a 116-105 loss to Cleveland in Game 1 that wasn’t that close. “I’m barely happy when we win.”

That sounds familiar, too. The Raptors have spent the last two post-seasons breaking and then fixing themselves and then breaking and then fixing themselves, and it gets repetitive.

Who are the Raptors? Who would they like to be? It’s a mini-identity crisis every year.

“The game is changing, and we’ve got to make sure we’re in that movement of changing, of playing faster, a lot of shots,” coach Dwane Casey said. “‘Man, why’d he take that three-pointer, he had a lane.’ Well again, you’ve got to attempt those. What did Houston have (Monday) night? Fifty attempts? Three-point shooters have to take their shots. We have to get a size smaller shoe for (P.J. Tucker) so he gets (his foot) off that line a little bit, but he’s got to take those shots, those are his shots.”

OK, but the Raptors played at the 22nd-fastest pace of any team in the regular season, and were 20th in three- point attempts per 100 possessions. They don’t really do that.

“I always say, if we can move the ball, and we get other stuff involved, it opens up room for Kyle and DeMar (DeRozan) to score, and that’s when our offence is crazy,” forward DeMarre Carroll said. “And we can’t predicate our game on our offence. I feel like that’s what we do. When we miss shots, we tend to just lay down on defence. And that’s the wrong, opposite thing.”

Well, they did do that in the Milwaukee series.

Faced with a less sophisticated but more aggressive form of trapping defence than Cleveland offers, the Raptors figured out ball movement. Of course, in the regular season, Toronto threw the fourth-fewest passes in the league, had the fourthfewest secondary assists, and created the fewest points via assists. They don’t really do that naturally, either.

So as the series unfolds, the Raptors are trying to craft a new identity by doing things they are not used to doing. But they are doing something very familiar, which is carrying on after getting their behinds hoofed. Of their last 13 playoff losses, 11 have been by double figures. They always do this. Lowry was asked why this team sometimes plays with force and purpose and sometimes doesn’t, and he said, deliberately, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” He paused, and said, “Mental?”

“The biggest thing is, we lose focus,” Carroll said. “We lose focus early on, and we allow them to throw the first punch. And when we look at film, we understand what we did wrong, and we try to bounce back. We’re the type of team, you gotta show us in order for us to go out and play the way we need to play, I guess. If that makes sense.

“I feel like we always have to learn how to listen by going to the film, which I feel like we shouldn’t have to be. We should be too grown for that. But at the end of the day we gotta bounce back. We have to learn how to win on a high level, and don’t take games for granted.”

The problem might be that Toronto’s identity is, more than anything, a good team that has lapses, that has a slim margin for error against elite talent, that doesn’t know how to meet the moment until after it’s gone. It has players — starters like centre Jonas Valanciunas, at the least — who can’t keep up with the changing game that Casey talks about, and which Cleveland plays.

The Cavs’ Richard Jefferson put up a Snapchat post Tuesday with a “Team Mood” caption over a quote that read, “Proceed as if success is inevitable.” Toronto just needs to win one game in Cleveland to change things. It’s not impossible. But it feels like the Raptors’ identity is to be a team that knows its role in this series, and it’s not to win.

“I mean it sucks to lose any type of way,” said DeMar DeRozan. “But the way we lost last year, it hit a lot harder. This time around we have kind of that confidence and understanding of how to get back on our feet. Like we said, we’ve been here before and we know what it takes, especially after Game 1, being down with our foot in a hole so we gotta go out there and leave it out there.”

Well, they did lose the series last year. You can look it up if you want, but it felt a lot like this.