HOME SICKNESS
Raptors dig themselves a hole with second straight loss to Cavs,
The galling thing isn’t that LeBron James is 33 years old and playing better than any prime-aged hoopster on the planet. The galling thing isn’t just that James is somehow carrying around a supporting cast of misfits that seems, on paper, too mismatched and faded to succeed.
The thing that has to burn you, if you’re a Raptors fan who just watched James dig the knife into your team yet again on Thursday, is that he did it so bloody effortlessly, so ridiculously easily.
For most of Thursday’s soul-crushing Game 2, a 128-110 Cleveland win, James was obviously pacing himself. The most important game of Toronto’s season looked like just another 41-minute workout for basketball’s self-proclaimed King. He was jogging mostly, sprinting rarely. He was orchestrating more than dominating -- content to survey the defence and set up teammates, especially in the early going.
But when he chose to turn on the faucet, he produced an awe-inspiring deluge — specifically the 15 points he scored in a third quarter that killed the volume on an initially raucous Air Canada Centre while pulling the Cavaliers ahead by as many as 15 points. If it wasn’t over then, it would be soon enough, as James reeled off 27 points after halftime, swishing high-degree-ofdifficulty fadeaways as though he was playing a playground game of H-O-RS-E.
“He was having one of those nights,” said Dwane Casey, the Raptors coach, speaking of Cleveland’s No. 23.
He’s having one of those lives. In the end, James’s Thursday performance was a marvel of game-controlling efficiency: He piled up 43 points on 27 shots to go with 14 assists, eight rebounds, and the umpteen beating hearts of the vanquished, effectively gouged from chests and left to expire with Toronto’s season. He even left teammates agog at his mastery.
“All the shots over his right shoulder, the step-backs, the fadeaways. The one where he hit the moon ball over his right shoulder and came back and hit one over his left shoulder — that was special,” said Cleveland’s Kevin Love.
That, if you’re counting, was LeBron’s eighth straight playoff win over the Raptors.
For all the promise that came with the home team’s culture reset and it’s franchise-record 59-win season, Toronto’s bycommittee recipe for greatness is being dummied by a man who defines it. “When you go home 2-0 with the best player in the world,” said Tyronn Lue, the Cleveland coach, “you like your chances.”
No kidding. James’ squads have a 21-0 record in series in which they lead 2-0. And the Raptors have lost all six of the series in which they’ve fallen behind 2-0, including their previous two encounters with the Cavs.
And then there’s the gut punch. Toronto’s season is down its last gasps, and James, for all the pre-series talk about him being “burnt,” looks like he barely expending himself.
You can complain about the LeBron-friendly officiating – and superstar treatment has been an NBA tradition going back decades – but the officials weren’t responsible for the team in the white shirts playing with such timidity they might as well have been come out of intermission waving white flags. And at least James has seemed almost ashamed to accept the avails of the refs’ favour. He’s shooting 5-for-14 from the free-throw line so far in the series. So it’s not about the whistle. It’s the Raptors who’ve blown. And it’s LeBron who’s calmly picked apart their weaknesses with his nearfaultless vision.
Cleveland committed a mere three turnovers in Game 2 and six in Game 1. It’s no coincidence the ball is almost always in the sure hands of James. He’s passing like Magic, scoring like Jordan. And he’s running like a Kenyan marathoner — a six-foot-eight, NFL-muscled marathoner who looks as though he’s strolling through an easy training run.
So much for the hope that James might lose steam. He spoke of being tired in the wake of Cleveland’s Game 7 win over Indiana on Sunday. He played 47 minutes in Game 1, when his legs looked decidedly dead in a poor shooting performance. And Toronto might have considered it a good sign he spent part of his morning publicly grousing about the every-other-night nature of the schedule.
But Love, for one, could see a renewed James in Thursday morning’s shootaround.
“(Sometimes) you know he’s going to have a big night, and this morning you could just sense it,” Love said. “He knew what was at stake. He knew that us getting another one here at their place was going to be huge for us. And he came out and he played that way from the jump.”
As for those moon balls of his right and left shoulder – Love said James prophesied his use of those weapons at the morning shootaround, too.
“He actually called his shots this morning,” Love said.
In a lot of ways, the teams came into Game 2 with transparent game plans. Toronto’s strategy was to defend James with single coverage as much as possible, with OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam encouraging him to settle for jump shots. James was unfazed.
“I pretty much know their scouting report on me is going to dare me to shoot jump shots, keep me out of the paint, not allow me to go to the freethrow line,” said James. “Over the course of my career I’ve just tried to put a lot of work into other facets of my game trying to neutralize that game plan.”
Beyond that, the idea for Toronto was to limit the production of the remainder of the Cavaliers lineup. In Game 1, of course, Toronto did nothing of the sort. Somehow four Clevelanders not named LeBron scored in double figures. In Game 2, James’ cohorts only got stronger. Kevin Love had a towering 31 points. But the Cavalier named LeBron set the table for the feast. And suddenly he looks like a man who’ll be pacing himself into June.
“We will not put our guards down. I won’t, so that’s going to trickle down to everyone else,” James said. “I will be as sharp as I was tonight (in Cleveland).”