Fate is written in stars
Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo blows past Raptors forward OG Anunoby on Thursday night. Adding another major piece is unlikely, so playoff hopes hinge on Leonard, Lowry
The Toronto Raptors flopped. They flopped in a big game, in front of a big audience, against a team with a better claim as the best team in the East, in theory and in practice. It could almost bring back memories, if you hadn’t blocked them out.
“I’m probably more concerned than there isn’t more solid play from our main guys than the fightback,” said Raptors coach Nick Nurse, after a 10592 loss at home to the Milwaukee Bucks, where Toronto cut a 24-point lead to six and then came apart. “The fightback’s great, right? It’s great. But I’m more concerned with how we’re playing.”
He should be. Of course, the loss happened as all hell was breaking loose in a league where MVP candidate Anthony Davis had already asked out of New Orleans, and where rising seven-foot-three science project Kristaps Porzingis asked out of the toxic late-capitalism swamp of New York on Thursday after- noon, and appears to have been traded to the Dallas Mavericks before he reached his car.
It made the game feel smaller, and then the Raptors helped. They couldn’t shoot in the first half, which is a persistent enough theme. Their energy and offensive execution were jumbled, and Kawhi Leonard had one of his worst games of the year. Danny Green was sick. Kyle Lowry was barely there. Serge Ibaka, who is given room by the Bucks, couldn’t finish.
The rotation was shortened and it didn’t help. Other than a run where Pascal Siakam was a force of nature, and when Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo was on the bench, it was a pretty bad night.
“I was saying at the beginning of the season we need to get better,” said Leonard, who shot 7-of-20 and looked deadlegged at times late. “We still need to get better. But it's not about the first unit. It's about the whole team. That's how you win games. Everybody being connected, linked together, having the same mindset, the same goals, the same energy. We all need to be linked together.”
Milwaukee was closer to that. The Bucks had their bumbles but more often hummed, and the sight of Antetokounmpo coolly hitting a three-pointer, or whipping a one-handed pass to an open shooter in the corner, was maybe scarier than his more typical giant-stepping drives and dunks. The Bucks are planets orbiting their star, and know where they should be. “As a team we know what we are,” said Bucks centre Brook Lopez, who has become a three-point bomber. “Everyone accepts their roles and understand their roles. We’re in a good place right now.”
The Raptors are a similar team — one star, surrounded by bodies — but they are still figuring it out. or figuring it out again. Coming off his catastrophic injury season in San Antonio, Leonard has been rested often (which sources say has been a complete team decision, based entirely on his health); Lowry was named to the all-star game for a fifth time, but he has veered all over the lane. The mix is still a work in progress.
“Some of that rhythm that we had pretty early, maybe 20 games in, has come and gone a little bit,” said Nurse before the game.
“So I guess my answer would be I guess I see it coming back a little bit more, then hopefully escalating further … I think it is coming. Now we’re back to the stage of stretching it out over more minutes.”
“But I feel good. I think we have worked on some more things here in the practice days that I think will help us with some chemistry, some spacing, where people need to be when he has got the ball. How to get him the ball a little easier, all those things that we need to do because he is going to have the ball quite a bit.”
But at their worst, they look like they just met, and are watching Kawhi work. And no second star seems likely to come from outside this team to provide a deus ex machina solution. Porzingis wasn’t going to work this season anyway, as he recovers from an ACL tear; he was on a Raptors list as a high-end target who might shake free.
As for the healthier star on the market, the Raptors are not expected to make an offer on Davis before the Feb. 7 trade deadline. First, it would take a panic move by the Pelicans to make any deal in that short window, to the Lakers or the Celtics or anybody else.
And besides, not only has Davis’s camp already signalled a preference for Los Angeles, Davis has never been on the top of that hypothetical second-star list here. Maybe Boston can get him; maybe it’ll be a team that nobody expects. But Toronto is, at present, a very long shot.
“We’re starting to get to that point where we need to … know exactly what we’re doing,” said Lowry.
So they’ll just have to make do with what they have, which is two all-stars of very different wattages, a near-all-star in Siakam who is still improving, and a cast that isn’t quite connected, and is still figuring out where to stand and move. There are 29 games left before the playoffs start, and the Raptors are going to be who they are. Whoever that is.