Home court no advantage for Bucks
MILWAUKEE— When it comes to making sense of the dominance of home teams in the NBA playoffs, there are a few standby explanations. There’s the hard-to-measure effects of a loud partisan crowd, and the well-documented tendency of referees to respond to their environment by giving a favourable whistle to the locals. There’s a litany of old basketball standbys, too. Familiar shooting backgrounds matter. Rims vary. Benches don’t travel.
Heading into Thursday’s Game 5 of the deadlocked Eastern Conference final, none of it offered a satisfying summation of Toronto’s struggles away from their Bay Street base during this post-season. The Raptors came into the game with a 3-4 record on the road in these playoffs. The Bucks, seven-point betting-line favourites in Game 5, were 6-1 at home.
But toss all that out the window and get ready for an opportunity that’s never before been presented to Canada’s only NBA franchise. Thanks to Thursday’s unlikely road win, 105-99, the Raptors find themselves one victory away from their first trip to an NBA final. Saturday night in Toronto, famous for its good old hockey game, suddenly has a chance to produce something the Maple Leafs haven’t managed in more than half a century: a berth in a championship series. Now up 3-2, the Raptors can ice the series with a Game 6 win.
They did it by bucking the trend with the timeliest of performances. Not Kawhi Leonard, who’s been excellent no matter where he plays, and whose 35 points, nine assists and seven rebounds were as necessary as they were expected. But who expected Fred VanVleet, who came into the game shooting 2-for-13 from three-point range on the road in the playoffs, turning his new-father energy into a 7for-9 night from behind the arc? So much for the “benches don’t travel” narrative. Thanks to VanVleet, Toronto’s reserves outscored Milwaukee’s in a landslide. Who expected Pascal Siakam, who had three blocked shots away from home in these playoffs, swatting away three Milwaukee shots of consequence?
But they couldn’t have done it, frankly, if the showpiece of the home team didn’t fall massively short of his pre-series billing. Giannis Antetokounmpo is the overwhelming favourite to win the league’s most valuable player award. But as the Raptors have shown with their swarming defence on the Greek Freak, he’s also possessed of flaws as obviously huge as his seven-foot-three wingspan. He can’t shoot from the perimeter. He can’t shoot free throws, missing five of nine. And if you keep him to the half court, home court or road, he struggles to create viable shots.
And they couldn’t have done it without halting a bad beginning. After establishing a clear formula to beat the Bucks in the successful bits of the opening four games — you know the drill: keep the Milwaukee running game in check by limiting turnovers and getting back on missed shots – the Raptors essentially lost their way from the opening tip. By the time Milwaukee led 16-4, they’d scored 10 of their points in transition. But the Raptors capped that problem quickly and stole the home-floor advantage from the team that led the NBA with 60 wins this season. Before this series, Milwaukee had only lost two games in a row once this season. Now the Raptors have beaten them three straight times.
“Certainly, it’s great to have Game 5 on your home court, to be here and sleep in our beds and practice facility and all those things, bench players and just the crowd and all the things that come with the home game at 2-2, a Game 5,” Mike Budenholzer, the Bucks coach, had said before the game. “We’ve played well all year. We’ve kind of earned this Game 5 at home, and you want to take advantage of it. But we’ve said all along, you’ve got to win on the road to be good in the playoffs … So I think being at home isn’t kind of the cureall, but it certainly is — we like having it here.”
It wasn’t a cure-all, indeed. But there was a reason that heading into Thursday home teams had won the previous 10 NBA playoff Game 5s in which the series was tied 2-2. That streak included the Raptors’ Game 5 win over the Sixers in the previous round, wherein Toronto blew out the Sixers by 36 points at Scotiabank Arena. If the NBA is said to be a makeor-miss league, the team that sinks three-pointers at the better rate so often prevailing, it’s also a taking-turns league. And up until Thursday, the Raptors and Bucks had been taking turns playing well in front of their respective fans.
“They were very, very good for two games in Toronto,” Budenholzer told reporters on Wednesday. “So we have to kind of learn and grow from it and be ready to come home and take our turn at being great.”
Take our turn at being great. Excellent theory. Except, Thursday was Toronto’s turn.
“I think a lot of it is games are all different. Teams do different things, there’s different people on the floor,” Toronto coach Nick Nurse told reporters at Thursday’s shootaround. “I mean if we could dial up what we wanted to dial up every time, we’d win 330-0 … I’d love to. That’s what we’re striving for, there’s always room for improvement, there’s always adjustments and things you need to make in the flow of the game. You have a bad stretch, you’ve got to snap out of it and do something to get your rhythm back; you have a good stretch and it isn’t probably going to roll that way where every shot goes in for eight straight possessions, and you have to adjust to that.”
Adjust they did. Now it’s up to Milwaukee to make a countermove. The Bucks will have to do it on a court where the Raptors are 7-2 in these playoffs.