RAPTORS ROLL OVER OVERWHELMED NETS
Like the Generals facing the Globetrotters, Brooklyn has no answers for NBA champs
In their heyday, when Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal would play Maple Leaf Gardens on a Sunday afternoon, and charm us with the same bits and same tricks every year, the wins would always come for the Harlem Globetrotters.
The scores may have been different. The games may have been different. Even the routines were different. But the outcome never changed.
It was always Globetrotters win, Washington Generals lose.
It was basketball in Toronto before there was ever basketball in Toronto.
And the Globetrotter trick-shot thing isn’t exactly what’s going on in the Raptors’ first-round playoff walkover against what’s left of the Brooklyn Nets. But it’s close. There’s no real competition here. That comes next week.
The Raptors won Games 1 and 2, and then prevailed by a score of 117-92 in Game 3 on Friday afternoon. Each game has been varied, though none of them truly in doubt, and for the first time in their history, the Raps have started a playoff series with three straight wins.
That’s meaningful in a Globetrotter kind of way. You came to see them win and that’s what they’ve done here on television. And it’s historical from a rather insignificant manner, big picture, considering that coach Nick Nurse’s Raptors won five straight playoff games last spring, four straight against Milwaukee, one against Golden State, in matches of higher drama and meaning than this ho-hum series with the Nets. Those wins were huge.
Nurse is 4-0 as an NBA playoff coach, about to be 5-0 in career series wins. For those counting, that’s four more series wins than hall of famer Lenny Wilkens managed at the Raps’ helm.
Now this being Toronto and all, we can’t take any wins for granted. We’re still rather stunned and appreciative of the Raptors’ recent historical greatness. The Blue Jays won four playoff games in a row once in their history, which began in 1977. The Leafs haven’t won four in a row since Ed Belfour’s three-shutout series against the Ottawa Senators, and that was only 19 years ago. They’re over 100 years old.
Now, for the Raps, it’s four wins in a row if you go back to Game 6 in Oakland. It should be five wins in a row when they play Game 4 on Sunday night. And then it becomes real. Maybe too real. Too much, too fast.
The Globetrotters against Wilt Chamberlain and the Lakers.
None of this Washington Generals stuff.
And the Raptors are trying hard to say all the right things, having beaten Brooklyn three straight, and really, with only about seven of the 144 minutes played in any doubt. The rest of the time, the NBA champions have looked enough like champions to win. Kind of like a championship boxer, not having his A material, but wise enough and sharp enough to win on all the scorecards without question.
The Nets are the tomato can in this fight. They’re like Iron Mike Sharpe. They’re here to lose and make it look good. The look good part we can debate later.
“We’re not doing enough to get the job done,” said Fred Vanvleet, who has scored 30, 24 and 22 points in three wins against the Nets. “We have some work to do. We know that.”
Vanvleet and Kyle Lowry in the backcourt are the Raptors’ constant, the team’s heartbeat.
The rest of the roster kind of rotates around as the Henry Burris Raptors: There’s good Pascal and bad Pascal, good Serge and bad Serge, good Marc Gasol and bad Marc Gasol. It depends on the day or the quarter or the opponent.
And while Vanvleet would like the overall picture to clean up — and so would coach Nick Nurse, who is pragmatic enough to take the win and move on from there — he knows the Raptors won’t be measured by this series.
They will have their first-round victory, apparently, without much clawback, which is something rather foreign to their hockey-playing cohorts from down the hall at Scotiabank Arena.
This is seven straight years in the playoffs for president Masai Ujiri’s Raptors, who coincidentally has been on the job for seven years. In that time, it’s five first-round victories. Or it will be when they dispatch Brooklyn: five in a row.
“Winning (is what matters),” said Nurse. “There are no style points for this. In Game 2, we found a way to win.”
In Game 3, showing up worked. After the win, Nurse and at least one player complained that the piped-in noise was louder in Game 3 than it was in the first two games. Apparently, piped-in Toronto wasn’t as loud as pipedin Brooklyn. At this point in this foregone conclusion, they need something to complain about.
“It didn’t feel like a home game or an away game,” said Pascal Siakam. He wasn’t aware the Raptors have never gone 3-and0 in any playoff series. And he didn’t seem to care.
After their games in Toronto years ago, the Globetrotters would pack their bags, grab a flight and move on to the next city for the next show, the next win.
The Raptors now go back to their bubble rooms, do their bubble things, and wait to end this thing, whatever it is, on Sunday night.