It’s never easy for the Toronto Raptors, right? It should be the franchise motto; they could put it on a T-shirt. Even in the best era in franchise history, nothing has ever been easy for the Raptors, except for losing. There are always rocks in the water, somewhere. Unless, of course, you learn to sail. The Raptors played a Game 2 without the weight of a Game 1 loss on their shoulders Tuesday night, and they were mercilessly, joyfully good. A 44-point first quarter, an 18-point lead at the half. The Washington Wizards were bickering. The Raptors looked free. And when the inevitable run came, it was … fine. Wizards point guard John Wall led a charge, and the lead was down to 108-103 with 7:52 to go. This is where previous Toronto teams might buckle; this is where previous teams might fall. Read more: Raptors storm past Wizards in Game 2
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Opinion | Dave Feschuk: Teamwork and timing on Raptors’ side in Game 2 win But these Raptors are something new. They got a little lucky, sure. C.J. Miles salvaged a brutal possession with a crazy long three; Delon Wright blocked a Wall floater right before it started to come down. They were just on the side of right. Next thing you know, Toronto stomped on the accelerator, scoring 17 of the next 21 points, and putting the Wizards in an 0-2 hole with a 130-119 win. This is what good teams do, when challenged. The last time the Raptors won Game 1 of a best-of-seven had been 2001. The last time the Raptors went up 2-0 in a playoff series was never.
“We strong as a team, we not strong as individual players,” said Jonas Valanciunas, who had 19 points, 14 rebounds and two blocks in just 23 minutes. “We did it as a team. We were great defending, helping each other, more than our own strengths. I think this is team sport and when you play it together, support each other, help each other, it’s fun. It gives you extra confidence to enjoy the game.” “They’re a number one seed for a reason,” said Wizards coach Scott Brooks, who just might be hopeless. “They play extremely well at home, and they did what they’re supposed to do.”
This team isn’t top-heavy anymore, especially with Kyle Lowry’s shooting struggles so far in this series, writes Bruce Arthur. ( Rick Madonik/Toronto Star )
The Wizards could go home and tie the series. The Raptors have won two games, that’s it. But you have never been able to apply that very basic bar to the Raptors, and now you can. The best part, in some ways, is that it was far from their best. Toronto’s bench, a season-long strength, failed to impose itself as a unit, Wright and Miles aside. Backup point guard and on-floor assistant coach Fred VanVleet returned from his shoulder injury suffered in Game 82, and badly missed a three and fumbled a pass before sitting back down for good, disconsolate; Casey said “he wasn’t ready.” The three-pointers dried up in the second half, and Kyle Lowry is 2-for-12 from three in the first two games. But the great joy of this team is its collectivity. DeMar DeRozan played one of his finest games, with 37 points on just 23 shots. As Lowry said, “He sucks as a friend, but as a basketball player, he’s really good.” But the real sauce is that the Raptors have so many good players that eventually some of them click. Valanciunas was a force in his 23 minutes. OG Anunoby was effective in his 19. Wright and Miles were great. The starters, as a unit, dominated. If you listen to DeRozan and Lowry explain it in their practised Statler and Waldorf cadence, it all makes sense. “These days it’s not like I have a mindset that I have to go out there and score 30 or 40 points,” began DeMar, next to Kyle on the podium.
“You just had 37!” said Lowry. “What you mean?” “I didn’t go out there saying, ‘Let me score 30 tonight,’ ” said DeRozan. “Dang, you got 37,” said Lowry. “You can’t say that when you get 37.” They bickered playfully. Lowry let him finish.
“Like I said, I didn’t go out there planning to score 37 points, I went out there trying to be aggressive, and with my aggressiveness came 37 points.” DeRozan added, “I’m pretty sure everybody will have their night. Tonight it was me, and that was that.” They’re loose, because this is fresh ground. Even last year’s six-game win over Milwaukee ended with the Bucks mounting a furious, end-of-the-world comeback that Toronto narrowly escaped, leaving Raptors employees a little ashen-faced. Now? Well, an email was sent about 12 hours after the Cleveland Cavaliers got spanked by the Indiana Pacers on Sunday afternoon, so maybe 24 hours after the Raptors won that rare Game 1. It went out to ESPN’s whole basketball operation. Housekeeping, logistics, that sort of thing. “(It said), ’Make sure your passports haven’t expired, just in case Toronto makes the finals,’ ” recounted ESPN.com’s Zach Lowe on his highly respected podcast. Lowe added, “Man, we never got that email before. We didn’t get that email last year. We didn’t get that email two years ago. People are starting to believe in the Raptors.” Asked about it, Lowe said he really didn’t remember that happening before. It would make sense if it hadn’t. Maybe these are the Raptors, free of the ghosts. Get enough good players on a team, and good things can happen. And these Raptors, they have more good players than you.
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Dwane Casey isn’t one for hyperbole and he doesn’t do hypotheticals either. He prefers to keep things — conversationally and operationally — between the lines.
It’s a function of a life-long belief in the merits of doing a lot of little things well, confident they’ll add up to big things at some future, unspecified date.
He’s 61 but could pass for 41, exercises daily, barely drinks, seemingly remembers the name of everyone he’s ever met and cites ironing as his primary vice – his pre-game ritual is perfecting the creases in his own shirts.
It’s worked out well for the Toronto Raptors head coach. From modest beginnings in a small town in rural Kentucky, he’s become wealthy, widely respected, and by any measure one of the most successful coaches working in basketball today.
So forgive the man, when he underplays that his team, heading into the second game of its first-round series against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night at the Air Canada Centre, is charting new territory.
“As we know,” Casey observed. “We haven’t been in this position very much.
And that’s where Casey’s minimalism falls a bit flat.
The reality is bigger than he is prepared to make it.
The Raptors, with Casey at the helm, have never been in this position – one win away from going up 2-0 in a series, from being able to put a stranglehold on advancing to the next round.
The Raptors have never been so well-positioned to make it all the way to an NBA Finals and all that comes with that. The Eastern Conference has never been so welcoming, a wrinkle in time that could fold up very quickly. When DeMar DeRozan says anything short of a championship would be a wasted season he’s not far wrong.
So they need to behave like it. Splitting the first two games at home with a No. 8 seed is beneath a true No. 1; winning Game 2 is step one.
Casey’s teams have done well in Game 2 — in seven playoff series he’s coached here his teams are 4-3 overall and 4-1 at the Air Canada Centre.
The only problem is that the Game 2 wins have never resulted in Toronto being up 2-0 in a series. That would make things too easy.
The Raptors don’t win playoff series. They survive them.
There have been wars shorter than Raptors playoffs series. In their non-sweeps, the Raptors have had three that went seven and two that went six. In their 2016 run to the Eastern Conference Finals the Raptors played 20 games – or three more than Golden State needed to win the NBA title last year.
So going up 2-0 would be a very big deal, and not just because the Raptors have fought all season to earn home-court advantage – in part by going 34-7 at home, tied with the Houston Rockets for the best home mark in the NBA — although that’s not nothing. And not just because the math is undeniable — according to whowins.com, NBA teams that go up 2-0 at home in the first round are 68-4 in the series.
But it’s the bigger picture that matters more here.
After the opening weekend of the NBA playoffs a few things are becoming crystal clear.
The Raptors’ time to emerge from the Eastern Conference and make the NBA Finals is now, like, right this very minute.
Nothing against the future, but it is hard to imagine it bringing together a better constellation of circumstances.
The idea that LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers can flip a switch and shake off their regular season took a serious blow when they looked very ordinary in being beaten at home by the Indiana Pacers to open their first-round series. It was the first loss in an opening-round game for a James team since 2012 and the first time in his 15-year career he’s lost the first game of an opening-round series at home.
And while it’s a long way from an elimination game, the Pacers made the Cavs look like the NBA’s 29th-ranked team on defence on Sunday, and when they turned up the heat defensively, the Cavs’ fourth-ranked offence looked like a team of hastily assembled parts, with some past warranty that lacked chemistry.
“I mean Indiana didn’t do anything special [Sunday],” said Casey. “They were getting after it [defensively]. In their scramble mode, scramble mentality, they were there on catch.”
Even if the Cavs get past the Pacers, the early indications confirm this is not the same team that has beaten Toronto eight times in 10 playoff games by an average of 22 points in the games they won.
Conversely, the rapid rise of the Philadelphia 76ers, who set an NBA record by winning the final 15 games of the regular season and then – in their first playoff appearance since they embarked on their unprecedented rebuild — blew out an experienced Miami club in Game 1 can’t be ignored. The Heat evened things up Monday but it’s evident – whatever happens in that series – that Philadelphia is a looming monster poised to become a dominant force in the East.
The time to play the 76ers – a potential opponent in the Eastern Conference Finals — may be now because they are just getting started.
And don’t forget Boston, who won 55 games this year and has a 24-year-old point guard in Terry Rozier and a pair of wing players in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown aged 20 and 21, respectively. Next season the Celtics should have healthy all-stars Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward back in their lineup, while president Danny Ainge has an arsenal of draft assets to package into another deal to round out their roster with even more cheap, young talent.
They are another team that will only get better.
The Raptors are saying the right thing about the importance of Game 2; they are trying not to look too far ahead.
“I think we’re just going out there and we understand the things that we’ve done this year and they’ve done great things, but that’s all part of our journey,” said Kyle Lowry. “Everything we’re doing is a part of our journey to our end goal. And we all know what the end goal is … Game 1 was just one step to our journey. Game 2 is another Game 7 for us, the way we’ve gotta play.”
But the Raptors should look back, too. They know first-hand the toll a long playoff run can take, particularly if they let series run further than they should.
By the time they were eliminated by Cleveland in the sixth game of the East final in 2016, Toronto had played 14 times in a stretch of 29 days. In contrast, the Cavaliers – having swept their first- and second-round series — had played 14 games in 41 days.
Cleveland pushed aside Toronto and arrived at the Finals rested and healthy and fresh enough to upset the Warriors in seven games, getting stronger as the series went on. By the time the Raptors made the Conference Finals they were already running on fumes.
Would Toronto have beaten the eventual NBA champions? It seems unlikely, but whatever chance they had was sucked away by the Cavs’ massive rest advantage.
As Casey might say, live for today, but plan for tomorrow. Take care of the Wizards in four or five games and the Raptors can start banking rest. Let the series go six or seven and they start building up stress.
It should be the Raptors’ mantra heading into Game 2. The Raptors are the best team in the East but their margin for error isn’t great. They don’t have a single superstar who can bail them out of trouble, nor do they have a bushel of assets that promise to make this team better two years from now than it is today.
They need to leverage every advantage they do have and see if they can fit themselves through this shrinking window in which they can compete for an NBA title.
They need to go up 2-0.
TORONTO – The Toronto Raptors global ambassador arrived in good time for his team’s standard 7:30 p.m. ET start.
But either Drake didn’t get the memo about the 7 p.m. tip or he was on famous people time.
Either way he missed a hell of a first quarter, something never seen before at the Air Canada Centre. He missed the earliest blossoming of what fans in other cities with really good teams experience all the time – their team playing with supreme confidence, a sold-out building enjoying their controlled dominance – even believing in it.
This is a new concept for the Raptors so give it time.
Toronto is entering a brave new world. Having opened a playoff series at home with a win for the first time in the Dwane Casey era the team was playing a Game 2 without the added weight of looming failure, without the paralyzing fear of possibly going down 0-2.
Everybody now. Breathe. Enjoy the house money and play the game the way it’s meant to be played: loose and free.
For the benefit of Drake who missed it, this is what it looks like: Once struggling rookie OG Anunoby – at six-foot-eight and 240 pounds – getting low, stymieing Washington Wizards two-guard Bradley Beal on the dribble and forcing him into an awkward, fading two and a miss.
At the other end the Wizards forcing the ball out of Kyle Lowry’s hands and into those of an open Serge Ibaka (10 points, nine rebounds) who moves it to an even more wide-open Anunoby (nine points) who knocks down a corner three.
Or Jonas Valanciunas (19 points, 14 rebounds) reading the defence and calmly stepping into a wide-open three of his own.
Or Delon Wright (11 points) breaking down the defence, spitting the ball out to Lowry (13 points, 12 assists) who snaps it to a waiting DeMar DeRozan for a wide-open three.
Or DeRozan – who tied his career playoff high with 37 points (on just 23 shots) – pushing the ball in transition and forcing his way into easy baskets and reminding everyone that he’s still an offensive force even as the Wizards build their game plan around turning him into a play-maker, hoping the likes of Anunoby, Ibaka or Valanciunas can’t beat them consistently.
So far, so wrong. After their 130-119 win Tuesday night the Raptors will head to Washington to play Game 3 on Friday looking every inch the first seed and with a chance to push the No. 8 Wizards to the brink of elimination and – who knows? – paying John Wall and Bradley Beal et al back for their sweep of Toronto in the first round in 2015.
Whatever the final form the odds are now overwhelmingly in the Raptors’ favour: teams that win the first two games of an opening-round playoff series at home are 68-4 overall.
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The water didn’t flow downhill uninterrupted for the entire night. Nothing can be that easy, not in Toronto. But that the Raptors were able – within the same game – both soar with confidence and then tie down a win when things got a little stormy might be even more satisfying.
“We understood they were going to come back and fight back,” said DeRozan. “We had to withstand that. Once they got back in close, we understood we had to buckle down, get some stops, and with them stops get out and get easy buckets. That’s what we did.”
With eight minutes left, a lead that had swelled to as much as 23 points had been whittled to five, but a quick spurt – a deep C.J. Miles (18 points, four threes) triple, a great chase-down block by Wright, a pair of scores by DeRozan and some brilliant defence by Ibaka, who was effective on switches and still managed three blocks in the paint – gave Toronto a 14-point lead with five minutes left and some breathing room.
And now they can head to Washington leading 2-0 in the series – a franchise first – and smelling victory, although the Wizards feel they will have something to say about that.
“No, I wouldn’t say [we’re in] trouble. Every series is different,” said Wall, who had 22 of his 29 points in the second half. Every year the playoffs are always different. Last year we were up 2-0 going into Atlanta and they took care of business on home court and we went down to Boston and were down 2-0 and came back home and took care of what we’re supposed to do at home. We have to definitely make adjustments, they’re a team that’s going to be hungry, probably, in a Game 3, trying take full advantage. We have to be a team that’s hungry, trying to take advantage of home court one game at a time.”
The Raptors did their part at the ACC. They shot 13-of-35 from three and are now 29-65 for the series. They shot 51.7 per cent from the floor while dominating the boards, 48-34.
And they had DeRozan delivering one of his (now) signature offensive games – timely scoring without sacrificing ball movement or leaving out his teammates and allowing the Wizards to focus only on him.
“DeMar is an unbelievable player, all-NBA, MVP-type calibre player,” said his running mate, Lowry. “He’s just grown as a player. Every year I’ve been with him he’s just continued to get better. He’s my friend: I don’t care. He still sucks as a friend, but as a basketball player he’s really good.”
While the game wasn’t quite over early, any idea that the Raptors would somehow fumble their good fortune after winning the opener – just the second time Toronto has won the opening game of a playoff series in 14 tries – was put to rest before a late-arriving crowd filled the building.
By the time Drake finally ambled to his seat Toronto was leading 44-27, setting a franchise playoff record for points in a quarter and proving that they were serious about setting themselves up for a long post-season run by being as efficient in the first-round as possible. The Wizards version? Two early touch fouls on both Wall and Beal opened the door for Toronto.
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If there was area of concern in the early going it was a shaky performance by the second unit (by their lofty standards) who were a collective minus-60 on the night, and a curious three-minute cameo by Fred VanVleet, who came back from a shoulder injury suffered in the last game of the regular season, but looked far from his normal, steady self.
“He was tentative,” said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey. “He’s courageous, he wants to play, he’s trying to play, he’s a tough kid, but you know, Mother Nature’s just telling him to take his time and let it heal a little bit more.”
But with DeRozan leading the way and contributions from all over the lineup the Raptors were able to take a 78-58 lead into the half.
The nervous points of the game first came late in the third quarter when the threes stopped falling and the Wizards elected to go with a super-small lineup featuring Ty Lawson – just recently signed after coming back from China – alongside Wall with Otto Porter, Kelly Oubre and Mike Scott.
It allowed the Wizards to spread the floor and attack the basket and cut the Raptors lead to 10 — 100-90 — heading into the fourth quarter.
The most encouraging sign of the night was how the Raptors responded when things got really tense down the stretch. You could feel the air leave the building as the Wizards kept nibbling away at the Raptors’ lead which was at its biggest with two minutes left in the first half.
By the time Wall hit a couple of free throws with 7:52 left Toronto’s lead was down to five.
But Toronto’s used to adversity. After building their lead by hitting three after three, the Raptors survived while shooting just 1-of-11 in the first 16 minutes of the second half. That one — made by Miles after the Wall free throws — was big as it moved the Raptors from the shadow of their own end zone. Then DeRozan scored his final eight points in the 19-4 run that allowed the building to relax again.
“We needed every point,” said Casey of DeRozan’s burst. “He showed offensive toughness, they were into him, they were doing a lot of switching, he attacked their feet. We figured that’s what they were probably gonna do and he did a good job of attacking it, attacking the blitzes early in the game … he did an excellent job of reading what the defence was doing to him and making ’em pay.”
Said DeRozan: “I just let the game come to me, flow of the game. I go based off that. These days, it’s not like I have to have the mindset of scoring 30 or 40 points. I go out there and play aggressive.”
It was what the Raptors needed in the moment. It allowed 19,800 Raptors fans to enjoy a home win in a way that was new, and different. This was a maturing team controlling nearly every aspect of an important game, even to the point where they could reel it back in when it was slipping away.
Casey was able to bring DeRozan out early to enjoy his handiwork. He got a hug from Drake on his way back to the bench. The global ambassador has been a Raptors fan since Day 1. He knows when he’s seen something special.
