Like so many times this year, the Toronto Raptors pulled out a game at home that they probably shouldn’t have. Yes, they got lucky on St. Patrick’s day in the end, but for a while it looked like they’d had a few brews at halftime, laying down another clunker in the third quarter.

Let’s not kid ourselves. This was the Raps biggest game of the year to date. The teams confidence was shook as it went from high to low in the matter of a dozen games. Fingers pointed at the team, and at specific players. Two of the main targets, Andrea Bargnani and Hedo Turkoglu did step up to the challenge tonight. You knew they had to. I mean if they aren’t going to respond to this situation, then you could have basically written them off for this year. This had the same feeling the Chicago game had back in December after the Raps were handed a royal beatdown by this same Atlanta team.

So it was kind of expected the Raps would come out guns blazing to start this game. The guns didn’t start firing right away as the Raps spotted the Hawks a quick 7 – 0 lead. This is when the Raps called out a time out and went on a 23 – 7 run. We’ll call this Andrea’s Run because he dominated fot his stretch. It was the kind of effort that’s bittersweet in the sense that it was great to see him get inside and bang for an offensive rebound, post up and attack the rim aggressively, but the bitter part being that perhaps I’m getting excited about something we should be taking for granted from our starting center. Even more bitter is why he can’t do it on a consistent basis. Ok, Al Horford is good, but I don’t think the way he aggressively took the ball to the rim and his overall activity level on defense was a revelation for Hawks fans. It’s something they expect from him, and he delivers it on a consistent basis. But let’s give credit where credit is due, Andrea had a very good 1st and 4th quarter, and an overall solid game.

I think this game was more the exception than the norm, but I’m willing to see this through. Amir played another great game tonight. His play to get his hand on the Turk free throw miss saved the game. What bothers me more than anything is that because this guy hustles and brings energy, he gets labelled as such, and it seems synonymous with “unskilled”. Make no mistake, this is one very skilled basketball player. He is getting very good with that jump hook, and his hustle includes challenging any play down the lane, getting this team extra possessions for second chance points. That’s a skill too, just like shooting is. Try telling Charles Barkley it isn’t. If Bargs starts coasting again, I want to see Amir in there for more than 25 minutes, at least.

The Raptors continued to play well, keeping a double-digit lead until something happened that I wish I could see from the Raps. I wish I had seen it when Paul Pierce stood over our best player after a dunk, seemingly taunting him. The Hawks rallied after a frustrated Josh Smith got “disrespected” by Jose Calderon. Hey, Caldy actually didn’t mean to, but unintentional swag’s better than no swag at all right?

Cue the Hawks rally. After a spontaneous players-only huddle where they must have pumped themselves up, Atlanta whittled a 10 point lead down to a one-possession game in less than 3 minutes. End of half. Gone was the adrenalin of a big home game, and the lead that came with it. Now came the dreaded 3rd quarter.

It was dreadful alright. The Raps got lucky with the absence of Joe Johnson, but Jamal Crawford made up for it. He was a tough guard all night, and the 3rd quarter was no exception. Demar DeRozan may have gotten burned by the wily veteran, but he got some back with his own stellar offensive play. He is going through another strong stretch of play. There is no denying his quickness, especially in the open court. 19 points, without any threes, impressive.

Chris Bosh really struggled in the third. It might have been one of his worst quarters of the year. Some of it has to do with Horford. Earlier in the game, Horford denied him on the drive, with some help of course. It succeeded in putting Bosh into jumpshot mode. Which is fine if your jumper is working. He got into foul trouble midway thoruh the 3rd, something he rarely does. He’s not fully back yet, Bosh is. Not sure what it is, but he’s not at the level he was pre-injury, and this team just cannot afford him to be any less than 100%. That is the sad reality that is the 2009/10 Toronto Raptors.

It was 86 – 75 at the end of 3, and you have to give credit to the Raps for bending but not breaking. They were always within arm’s length of the Hawks and with some of the stellar fourth quarters this team had had at home, you knew that keeping it close was important. Enter Hedo Turkoglu, who made a pivotal 3-pt play with 6 mins to go, just after a big Jarret Jack floater. I like Jarret at the end of games. You need assertive guard play in crunch time, and Jarret does that better than Jose, me thinks. Jose was great in the 1st, not so much the rest of the game. Let’s hope he doesn’t fall into that passive player we all grew to loathe as a starter.

I wouldn’t worry as much about this if Jay Triano wasn’t our coach. I don’t know why MLSE allows us to hear in on his timeouts, because they expose him as someone who carries no authority behind his words. It’s not that he’s not loud or overly demonstrative, Phil Jackson isn’t for example, but when the Zen Master talks, you listen. With Jay, he just doesn’t sound convincing. I could be wrong but he doesn’t make eye contact with players, nor does he address specific players, which you need to do sometimes. Does that part get editted out? Perhaps. I hope. There was no way to edit that timeout on a fast break… at the end of the game… where the Raps had numbers. Not going to hang everything on the coach though, because I think it’s just too easy to do it when fans can’t admit their team is just not as talented as they would hope.

Back to Turk. He looked a tad quicker out there. The effort was there, and maybe the conditioning he referred to recently is starting to reap its benefits. If he’s getting back to the player he was last year, this game being the first of many steps, then a lot of our questions are answered. That’s how important he is, especially in Bryan Colangelo’s eyes. He should be the second option on this team. Yes, he’s not terribly efficient, but he generates offense through his passing as well, which is not as quantifiable.

In the end, Chris Bosh hit a nice stepback fadeaway over Al Horford to ice the game. Good for him, good for the Raptors to struggle but make ‘em when they counted. Big men have never been counted on to close games. Some of the greatest, Patrick Ewing comes to mind, failed more than they succeeded in endgame scenarios. But on a team that hasn’t seen a quality backcourt gunner since the days of Vince Carter, he has started to figure it out. He’s stepped up to the challenge, worked hard this offseason to become a better player, and is now arguably the best power forward in the game. He’s not the problem on this team, and this victory was one important step to retaining respectability and his services for the next few years.

On paper we win this, but on paper we should’ve also won against Philadelphia and Sacramento. It’s a matchup of the third and fourth highest scoring teams, and the worst and third-worst defensive teams. The Warriors have 17 wins on the season and have lost six straight by an average of 10.2 points. I wish their recent poor run would fill me with some sort of confidence heading into this one but no such luck. Wait, maybe this will: Our 10-26 record against teams over .500 might make you question whether we can handle good teams, but there’s no doubt about whether we can kick the crap out of the minnows: we’re a whopping 22-5 against teams under .500.

This back-to-back thing, we’re 4-10 in them and the wins have come against New York, New Jersey, Washington and Chicago. The only road win has come against New Jersey so with all due respect to the Raptors, tomorrow night in Portland is a write-off. I hope Triano sees this as the gettable game and goes all out instead of holding back for Portland or Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

The Warriors have been hit by injuries and have lost Andris Biedrins, Kelenna Azubuike, Raja Bell, Anthony Randolph and Brandan Wright for the season. Even that doesn’t fill me with confidence because you just know one of their scrubs will be eyeing this game as a chance to get some points on the board. My pick for who that scrub will be is C.J Watson, profiled here by our TrueHoop colleagues or of course, the great rookie Stephen Curry. Even though the Warriors are clearly a rather pathetic injury-riddled squad, the oddsmakers seem to have little faith in the Raptors making them only a 1.5 point favorite. I really am torn which way this game will go. Also of note, this will be Monta Ellis’ second game back after missing the previous six due to a back injury.

I’m sure this will be an up-and-down no-defense game but as with any NBA game, it’ll come down to playing fourth quarter defense (or in our case, third quarter defense). After a fairly solid first half, we gave up 43 in the third quarter, the Warriors did something similar against Portland. They led them 96-83 heading into the fourth but scored just nine points in the final quarter. They shot 3-14 shots and had six turnovers in the fourth, completely blowing their solid play of three quarters (shot 53%). RaptorTalk did some analysis of our third-quarter struggles and concluded that Jay Triano’s talk at halftime does us no good.

This will be Marco Belinelli’s first game back in Golden State so I’m looking forward to seeing him in the first half tonight. If I don’t, Triano doesn’t know what he’s doing. We’ll need to maybe even see if he can use his length to cover Curry as I’m sure PG defense is going to be a high-priority after Beno Udrih’s impersonation of an in-prime Isiaiah Thomas. We cannot expect Calderon and Jack to cover these types of guards, if they would’ve been able to do it they would’ve done it by now. It’s time to start getting creative defending this position and perhaps even throw Marcus Banks out there who I recall as someone wanting to play defense.

Tom Liston was busy flogging dead horses on Friday night and trying to come up with a starting lineup that would fix our issues. He concludes that replacing Wright with DeRozan makes the starting lineup better defensively, yeah, no kidding? Other than Bosh’s offense and Jack’s desire to get to the rim, there’s hardly a consistent element on this team and even though Wright might have a couple good games (after doing nothing for the last 8 – 16/56, 29% + countless blown coverages) by getting the nod as a starter, there is simply no way he’ll maintain that level of play for more than 4 or 5 games and we’ll be having this same discussion two weeks from now.

DeRozan should not have played the entire third quarter against Sacramento, as much as I like him his defense has been disappointing and he should’ve been yanked after failing to fight through the pick set on him in the first minute. However, to state that taking him out of the starting lineup is going to mend some of our problems is a fallacy, the first quarter has been DeRozan’s strongest, he gets about 50% of his points in the first and is very attack-minded, something you need to be early in games. I hardly care though, take him out or leave him in, players like him are red-herrings when it comes to identifying problems.

There’s an article in the Star today which is talking about how the Raptors have been plagued by injury. Really? Losing 96 man-games is now considered being ‘plagued’? Especially when Reggie Evans accounts for 51 of them which the article fails to mention. From what I recall, the only significant injury we’ve had is to Chris Bosh recently and to Jose Calderon a while back. Injury cannot be used as an excuse this season.

Taking a quick reluctant peek at the standings we find that the Raptors are now in 8th spot after wins by Miami and Charlotte. The good news is that we’re three ahead of Chicago in the loss column who, like us, also blew a back-to-back road assignment (Miami and Orlando). They’ve lost 7-straight and have road dates with Memphis and Dallas before returning home to face Cleveland. Chuck Swirsky must be pulling his hair out. If the Raptors current slide continues, we have every chance of making the playoffs only because Chicago is playing awful basketball. Question becomes what does making the playoffs really mean if it’s going to happen like that? BTW, there is no chance for another team to come and steal that 8th spot as Detroit in 10th is a full 10 games back of the Raptors.

Finally, March Madness is around the corner and we’re having a pool. Get the info here, create the bracket and prepare to have your ass kicked.

GSW tonight, let’s do this now. Love the late-night games.

Crowd says: 41-41
RR says: 44-38

Yes we can!

The Raptors headed into the off season with little hope of improving the roster with the chips they had to play with, but a man by the name of Steve Fruitman did some math and boom! Suddenly they had their midlevel exception, veteran’s exception and Hedo Turkoglu. The MLE was converted into Jarrett Jack which addressed the Raptors biggest weakness of a year ago – backup point guard. they did away with underperforming Croatian rookie Roko Ukic and got underperforming but potentially good Amir Johnson. The veteran’s exception got us Rasho Nesterovic who should help clog the paint and improve the Raptors defensive rebounding – the team’s second biggest weakness. Jason Kapono’s rotting carcass was magically transformed into the serviceable intimidator, Reggie Evans.

Turkoglu gives the Raptors the perfect point-forward to run the pick and roll with Bosh and Bargnani, something teams will have issues dealing with. The word around the team is that the Raptors are Magic Lite. I hope they’re Magic 2.0. Oh, the team also got more Euro-rized when they traded for Marco Belinelli, a good talent that Don Nelson just didn’t like. You can tell that was a good deal by how much the Warriors hated it. I mean, c’mon, they got Devean George.

With the Raptors’ needs addressed to varying degrees and there actually being a semblance of true talent on the roster, the biggest question mark remains the coach – Jay Triano. He was 25-40 last year but let’s not forget the team finished strong with against Chicago (twice), Orlando and Philadelphia towards the end.

I know what you’re thinking: How is a rookie(ish) head coach going to integrate nine new players in a new system with two new assistant coaches (Marc Iavaroni and ex-Raptor Alvin Williams)? Triano actually has credentials at the national level for both USA and Canada, is on the same page with general manager Bryan Colangelo and commands the respect of his players. Don’t believe me? Ask Mike Krzyzewski or Jerry Colangelo. Most of all, he doesn’t just yell “Go go go!” with both arms waving like his predecessor. Most of all, he doesn’t cater solely to Bosh but factors in the whole team.
Colangelo has completely stopped everyone reminding him of Bosh’s impending free-agency but instead has us thinking of winning games and making the playoffs. He’s made it so that the coming season will be a test of whether Bosh can do anything with actual talent around him. He’s told Bosh, “Let’s see if you’re the max-player you claim to be.??”

No you won’t

We go across the Mississippi for this one and to the Bright Side of the Sun:

When Chris Bosh is the most “normal American” on your team full of Euro’s playing outside the borders of basketball’s home your motto should be, Expect Soft.

Ouch.

All-a-Twitter

@ChrisBosh: NONE OF THIS COULD HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT MY TWITTER BOSH ARMY WHO GOT ME TO 50K TONIGHT !! 2MORO I SHOUT U ALL OUT ON ESPN! they DID IT!!

Not exactly the type of contest you want to see your franchise facilitating during the off season, but his competition of “The first to 50k followers on Twitter” with Charlie Villanueva drew the ire of many fans (the folks at Raptors Republic included). He is doing his best to connect with his fans, which they can appreciate, but when you are holding out signing a contract because you are unsure of the future of the franchise, and its commitment to winning, maybe you should be doing other types of things with your summer then building up a following on Twitter. Thankfully he isn’t conducting anymore contests on Twitter.

On the record

John Hollinger:

It’s easy to split the difference and say they’ll be a .500-ish team, but I don’t think that will be the outcome. I’m expecting either a brilliant success or a spectacular failure, and I’m really not sure which.
That about sums up the feelings of 75 percent of Raptors fans.

The 2008-09 Almanac

Need a killer stat? If by “killer” you mean what kills the team, well, it’s got to be Andrea Bargnani’s rebounding. He’s the worst rebounding center in the league. His 5.3 RPG rank 89th overall and 57th amongst all centers. All the other roster moves are made just so that they can afford to have him rebounding next to nothing and still play 32-plus minutes a game.
We had issues scoring in the clutch. In crunch time they looked solely towards Bosh (which was unfair to begin with) and he couldn’t bring the cows home. His 5.4 points ranked 20th in the league in fourth quarter scoring even though he had tons of touches. We’re hoping Hedo brings some stability into late game situations.

Our record against Boston last year: 0-4. These dealt serious blows to the Raptors confidence and a win in Boston on November 27th will restore the team’s confidence and faith.

Last Year’s Almanac

• Offense: 22nd
• Defense: 22nd
• Pace: 14th
• Team Factor Strengths: Free Throws Allowed (3rd), Turnovers (9th)
• Team Factor Weaknesses: Offensive Rebounding (29th), Turnovers Forced (23rd), Shooting Allowed (22nd)

The Play

Calderon into Bosh down low, who demands the double and immediately passes to the perimeter for a picture-perfect swing sequence to find Marco Belinelli for the win.

The People’s Choice

You’d have to go with Amir Johnson under normal circumstance but there’s a chance he’ll actually play minutes over Evans and Nesterovic. So they’ll have to go with Sonny Weems. He fits the bill perfectly: Nobody’s seen him play, he looks like he can play, but he doesn’t play.

If you’re watching the bottom line, you’re watching this

Easily the pending Chris Bosh free agency. Last season was supposed to be about whether Chris Bosh was going to re-sign in Toronto. Thanks to Bryan Colangelo, there has been enough talent assembled on this team that the talk is about making the playoffs and making noise when they get there. You want to be elite? You want a max contract? Lead this team and build something special in the city that drafted you, nurtured you and idolizes you.

Fellow network member, EightPointsNineSeconds has a summary of ESPN TrueHoop previews for all 30 teams.