The only good news coming out of tonight is that New Jersey lost. Thats it. End of story. It’s games like these that make you test your resolve to maintain a Toronto Raptors blog so here goes.
A back-to-back game on the road after a tough loss is a tough proposition, now add to the mix that your best +/- player Anthony Parker, is out with an injury (thanks Bruce Bowen) and things get a little tougher. This team misses Anthony Parker and his ability to open the floor, supply a mid-range game and play defense on the opposing two guard. So as Larry Hughes was exploding today it occurred to me that things would’ve been a little different with Parker forcing him to play defense on the other end of the floor. Another guy missing in action tonight was Andrea Bargnani who’s in Italy to visit his ailing grandfather. Bargnani’s become a key part of this team, both offensively and defensively and his presence was sorely missed as the Raptors went 4-14 3FG. His presence on the defensive end was also missed, it doesn’t show up in the stats but the guy changes enough shots to change a ballgame. But that’s not the reason we lost.
The reason we lost was Lebron James decided that there was nobody on the Raptors who had the acumen to guard him, and he was right. James had the referees behind him and anytime he didn’t score, a bail-out call wasn’t far behind, Lebron went 15-17 from the FT line and that was the difference in the game, him being aggressive and the Raptors being passive. Things didn’t start out all that bad with TJ Ford, Mo Pete and Chris Bosh supplying some early offense, but that doesn’t matter if you let the other team get any shot they want on offense. How Donyell Marshall was able to drain 3 threes is perplexing, you would think of all the teams the Raptors would know of his abilities. Defenses lapses like allowing Marshall to shoot open threes and Raptor killer Varajeo to run rampant on the boards will kill you, and it did.
Unlike the Bucks game, Chris Bosh tried to be assertive but didn’t get many calls from the refs even when there was obvious contact. Bosh bailed out the defense a bunch of times by taking long range jumpers which set the Raptors back as that played right into the hands of Cleveland. Varajeo or Gooden will admit that they cannot stop Bosh in the post, so why Mitchell didn’t establish Bosh as an inside force early on is a mystery or perhaps just bad coaching. TJ Ford and Calderon haven’t played well in the last two games, both haven’t been able to break the defense down consistently enough to create chances for teammates and when they do manage to create, the shot is uncharacteristically missed.
Overall the Raptors played horrible transition defense, allowed too many offensive rebounds and didn’t establish an inside game, all of which worked out in Cleveland’s favor. The two bright spots were Juan Dixon’s play (24 pts on 10-18 FG) and Kris Humphries’ effort off the bench. Humphries has shown he has some offense in him and doesn’t lose his cool when he’s got the ball in the key. He’s definitely making a case for some consistent playing time.
Huge game coming up on Tuesday in Washington, division lead is at 3.5.
For all you techies, here’s an error message displayed on the front page of NBA.com today:
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