What gives with the Raptors? They can blow the shit out of the Bulls in Chicago, lambaste Jersey into oblivion but lose at home to the Magic? All I can say is that all bets are off on what’s going to happen against Utah on Wednesday. Damn confusing to say the least. So what happened tonight that sent the Chicago fans heading for the exists in the third quarter and the Bulls fans demanding a trade for Kobe? Amazing happened, that’s right, amazing. To be more specific, the jumpers were falling and the defense was tighter than a Bulls ass in fly-season (got this one from Deadwood on HBO). To be even more specific, TJ Ford was distributing the ball like an expensive sprinkler on a nice summer lawn and Jamario Moon was reminding the Bulls of what Scottie Pippen felt like. Yes, I just compared Jamario Moon to Scottie Pippen and no, I’m not insane, it’s OK to do that as long as you’re speaking of one game.
I have to give Sam credit for listening to the voice in his head about starting Jamario. On the radio post-game show Moon talked about how the coaching staff brought him into the lineup in order to guard Luol Deng (2-8 FG) to which the lanky forward gladly obliged. But it’s not just the man-defense he used on Deng that was amazing (Toronto Raptors, where amazing happens), it was his clogging of the passing arteries and supplying enough pressure on the doubles that made this a great defensive game for Moon. Jamario punctuated his night with a dunk of the most massive variety in the fourth sending the remaining three Chicago fans and Bulls color-man Johnny Red Kerr heading for the exists. Aaah, it’s good to be Raps fan.
This paragraph is for everyone who thinks TJ Ford is “erratic”. 2-3 FG, 14 AST, 1 TO. What’s that hater? Got nothing to say? Ford has been the most consistent Raptor this year, no other Raptor has shown up in all seven games and TJ has carried the team on his back when they’re struggling and has been a pass-first PG distributing the ball brilliantly, it’s unfortunate that many of his passes are ended up being converted into bricks but that’s not his fault. Today everyone was hitting their shots including Delfino, Kapono, Bargnani and Parker and TJ Ford took a step back and fed the hot hands instead of carrying the Raptors by taking over offensively. The jumpers were falling so regularly that Calderon didn’t even attempt a shot, opting instead to just pass the ball around and collect nine easy assists. This is Raptors basketball. It primarily only works when your jumper is falling but nonetheless, this is Raptors basketball.
The spacing tonight was excellent, it’s never been too much of a problem but we made it really hard for the Bulls to defend us by moving the ball East-West and always setting hard screens to get our shooters open. Sounds so simple that it’s hard to imagine why we can’t do this every single game. The Bulls and Scott Skiles hardly made any adjustments to counter the Raptors’ shooters and were almost hoping for us to cool down so that they’d start their run. It just never happened. The Bulls had their looks and missed their fair share of makeable shots but our defense was always closing out shooters and challenging shots, even AP managed to cause enough turbulence on Duhon/Deng/Hinrich jumpers causing them to miss shots they normally make.
I didn’t mention Bosh in this post because I want to keep it under a 1000 words. But he played solid against Ben Wallace and didn’t concede a thing to the former DPOY. An efficient 14 points for CB4 on a night where he could’ve just stayed in bed and done “View Source” on websites and wondered how they’re made (see, that’s what he does in his spare time once he’s done getting his ass handed to him by the CPU at Semi-Pro level in Madden, Chris if you’re reading this and I know you are, I challenge you to a game of Madden 2008, I pick the Chiefs).
Watch out for the podcast, it’s all dependent on me figuring out how to use Skype. Until Wednesday (or maybe even earlier), later.
On a completely non-NBA-Raptors related note, this clip of Jerry Seinfeld on Larry King Live is pretty funny. Latch on the most relevant Raptors feed on the planet.
