First up, check the quick reaction as my thoughts are summed up in enough detail there that there’s very little for this post to do.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way: the Raptors have lost 4 out of 5 to the projected top two teams in the East. That’s not a good sign and serves up plenty of ammunition to the “you’re not real” crowd, and that’s entirely fair. You have to beat the good teams to be considered good. That doesn’t diminish what the Raptors have been able to accomplish this season, and given the context of a back-to-back on the road without DeRozan, the loss does have a huge asterisk next to it. That asterisk is made even larger by some very shady calls going Chicago’s way on the night (30-20 foul differential), but that’s not the reason we lost.
[aside header=”Stink”]
“We were due for a stinker and we had one tonight”
– Dwane Casey
[/aside]
The six-point lead the Raptors held at the break was quite similar to the 7-point one they held at home against these same Bulls. A deserved edge created due to crisp player movement capped off by good fundamentally sound perimeter passing, all executed in what seemed a sound offensive structure. There was the ever-so-important focus on playing inside-out, this time though Jonas Valanciunas (career-high 13 shots in the first half, 4 in the second), who was being checked by Pau Gasol and doing wonders against him. They were even out-hustling the Bulls which not many teams do. Unlike last time when the Raptors crumbled right out of the gate in the third quarter against an increasingly physical Bulls defense, they held on for slightly longer.
To be precise, they held on until the bench unit of Lou Williams and Greivis Vasquez came in. Williams was torched by Aaron Brooks’ quickness which was compounded by Williams being very poor at dealing with screens, especially ones set by solid screen-setters like Gasol, Noah and Gibson. Valanciunas isn’t a great hedging big man and with Johnson benched for the second half (some niggling injury, I presume), Brooks found his routes to the rim easily. On the other end, Vasquez and Williams took such poor shots, that it not only deflated the momentum built in the first half, it spurred the Bulls who got long rebounds and breaks out of them.
Kyle Lowry and Terrence Ross’s play was the most consistent on the night. I felt Lowry left it too late to take over this game and deferred to the brilliant James Johnson and the improving Terrence Ross too much. Once the Bulls defense up-shifted in the second half after Joakim Noah was energized and Jimmy Butler remembered that he’s playing for the max, the Raptors offense was in a strait jacket, and the likes of Williams and Vasquez felt the need to dig them out individually rather than as a team. Lowry needed to have 12-15 assists in this game because what the Raptors desperately needed were easy buckets, and they got none of them.
The offense was too frictional to ever be cohesive. There were too many late shot-clock situations, balls being deflected, a big nervously clutching the ball with 10 on the clock looking to pass it out to a guard who is too far away. Those were the type of possessions that the Raptors had in key periods of the second half, notably in that third quarter when they went 6:09 without scoring. Compare this to the Bulls, and it was night-and-day. Derrick Rose was on fire and torched everyone including Lowry, and I still can’t explain why Lou Williams gets a shot at guarding him but Ross doesn’t You’ll recall that even though Ross has zero success guarding guys like Jimmy Butler, or any well-built three, he’s decent at staying in front of quick point guards because of his length. I’m not suggesting he would’ve stopped Rose, or even Brooks, but at least he would’ve had a better chance than poor Williams.
Any time a player is on course to have a career night in the first half and then gets only four shots in the second is going to be a topic of discussion. I realize that Thibodeau switched Noah on Valanciunas in the second half, but that should not mean that the latter gets ignored by the offense. He had had some very strong showings in the last 10 days, especially in pick ‘n roll play and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single dedicated pick’ n roll play for Valanciunas in this game. Ignoring assets that can clearly provide benefit seems to be Casey’s hallmark, and just like he inconceivably didn’t play Landry Fields for all this time despite the man clearly having value, he continues to avoid the obvious strengths of Valanciunas.
Let me pause here. You can dump the ball into Valanciunas in the post and he might score, or he might not. The Bulls will accept that play because it puts pressure on one man in the defense, who they probably feel quite confident can get a stop, say, 60% of the time. However, if you put him in pick ‘n roll situations and have him catching the ball going towards the rim, whether on a side PnR bounce-pass or a hi-lo, he has a better chance of finishing, putting greater pressure on the defense by invoking help, and of drawing fouls. When was the last time the Raptors got an opposing big man into foul trouble? I can’t even recall an instance this year, but it seems to happen to us far too frequently.
I can’t tell with mathematical certainty whether the “small” ball lineup of Patterson and Valanciunas against Noah and Gasol caused the Raptors to give up 24 second-chance points. It probably didn’t help and it certainly didn’t give us an edge on offense (which is what small-ball lineups are supposed to do) and was an instance where instead of hockey lineups featuring two struggling guards playing selfishly, throwing Valanciunas into the mix and working the inside was the smarter play.
We need to pay homage to Patrick Patterson’s efforts in the game. He battled Taj Gibson in the block, contested every shot and fought for every rebound. He’s found his knack of moving without the ball and getting into key areas to get his shot off, and it’s a shame that Vasquez and Williams have adopted a shoot-first approach to the offense, leaving Patterson to softly walk away after setting a screen on a play where he should be further involved.
[aside header=”Casey on Rose”]
“He’s all-pro, all-star, whatever you want to call him, he’s a great player and he made some tough shots. Even in that stretch, we made him work and he made tough shots but your help’s got to be there when it’s supposed to be there and you can’t fall asleep.”
– Dwane Casey
[/aside]
Terrence Ross’s three gave the Raptors slight breathing room heading into the fourth, but it only proved to be temporary respite against the inevitable: Derrick Rose taking over. If you want to make yourself feel better, you can tell yourself that Rose was on absolute fire. His 29 felt a lot bigger than Lowry’s 34, probably because every single one of his shots either subdued a Raptors run, or hammered a nail in the coffin. Rose had 15 in the fourth and Lowry had 18, but the Bulls did end up scoring 49 ridiculous points in the frame on 70% shooting (and we’re a defense-first team?). Everyone was on fire for them, Mirotic had 8 against Chuck Hayes, and I have no idea why Hansbrough didn’t check him after doing a decent job earlier. Butler had 9 and drove shoulder-first against anyone, and forced switches off of James Johnson to matchup against Williams, Ross, or Lowry, all of whom he burned. As for Brooks, he just used his quickness against a tiring Raptors defense that couldn’t move laterally.
The roadtrip starts off with a loss, and much like the back-to-back in Cleveland, the Raptors play three good quarters and come up short with cloudy officiating being a topic. It’s not doomsday. We just need DeRozan back after the holidays to get us through the remaining five games on the roadtrip so we don’t have Williams and Vasquez assume the role of heroes.
