Plenty to second-guess in would-be moral victory against Warriors

"Moral victories is for minor league coaches."

by

Tuesday’s incredibly entertaining 115-110 loss to the Golden State Warriors poses an interesting question for the Toronto Raptors: In their third consecutive season of being a competitive, playoff-bound, above-.500 team, do moral victories still exist?

If they do, then Tuesday’s game was the definition of moral victory.

In the second game of a west coast road trip, the Raptors visited the undefeated defending NBA champions, a team nearly at full health, employing the reigning MVP and league’s leading scorer, the NBA Finals MVP, the runner up for Most Improved Player and Defensive Player of the Year, and several other major, enviable contributors, all coming off of two days of rest. Not only did the Raptors claw back from the brink, having taken the Warriors’ best punch in the second quarter while the Raptors kept their hands down around their waists, they kept things close enough late that some were calling the result a split decision. It wasn’t quite the double-knockout whereby the Warriors retain their title on a technicality, a la the original Rocky, but it was hardly the Mr. T-Rocky or Ivan Drago-Apollo Creed battle that most expected. The Raptors were floored, bruised, busted open, got stitched up at half time and came back out to fight like hell. That’s becoming a lovable staple of this team.

There’s honor in a spirited defeat like Tuesday’s, especially against a juggernaut like the Warriors that was yet to play a game with a margin of victory less than eight points, a team outscoring opponents by more than 16 points per-100 possessions. They are the favorite to end all favorites, a veritable Goliath that thinks itself an underdog and has somehow been given cause for further hunger, insulted at claims their championship was driven by anything other than a singular dominance. There may not be a team in the last decade or two that’s played at this level for this long a stretch – the Warriors are 95-20, including playoffs, dating back to the start of last year. Steph Curry is a remarkable piece of breathing basketball artwork without a contemporary. Draymond Green is a complete original, someone no team has a match-up answer for. The team has benefited from great coaching, unprecedented continuity, and total buy-in from a deep, talented, and versatile roster.

Losing narrowly on the road to a team this good is a win. Literally nobody has played the Warriors tighter, save for the Nets, who forced an overtime before rolling over in the extra frame. The Warriors don’t suffer challengers lightly. They don’t deal in close calls and uncertainties and coin flips. They’ve gamed the coin by this point. To make matters worse, the Warriors played probably their best defensive game of the season on Tuesday as far as coverages and assignments go.

The Raptors did several things well Tuesday, perhaps providing a road map for the next team that has an upset in its grasp.

The lone area to identify as a potential edge before the game was Toronto’s ability to get to the free-throw line, something the Warriors are occasionally willing to oblige opponents in and aren’t elite at themselves. The Raptors took 39 free-throw attempts to 27 for the Warriors, providing a 12-point edge. Some felt during the course of the game that the Raptors were the beneficiaries of loose whistles (more on that in a bit), but the Raptors had a clear plan to attack Golden State aggressively. That worked about as well as they could have hoped, and they leveraged an offensive rebounding advantage to corral 12 second chances leading to 14 points. There were also real instances of shot making, including some nifty actions that created space where the Warriors aren’t often wont to allow it.

The Raptors didn’t play magnificently on defense, but they capitalized on Warrior miscues, worked their tails off in transition, and generally did an effective job closing out on 3-point shooters. Cory Joseph, in particular, had another terrific night on the defensive end of the floor. The Warriors are going to hit threes, and 11-of-29 isn’t a bad mark by any means – the Raptors would gladly take it most nights – but some were degree-of-difficulty shots.

It wasn’t all great, because again, the level of competition couldn’t have been higher. And there were some, umm, lapses on the defensive end.

The Warriors had 14 second-chance points on three fewer offensive rebounds because everything they grab gets kicked back outside the arc, whereas the Raptors were a chilly 6-of-18 from outside. Toronto conceded control of the pace of the game in the second half, too, with a 103.5-possession estimate for the game leaning far toward Golden State’s preferred mode of play. The Warriors are far more effective scoring off of steals (73.9 effective field-goal percentage) than misses (58.1) or makes (48.8), and the Raptors committed 20 turnovers, half coming by way of the steal (Golden State also had 20 turnovers, something they accept as a function of their style of play). Curry reigned hell fire, scoring 37 points on 23 shots and adding nine dimes. Because dammit if they guy isn’t one of the best three players in the basketball universe right now. 

And still, with several miscues, the Warriors shooting well enough, and an abhorrent stretch of play in the second quarter (I may double back to this tomorrow), the Raptors nearly stole one.

So again, the question becomes whether the Raptors are at a point where playing the champs better than anyone else is something to talk away happy about. Because the flip side of that is that they had the champs, and they lit the upset slip away. Now, it’s the Warriors, so as Dom Toretto would advise, “You never had me. You never had your car.” And that’s fair. The Warriors are the favorites in almost any game situation, because they’re the Warriors. The fact remains that the Raptors were tied as late as midway through the fourth, were down one with 38 seconds to go, and were within a possession until the six-second mark. It was right there. Right. There.

How you look at the way the final few minutes played out might say something about you. It might not, I don’t know, I’m not your shrink. But you’re welcome to assign deeper meaning to your own interpretation or the interpretation of others. The Raptors either earned a major moral victory by being in that situation, suffered a moral blow by choking away the situation, or were the victims of some elaborate conspiracy that muddles the grey area between those two extremes.

So let’s start here: The Raptors may have been hosed on two late calls.

Let’s follow with this: The NBA is not out to get the Raptors. Believe me, the fact that I likely have to write a third “NBA admits late officiating error” post tomorrow and it’s only mid-November annoys me, too. I also understand that my general refusal to get up in arms over officiating can sometimes make the reactions of those who are angry even worse. It’s not my intent. I just don’t engage in referee hand-wringing. I truly believe that if an objective person scoured over every game, they’d find that most games are called relatively evenly, or as close as is humanly possible given the constraints on officials. Our rooting interests color that, as do our cognitive biases. Calls made late in close games are the most recent, the most primary, and the most argumentative. They’re under a greater microscope and we care more about them, so of course it’s going to feel like the outcome of a single call is reflective of the entire game or season or league-wide agenda. But I think most games, including this one, are called pretty evenly.

Having said that, two calls late Tuesday were tough to swallow.

The first won’t be subject to the league’s official review, as it happened with 2:02 remaining. In a play almost identical to the one from Sunday that the league admitted an error on, Cory Joseph was once again whistled for a loose ball foul on an offensive rebounding situation. Like Sunday, replays strongly suggested Joseph plucked the ball from Klay Thompson cleanly. Thompson would hit one of two free throws – the Warriors were in the bonus – extending the lead to three.

(Note: There may also be a Curry travel at the 1:28 mark. I can’t tell if I’m overreacting to a liberal pivot or seeing a walk.)

And then with 15 seconds left and the Raptors again down one, Kyle Lowry was whistled for an illegal screen.

Perhaps coloring the referee’s decision was that Lowry had engaged in two other 50-50 offensive foul calls on prior plays without a whistle. Officials should call every play as an independent event and not keep a sort of running tally like that, but it’s possible that leaning against a foul call earlier subconsciously suggested the referee lean the other way this time around.

In any case, Lowry’s foul on Andre Iguodala is a tough one to call in real time. It’s a tough one to call with the benefit of replay, too, as Lowry appears to trap Iguodala’s arm some while Iguodala also appears to invite the contact.

Whatever your feeling on the call – my thought is that it’s an illegal screen, but one that’s tough to justify calling at this point in the game – this one hurt far more. The Raptors were down three after Curry sunk the free throws, putting them in a very tough situation with no timeouts.

That tough situation is further reason why I’m not a believer in chalking things up to officiating. Those in boxing and MMA are partial to saying “you can’t leave it up to the judges,” meaning fighters have to decisively win fights, go for a knockout or submission, to avoid the chance for an unexpected outcome at the margins. Similarly, the Raptors could have avoided needing that call to go their way. Here are three other factors that have me more upset than the final foul call:

The second quarter – Again, I might go deeper on this tomorrow, but Dwane Casey stuck with a Luis Scola-Jonas Valanciunas frontcourt far longer than there was any reason to. It looked like a horrid match-up on paper and it played out exactly as expected. Still, the duo played 18 minutes together, getting outscore by seven points. What’s worse, there was a stretch of 4:31 late in the second quarter where the starters were completely torched by the Warriors’ starters with Festus Ezeli in place of Andrew Bogut. The Warriors scored on 9-of-12 field goal attempts and collected two of their own misses, meaning the Raptors got a single stop over a 4:31 stretch. Not all of that is on the bigs – the Raptors didn’t even bother to give either a touch in that time – but that 21-8 run may have made the task of coming back too large.

The Raptors had no timeouts – Casey used his final timeout with 88 seconds left, far earlier than most coaches burn their final break. That’s because immediately coming out of a full timeout, they were unable to inbound the ball.

So Casey burned his last 20-second timeout, and the Raptors were able to inbound the ball. To Joseph, who gave it to DeMar DeRozan for a drive right at a terrific defender in Green, who stole the ball.

[gfy]LightheartedShyKob[/gfy]

Lowry went for a quick two – We don’t know for sure what play the Raptors were attempting to run when Lowry was called for a foul up one. It certainly looked like they going for a quick two, then giving the Warriors possession. Considering the Warriors employ Curry to shoot free throws in the event the Raptors missed and had to foul, and given the general insanity of the Warriors’ offense, I probably would have opted to hold for the last shot here. It’s riskier in a way, because it boils thing down to a single possession, but the Raptors play with that mentality and style late in games anyway, and a single shot to beat the Warriors is probably the best chance anyone can hope for in Golden State.

And I definitely would have shot a three to tie with six seconds left, when Lowry sprinted directly at Green and was blocked. Lowry was trying to draw an and-one to tie the game and, failing that, come away with two points and the chance to foul. But it was so late, the Raptors without a timeout to advance the ball, and the Warriors so good at the stripe, that this seemed like an accidental release of a white flag.

All of that is to say, this can’t be hung on one or two bad calls late. It’s unfortunate, to be sure, but there are plenty of reasons the Raptors lost Tuesday, not the least of which is that the Warriors are the best team most of us have ever seen.

Whether you want to take Tuesday as a moral victory, a bitter disappointment, or a rallying cry against the NBA bureaucracy is entirely up to you.

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