Jazz 93, Raptors 89 | Box Score | Quick Reaction
Here it is again, yet it stings like the first time.
Good news before bad news: The next time the Toronto Raptors see the Utah Jazz, they won’t have to worry about Rudy Gobert. Because DeMar DeRozan ended him in the fourth quarter of Wednesday’s game.
Now for the bad: That was the highlight of DeRozan’s night, the highlight of a tough fourth quarter for the Raptors, and an image that will probably fade for Raptors’ fans in the short-term, because it came late in a 93-89 loss. More bad: If the playoffs started today, the 7-6 Raptors would be outside of the playoff picture in a much improved Eastern Conference. That doesn’t matter this early, and the Raptors have had one of the league’s toughest schedules so far, but it speaks to a potentially smaller margin of error this year than in the last two.
If you’ve been watching the last two nights, you may realize that the Raptors are the Edward John Smith of navigating small margins of error.
It’s tough to know how to feel about Wednesday’s loss. On paper, a narrow loss to a quality Jazz team is less forgivable than the one a night prior to the undefeated defending champion Golden State Warriors. The way the Raptors choked away Wednesday’s game was also more objectionable. At the same time, the Raptors were on the second night of a road back-to-back that saw them play the champs tight to the wire a night before, then immediately travel through a time zone, then tip-off their next game less than 24 hours after the prior tip. Utah could have easily been circled as a “schedule loss,” and strangely, had the Raptors bowed out early and been blown out, most would have understood.
Instead, the Raptors were able to make up for their customary slow start, taking a lead into the half and into the fourth quarter. That put the microscope closer to the team’s play, and what could have been an acceptable loss by a larger margin became an unacceptable loss by a smaller margin. That’s a weird psychological quirk of how games are viewed and evaluated, but it’s where we are.
Like a night earlier in Oakland, there was plenty to second-guess about the Raptors’ play late in the game. These points should ring familiar.
The Raptors had to burn their last timeout too early – For a second night in a row, the Raptors couldn’t successfully inbound the ball, even coming out of a full timeout, and had to use their final break to regroup. In this case, it came with 23 seconds left, thanks to Gobert playing terrific defense to ensure DeRozan couldn’t receive the ball. Exactly like a night earlier, the Raptors opted to run a DeRozan isolation play out of the second timeout. He would dribble the ball off of his knee and out of bounds, allowing the Jazz to extend a two-point lead to four.
DeRozan carried far too big an offensive burden late – The Raptors were running their offense pretty creatively from the second quarter onward, a necessity of the Jazz giving up nothing easy and clearly playing with an edict to avoid their usual predilection to fouling. DeRozan was struggling to get to the line, and early on he opted to become a facilitator. He took five field-goal attempts and dished five dimes through three quarters, and while he was struggling to keep from fouling Rodney Hood (and his DeRozan impression) at the other end, he was at least playing within himself.
He took 10 of the team’s 20 field-goal attempts in the fourth quarter, got to the line on only one occasion, committed a turnover, and recorded just one assist. He used 12 possessions to score his 12 points, which isn’t bad itself, but it makes the Raptors very easy to defend when it’s clear he’s holding for his shot. His makes mostly came on strong takes where he was able to clear space, use a screen, or draw the defender off balance. His late misses came from 20, 15, 17, six, and eight feet, while his makes all came within 10 feet of the rim, and several of those misses were up against the length of a Jazz big.
Even with Gobert lurking – and Gobert got the better of him for the game despite the dunk – simply avoiding the paint was not an option. Neither was not looking for teammates at all off the bounce, something he had done so well earlier in the game and has been doing regularly this year.
It’s not all on DeRozan. He’s the team’s primary scoring option and head coach Dwane Casey clearly trusts him, as do his teammates. But for as nice as this offense can look for stretches, and as good a distributor as DeRozan can look, there have been several occasions on which the team devolves into DeRozan isolation-ball late. Avoiding that was supposed to be one of the reasons for the roster turnover that summer. The team should get some leash while they figure their endgame sets out, but it’d be nice to see them trying new things more often. The plays are there, they’re employed earlier in the game, so use them.
Questionable lineup decisions late – On Tuesday, it was an over-reliance on the Luis Scola-Jonas Valanciunas frontcourt duo in a match-up they weren’t well-suited for. This may seem a bit hypocritical a night later, but I actually disliked Casey’s decision to roll with the pairing in a much more suitable match-up late Wednesday.
Casey said after the game he stayed big, using the starting lineup for the bulk of the final seven minutes, because the Raptors “had to match their size.” The Jazz were playing Derrick Favors and Gobert, the former a really difficult check and the latter a dive-man dynamo. And Scola was awesome on offense – “I just make shots,” he said at halftime – shooting 10-of-15 for 22 points in 30 minutes.
But Valanciunas wasn’t at his best, and the Scola-Valanciunas pairing was struggling some when it came to pick-and-rolls involving Gobert. Valanciunas looked hesitant in the space between Gobert and the ball-handler, and Scola was occasionally late to help off of Favors and bump Gobert. A few first-half possessions seemed to haunt the pair into hesitation later, and it resulted in some easy looks for Favors. And, like Tuesday, the offensive edge of having both bigs out there was negated some by not giving them many touches and by their own poor rebounding performance.
Instead of going to their closing lineup – the starters with Cory Joseph in place of Scola – late, they played Joseph with Lowry a lot in the third and then staggered their minutes for all but 48 seconds of the fourth. The team’s best lineup saw less than a minute of total action, even though the Joseph-Lowry pairing outscored the Jazz by four points in their 11 minutes. The Jazz don’t have the personnel to match up at the one and two like that, and they seem to strongly prefer playing two bigs rather than making Gordon Hayward a small four.
You don’t “have” to match up with what another team is doing. You can use your own advantage and make them adjust to you. The Jazz outscored the Raptors 19-10 in the game’s final 6:20 (when Lowry came in for Joseph), and the Raptors weren’t getting the desired effect of their bigger lineup at either end. Against Gobert, better floor balance and spacing is probably more valuable than having an extra big to work the elbows or go inside.
It’s disappointing that the Raptors bowed to an opponent’s wishes in that regard.
The bench provided next to nothing – The Raptors have a day off before taking on the Lakers on Friday night. They could surely use a rest, having tasked their starters with an obscene workload over the course of 26 hours or so. Scola played 58 minutes in the back-to-back, Valanciunas 64, and Carroll, DeRozan, and Lowry 74, 74, and 76, respectively. The Raptors bench gave them next to nothing outside of a few solid James Johnson minutes and the usual two-way goodness from Cory Joseph. That’s a problem on a five-road-games-in-eight-days stretch.
So, yeah…
This one’s disappointing. The Raptors were right there for a second night in a row and really have only themselves, and maybe fatigue, to blame. That’s a tough reality, since the Raptors would have been justified in rolling over and resting up given the circumstances. DeRozan forced it way too much, Casey may have used sub-optimal lineups late, Lowry didn’t have his best game, the team was ice cold from outside – there’s a lot here that can be chalked up to a bad night or tired legs, but it hurts in a game where one or two corrected mistakes could have meant a victory.
They were a couple of possessions from defeating a pair of Western Conference playoff teams, the class of the league at one end of the floor each, and they came away 0-2 instead, falling to 0-3 on the road trip.
Rest up, Raptors. Friday’s game took on a lot more importance.
