The Toronto Raptors held their lone practice between playoff series at BioSteel Centre on Monday, and the talk of the day was the quick turnaround from the Indiana Pacers to the Miami Heat, two fundamentally different offenses and defenses, no easy adjustment. Out of necessity, the Raptors are turning the page quicker than your boy with the new DeLillo once the season’s done.
No counting chips at the table
The Raptors won a playoff series for the second time ever on Sunday night. The game ended around 11 p.m. So how long did they have to enjoy their victory?
“Celebrate quick, enjoy it for about — I told the guys celebrate until about midnight,” head coach Dwane Casey said. “Now we gotta start thinking about Miami.”
That’s absolutely necessary, and it might be better, anyway. The Raptors had literally minutes to exhale before turning their focus, and – not that this team was necessarily at risk of it – there’s no opportunity for the Raptors to get complacent with achieving the next in an escalating series of goals. Appreciate, learn, sure, but the Raptors aren’t quite where they planned on getting just yet.
“I was reading the book last night,” Kyle Lowry said. “I didn’t really celebrate the win too much because it was such a quick turnaround, prepping for them is important, we’re in Round 2 and everything we did last series really doesn’t matter.”
There aren’t going to be many complaints from around BioSteel or the Air Canada Centre. The energy was a focused one as the practice session wrapped up, an afternoon after 75-page binders littered the locker room, already opened and leafed through in some cases. And for those who didn’t crack them as they undressed, it wasn’t long until they did.
“Really quickly,” Norman Powell said. “As soon as I got back to my apartment, I started looking at the scouting report and the playbooks for them.”
To be fair, Powell could probably be on a team that went 82-0 and 16-0 in the playoffs, average 40 points on 100-percent shooting and still find something to motivate his grind in the immediate aftermath.
Powell ready to guard role model
Powell dove into the scouting report quickly, but if he draws the assignment of guarding Dwyane Wade, he won’t need all that much tape. Wade is someone Powell looked up to, and it stands to reason that the rookie will know some of the tricks in Wade’s bag. Not that it will be any easier to guard him as a result.
“It’s going to be fun. Dwyane Wade is one of the guys I modeled my game after growing up,” Powell said. “He was a role model for me. It’s going to be fun for me in the minutes I do get to guard him. I’ve been watching him my whole life, so I’m looking forward to the challenge.”
He’s a significantly different task than Paul George, against whom Powell did a pretty stellar job for short stretches in Round 1.
“He’s really different,” Powell said, recalling that Wade and Erik Spoelstra immediately called for a Wade post-up the only other time Powell was opposite the veteran. “He’s really crafty with the ball and a great post-up player. He uses his body so well. He finishes and gets to the line, and he’s a great pump-fake guy. It will be really a test for me not to get in early foul trouble. I have to stay down in his pump-fakes.”
Powell mentioned, by the way, that he’ll see George in L.A. this offseason. We know Powell’s set to spend some time working out with DeMar DeRozan and Damian Lillard this offseason, and adding George to the mix would only stand to help Powell improve further. And last summer’s workouts with DeRozan, a similar player to Wade, should give Powell some additional experience.
“Yeah, that’s what will help me, guarding a guy like DeMar in the summer, working out with him,” Powell said. “He loves the pump-fake too, so it’s helped me stay disciplined, not going for shot fakes and things like that. Both guys are crafty in the mid-range area.”
Don’t get carried away just yet, though – Casey isn’t willing to commit to Powell on Wade publicly just yet.
“If that happens, if that matchup is there, if we have that matchup, again, it’s a challenge,” Casey said. “Dwyane Wade and Joe Johnson is a challenge for any team. They’re veteran scorers, they’re born scorers, they’ve done it for a long period of time, in the playoffs. It’s a challenge for whoever guards him. I’m not saying Norm’s gonna guard him, but whoever guards him, it’s going to be a challenge.”
Powell should see time on Wade. I think the Raptors will stick with their moderately effective new starting five, bringing Powell off the bench for some defensive energy in slightly sheltered minutes. The Raptors will roll with three wings or two guards and two wings fairly often – they’ll probably stick to a three-big rotation – and Powell will be prominent in those, probably seeing time on a number of different Heat players.
Former teammates square off
One of the more fun storylines of the series will be the point guard battle between former teammates Kyle Lowry and Goran Dragic. They’re still close despite having battled for minutes over two seasons in Houston, going at it in practice daily.
“Me and Goran, we have a great relationship,” Lowry said. “We shared some time together in Houston and it’s definitely going to be a good challenge, it’s going to be fun. At the end of the day, he’s still a guy I respect, he’s earned the respect of the fellow NBA players. I’ve watched him be my backup, to the guy starting over me, and him going to Miami and playing well…His game’s changed, my game’s changed. It was like five years ago so we’re both different players. You can watch film and go back to what you saw in practice but it’s a different team, different sets, different approaches.”
Those practices? Pretty intense, according to DeMarre Carroll, who played five games with the 2010-11 Rockets.
“It was great man. You got one feisty bulldog and then you got another feisty European so it was great,” Carroll said. “Back then I wasn’t really playing so I could just sit on the bench and watch these guys and it was great.”
Lowry and Dragic have squared off 11 times since Lowry departed Houston, with Lowry winning seven, and Carroll correctly pointed out that both players are far different – and improved – since their time together.
Lowry health update
Of course, Lowry struggled shooting the ball in the opening round, and that’s a pretty major concern heading into a series against the Heat, where Lowry’s offense is crucial. For anyone curious as to what’s going on with Lowry’s shooting, Zach Lowe said on the Lowe Post podcast on Monday that he’s not hearing Lowry’s hurt.
“The murmurs I’m hearing are that his elbow is fine, and that this is just a slump or something else is going on mentally with him,” Lowe said.
For his part, Masai Ujiri said on Sportsnet 590 this evening that Lowry and DeRozan are “too good for this to go on” and that he expects better against the Heat.
