Raptors 99, Heat 91 | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Podcast
For weeks now, Toronto Raptors fans have been waiting for their All-Star backcourt duo to take over. Kyle Lowry has played well but shot poorly, while DeMar DeRozan has been mired in an extended slump, first due to basketball cyborg Paul George and then due at least in part to a thumb injury. Game after game, whether the Raptors survived or they didn’t, and they mostly did, the refrain was the same: If they can manage without these guys at their best, imagine what they’ll look like when they get it going.
“It’s definitely scary. It shows you the potential we have. Once we get our rhythm it’s going to be a scary thing,” DeRozan said after Game 2 against the Indiana Pacers.
That quote could have just as well come after any game in the postseason. Lowry and DeRozan, who combined to average 44.7 points on 43.5 percent from the floor in the regular season, had combined for 45 points just twice in 11 games and had combined to shoot even 40 percent just once. That the Raptors were in the position for this to still be a conversation is somewhat remarkable, even if it’s exactly what the team tried to insulate itself for last summer.
A season ago, the Raptors were found wanting in the postseason, their offense-first mentality and a perceived lack of toughness dooming them. General manager Masai Ujiri went out and acquired tough, experienced, defense-first players to solidify that core, knowing that once the pressure was turned up in the postseason, the Raptors would have more depth, more grit, more versatility, and more ways to win. The way the postseason has played out is worrisome in the sense that Lowry and DeRozan, and the offense in general, have again struggled, but that the Raptors have survived speaks volumes about the efficacy of Ujiri’s additions.
Bismack Biyombo is filling in for an injured Jonas Valanciunas and providing back-line defensive help the team hasn’t had in years. Cory Joseph is spelling Lowry effectively, easing his workload, and taking on more ball-handling and scoring duties while also checking much bigger guards, like Dwyane Wade. DeMarre Carroll’s defense before he was injured Wednesday hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been better than anything the Raptors could muster last season against bulkier, score-first wings. Luis Scola’s role has been diminished and so he’s created a new one as a de facto assistant coach and motivational speaker. Even Norman Powell, a start-of-season afterthought who’s now fallen out of the rotation some, has helped swing crucial stretches of playoff games.
All the while, the story has focused on Lowry’s jumper and DeRozan’s sub-par play. It’s understandable, of course. The Raptors go as their stars go, and from what it looked like, they weren’t going to go as far as they hoped.
“I know we won’t advance if we don’t play better,” Lowry said back on May 4 after dropping the opening game of the series.
Nevermind that no matter who the Raptors call on has stepped up, that rookies are contributing, that Valanciunas was finally dominating, that the Raptors are allowing 1.8 fewer points per-100 possessions than in the regular season, that they’ve shown every last damn intangible on the cliche checklist in gutting out ugly win after ugly win. There’s long been the sense that if Lowry and DeRozan didn’t step up, the Raptors would only get so far, their depth already providing as big a boost as it possibly could. The playoffs to date had been unseemly and strange, but as DeRozan and Erik Spoelstra keep suggesting, beautiful. Despite abhorrent shooting from their two best players, the Raptors kept finding a way, and they’ve learned a ton about themselves because of it.
Those lessons and those moral – and real – victories are important, but they’re only positives so long as the Raptors are winning. The playoffs are a time of short windows and small samples, and the Raptors were running out of time for their stars to regress, all while fighting off potential impending regression from continually reaching deep into their quiver in the second round of the playoffs and finding contributions. That they were managing was incredible, but eventually they need to be at their best.
“I think I’ve played well overall I just haven’t shot well,” Lowry said defiantly, and correctly, before Wednesday’s game. “We’re in Game 5, second round. We’re both doing something right, I think. So we’ve just got to continue to try to score better…Even right now, we’re not playing well and I still think we have the opportunity to do something special and that’s the scary thing.”
In Game 5, in the most important game the Air Canada Centre has played home to in over a decade, the series and the season in the balance, Lowry and DeRozan broke through. If DeRozan warned of what the team would look like when they were clicking, they showed it here. If Lowry thinks they just had to score better, they did so here. DeRozan turned in his best scoring performance of the postseason, dropping 34 points on just 22 field-goal attempts. Lowry shot a shaky 9-of-25, but that line’s much better when the four threes, six assists, and game-high 10 rebounds are factored in. Lowry maybe didn’t shoot well inside the arc again, but it was a KLOE game, his second in three outings and a mighty encouraging sign about how this series may play out.
“I couldn’t tell you,” DeRozan laughed with Lowry when asked what changed. “We just told ourselves we’re just going to continue to be aggressive and it was going to come back around.”
Come back around it did. In the end, they combined for 59 points, seven more than in any other game in the playoffs, with 14 rebounds, eight assists, and five steals. The Raptors were a plus-25 with Lowry on the floor, and while DeRozan-led bench units struggled, they were (narrowly) enough to hang on. And it was the two stars successfully closing things out down the stretch.
“They’re our guys,” Casey said, vindicated for a night in his earlier ride-or-die statements. “You don’t forget how to score the basketball. It’s gonna come back. When? You hope it’s within the series. But it’s gonna come up. And we have faith in those guys. They’ve carried us the entire season. Not one time did we doubt their ability.”
The Heat, despite grit and persistence of their own, didn’t quite have enough to match the Raptors in a more complete form. The Heat shot 40.3 percent, hit just six threes, and coughed the ball up 15 times, wasting a lot of the value they got on the offensive glass and at the free-throw line. They insisted on matching big for far too long, watching as Biyombo laid waste to the Heat offense, unafraid of Udonis Haslem or the bones of Amar’e Stoudemire. Wade wasn’t quite able to take over, though he certainly threatened, Joe Johnson’s shot remains downright early-series-DeRozan-esque, and Luol Deng left injured (along with Carroll). Goran Dragic was off his game, too, with Biyombo representing quite a deterrent to his dribble penetration and the transition defense as a whole doing well to slow him down.
Instead, it was Josh Richardson bombing away from deep that let the Heat trim what was once a Raptors playoff-high 20-point lead down to one in the fourth quarter. It’s a huge credit to Miami that they did so, and the Raptors fully understand that they’re simply not going to run a second-round playoff team off the floor for 48 minutes.
That’s why starts like the one the Raptors had, where they kept their foot on the gas as long as they could, are paramount in a series like this. “Game of runs,” and all of that, but it’s much easier to manage those runs from ahead than behind, especially when you employ a defense-first center hell-bent on putting the Heat offense in a Coquina Clutch and then dropping a To Di World over its lifeless corpse. In the Heat’s own estimation, letting the Raptors get comfortable early – they led 26-10 when Lowry first checked out at 1:40 of the first quarter – was their downfall. By that time, Lowry had already hit a pair of threes and got to the line twice, and DeRozan was at 10 points on seven field-goal attempts. They had scored 19 of the team’s first 23 points, “built a rhythm,” and they’d get hot again down the stretch, trading buckets for the team’s final 13.
“They’re All-Stars,” Wade said. “It was going to happen at some point.”
To be clear, this wasn’t necessarily a case of only Lowry and DeRozan showing up. This wasn’t Wade willing the team to a win single-handedly. Biyombo was instrumental, for example, and the Raptors who didn’t make the All-Star team shot moderately well in their limited opportunities. Dwane Casey coached a smart game, too, adjusting very well from Game 4 and tweaking his rotation patterns to try to protect against some earlier weak spots. What matters most, though, because it hasn’t happened much and offense has been at a premium all series, is that Lowry and DeRozan combined for 59 of 99 points, completely taking over a pivotal game and its most pivotal moments.
When Ujiri overhauled the roster in the summer, the idea was that the Raptors would be able to win ugly, and win when the offense wasn’t there. They’ve shown that to be true throughout the playoffs. Ujiri’s vision, though, also included the team being propped up by the dominance of a pair of star guards. Finally, 12 games in, that part of Ujiri’s vision was realized. Never was it more on display than when Lowry hit a pair of massive pull-up jumpers on back-to-back possessions late in the fourth, while the defense locked Miami down for four points in the closing 1:54. Star-led scoring and team-wide defense, grinding out playoff basketball games. Just like they drew it up, at long last.
“My guy over here (DeRozan) just told me to be big and be aggressive and be me,” Lowry said.
And with Lowry being Lowry, and with DeRozan being DeRozan, the Raptors were able to be the Raptors. If they can do it once more in the next two games, they’re going to the Eastern Conference Finals, a decidedly un-Raptors place to wind up.
