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Pre-game news and notes: Carroll and Deng are both playing, Heat start Winslow

DeMarre Carroll is a warrior.

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The Toronto Raptors have a chance to punch their ticket to the Eastern Conference Final on Friday night. They’ve never been there before, and they’ve already matched the furthest they’ve ever made it in the playoffs at “three wins in the second round.” Technically, because the first-round extended to seven games in the time since, they’ve already set a franchise record for playoff wins, and they’ll set the mark for playoff games tonight.

The goal, however, is not to top 21 years of futility. The job is not done, and this team has long considered itself one of the two best teams in the conference. It hasn’t been the prettiest roads to get to this point, with injuries, slumps, no-shows, and ineffectiveness all setting in at times. Plus, they’ve played two pretty good teams, particularly at the defensive end. The Raptors haven’t been their best, and that’s at times been frustrating, but it’s hard to be at your best when the opponent is trying to be at theirs night-in, night-out, and as much as I prefer to be coldly analytical a lot of the time, all that matters in the postseason is getting the Ws. There is no sample for things to even out over. It’s win now, however ugly, however it needs to get done, or go the hell home.

The Raptors don’t seem intent on going home anytime soon. The Heat probably aren’t, either, and so Game 6 should be one hell of a fight.

The game tips off at 8 p.m. from American Airlines Arena. ESPN has the game in the U.S., with Dave Pasch, Hubie Brown, and Lisa Salters on the call, while Sportsnet has the Canadian broadcast and TSN 1050 has radio rights. Monty McCutchen, Sean Corbin, and Marc Davis are your officials.

Required reading
Here’s what you need ahead of Game 6, assuming you haven’t been keeping up.

*Tamberlyn has your very in-depth game preview, and Will and I teed up the game on the podcast today, too.
*Hassan Whiteside has been ruled out for Game 6. Jonas Valanciunas is progressing but there’s no change in his status. That means more juggling of the very interesting center-or-no-center dynamic.
*DeMarre Carroll and Luol Deng are both game-time decisions with wrist injuries. Carroll did not sound like a guy intent on sitting, and there’s no structural damage, so…good to go? Deng doesn’t have any structural damage, either, so…same?
*Cooper did another tactical deep dive on how the team’s handled the end of Game 5. He and Zarar have been killing the play-by-play breakdowns.
*Kyle Lowry said Friday he can play all 48 if need be. He won’t, but it sure would help.

The homie Michael Pina wrote more about Lowry’s importance, as did the mega-smart John Schuhmann.

Remembering to mention this time: I’ve been doing semi-occasional TV spots for CTV during the playoffs. I helped preview tonight’s game, and you can find the video (plus all my usual radio hits) here.

Raptors updates
Let’s focus on what’s most important first: If DeMarre Carroll can’t go, Bruno Caboclo will be active. The long-con is about to finally pay off with Caboclo making a surprise start at the three and shedding all of the feigned inexperience of the last two seasons.

If I’m being honest, pegging down the rotation is nearly impossible without knowing Carroll’s status. My guess would be that if Carroll can’t go, Norman Powell draws the start with somewhat of a quick leash. Terrence Ross would still be the first wing off the bench, but James Johnson would almost certainly factor in as a combo-forward for duty on Dwyane Wade and Joe Johnson. Dwane Casey would probably continue rotating those three until they found a group that worked, and he may even get more aggressive with Cory Joseph’s minutes, since the point guard has done decent spot-work on the much bigger Wade. One thing a Carroll absence would make difficult is going small – the team could still do it based on personnel (using Johnson in the frontcourt with Patrick Patterson), but they’d be spreading the wing minutes pretty thin by doing so for moderate stretches.

If Carroll plays, the rotation should look pretty similar to Game 5. The Raptors stayed big and it mostly worked, with traditional four-five lineups (with Patterson-Biyombo) working well for the second game in a row. The Heat’s small groups outscored the Raptors when on the floor again, but the Raptors continue to be able to defend them, mostly, so long as Justise Winslow is out there for Biyombo to help off of comfortably. The Heat went without a center for 15 minutes, and they might be able to push that to 20 or so in Game 6, forcing the Raptors to consider matching small. The Raptors can do that, but they give up size at every spot going small-against-small. There are no perfect options, of course, as Jason Thompson and Lucas Nogueira didn’t exactly blow anybody away in their stints (they weren’t awful, they just weren’t particularly effective, either). Tough questions, these. Hard things are hard.

The guess here is that Carroll plays. He played in the playoffs last year with a hip pointer, turf toe, and a knee sprain he said would have cost him four weeks if it happened in the regular season. He also sounded like Alex McKechnie and company will have to knock him out and tie him up to keep him from playing. My money’s on Carroll fighting through it, and maybe using the old Cowboy Bob Orton move and clocking Wade with his cast (no, he’s not in a cast).

DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A MAN SITTING OUT? No.

Here’s what the rotation could look like, assuming Bruno Caboclo and Jonas Valanciunas are inactive:

PG: Kyle Lowry, Cory Joseph, (Delon Wright)
SG: DeMar DeRozan, Norman Powell
SF: DeMarre Carroll, Terrence Ross, Bruno Caboclo
PF: Patrick Patterson, (James Johnson), (Luis Scola), (Jason Thompson)
C: Bismack Biyombo, Lucas Nogueira, Jonas Valanciunas

Check back before tip off to confirm the starters.

UPDATE, kind of:


How do you not love this guy?

UPDATE TWO: Fueled by Coloring Book and his Coloring Book Jacket, Carroll says he’s playing.

Heat updates
The Heat are just as tough to figure with Deng’s status up in the air. And if you think Carroll’s important to guarding Wade, well, remember that big game DeRozan had on Wednesday with Deng limited and then out for the second half? Well…

Like Carroll, it sounds like Deng wants to go, though the team has been less forward in their optimism.


If Deng can go, I’d expect the Heat to push going small even more than in Game 5, as small groups have been their best looks two games in a row. There’s a limit to how long they can play like that, but I think they can push it a bit more, and they pretty much can’t play Amar’e Stoudemire anymore. He’s been brutal in back-to-back games, to the point that I think Josh McRoberts will draw the start in Game 6 – Udonis Haslem is an option, too, but McRoberts is the best bet to pull Biyombo at least a little away from the rim. Although Spoelstra is suggesting no change. OK, then.


If Deng can’t go, things get…dicey. The Heat have three centers, and they may have to stay big. They don’t really have the wing depth to play small the way they’d like to for big minutes without Deng. Winslow presents spacing issues, Josh Richardson gives up some of the size advantages they have in a small-against-small look, and Gerald Green is South Beach Terrence Ross. Tyler Johnson finding his early-season form out of nowhere in Game 5 gives them some options and Dorell Wright is a stretch four by trade, but Erik Spoelstra is going to have to do a lot of juggling and experimenting if Deng sits. That’s something a coach probably prefers not to do in an elimination game.

Assuming Bosh and Whiteside are the lone inactives, the rotation will look something like this:

UPDATE: JUSTISE WINSLOW IS STARTING FOR AMAR’E STOUDEMIRE. As discussed above and elsewhere over the last few days, there is an upper limit to how much small-ball the Heat can comfortably play, but by starting this way, they’re putting their best foot forweard from the outset and possibly challenging the Raptors to adjust if things are uncomfortable early on. The chess match continues! Fun stuff, the rotations, these last few games.

PG: Goran Dragic, Josh Richardson, (Tyler Johnson), (Briante Weber)
SG: Dwyane Wade, Gerald Green
SF: Joe Johnson
PF: Justise Winslow, (Dorell Wright), Chris Bosh
C: Luol Deng, Josh McRoberts, Udonis Haslem, Amar’e Stoudemire, Hassan Whiteside

Check back for an update on the official starters.

UPDATE: Deng is playing.

Pre-game notes/quotes
*It’s all elsewhere in here. Nobody was talking about anything but the injury updates.

Assorted
*I haven’t been able to turn Coloring Book off all day. I’m off my feet right now due to injury and all I wanted to do all day is go run the lake with Chance in the headphones, and I can’t. So it’s just spun in my office all day. It’s so damn good. I wouldn’t object if ESPN/Sportsnet just decided to play the album instead of commentating the game.

*Here’s your Heat swag update:

*We’ve long mentioned around these parts that France could be without Nic Batum and Evan Forunier at the Olympic qualifiers this summer. Not only are those absences now confirmed, France will also be without Ian Mahinmi and Rudy Gobert. France still has a lot of really talented players (including Euroleague MVP Nando De Colo, to whom the Raptors hold rights), and Canada’s qualifying tournament also includes Turkey and New Zealand (and Senegal and the Phillipines), but this is good news for the national team.

*I don’t want to touch yet another Stephen A. Smith DeRozan-to-Lakers rant, but if you need a response, you can check out my quick answer from an earlier mailbag, or read this Twitter thread from today.

The line
Game 1: Raptors -4.5 (Heat 102, Raptors 96, OT)
Game 2: Raptors -5 (Raptors 96, Heat 92, OT)
Game 3: Heat -5.5 (Raptors 95, Heat 91)
Game 4: Heat -5 (Heat 94, Raptors 87)
Game 5: Raptors -4.5 (Raptors 99, Heat 91)
Game 6: Heat -4

The Heat opened at -4.5 and it quickly shifted to -4, the smallest they’ve been favored at home in the series. There’s a lot that could be going into that, and it’s worth remembering that it’s an elimination game in a series that hasn’t had a game finish with a double-digit margin, so it could be a case of the market betting on the game being close rather than some increased belief in the Raptors. At the same time, the Raptors are enormous -350 favorites to win the series. That’s an implied probability of 78 percent, and teams with home-court advantage in the series and a 3-2 series lead have won Game 6 on 53.3 percent of occasions in the 2-2-1-1-1 format, and 50 percent of those that came in the second round.

Taking all of that in and thinking on the series as a whole, I think the Raptors drop Game 6, then win the series at home on Sunday. I don’t mean to be negative or pessimistic, but I predicted Raptors in 7 initially, and little has changed in how I see the two teams, even as injuries have taken their toll. A seven-game prediction kind of assumes teams will hold serve at home, at least in the final three games. Closing out a good, experienced team on their own court is a very difficult thing to do, and a “failure” to win Game 6 wouldn’t be an indictment of the Raptors – it would simply be the realities of how a very evenly matched series often plays out. Plus, who’s not down for another Game 7 at the ACC?

Heat 95, Raptors 92

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