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Kyle Lowry leads the Raptors where they’ve never been before

K. L. O. E.

Raptors 116, Heat 89 | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Podcast

For weeks, The Toronto Raptors threw up what ifs, like so many DeMar DeRozan mid-range jumpers.

DeRozan and Kyle Lowry struggled shooting the ball for the bulk of a series against the Indiana Pacers, the first seven-game series the franchise ever won. Carried by the team’s depth and their defense, it was simply a matter of when, not if, the All-Star duo got their offensive games going, so long as their supporting cast could help keep the team afloat long enough to reach that when. Lowry gutted out terrific games despite wayward shooting, staying at the Air Canada Centre until an ungodly hour to rediscover his stroke, and names like Bismack Biyombo and Patrick Patterson and Norman Powell stepped up to help carry the substantial load. When the stars finally found their top gear halfway through the team’s second-round series against the Miami Heat, it looked (for Game 6, at least) like maybe asking so much had worn out the depth.

What if the stars and the support staff had “it” on the same night, though? In the words of DeRozan in the opening series, “it’s going to be a scary thing.”

For the entire season, the Raptors promised that this year’s team was different than the last two. Deeper, more experienced, better able to win at both ends of the floor, not only would this iteration not crack under the pressure of the postseason, they’d find ways to win when things weren’t perfect. They gutted out 56 wins despite significant injuries to DeMarre Carroll and Jonas Valanciunas, and when the latter went down in the playoffs, it was the former at the forefront of those stepping up to fill the void. Masai Ujiri overhauled half of the rotation so the Raptors could win a game at the defensive end when their top-five offense wasn’t clicking, and the Raptors made it to Game 7 of the second round almost exclusively on their performance on that side of the ball.

Now, what if the offense and defense ever coexisted for a game?

For 21 years, the Raptors have toiled in mediocrity, not quite torturing but at least challenging a still-young fanbase, sifting through the casuals and the fleeting new-toyers to determine who, exactly, The North. From Damon Stoudamire to Vince Carter to Chris Bosh to…Mike James?…to DeRozan and Lowry, the Raptors have shuffled stars and pseudo-stars, rarely inspiring enough hope to project the franchise to reach the “heights” it reached in 2001, when an errant buzzer-beater from Carter on the left wing clanged out, seemingly arresting the team’s ascension permanently. Player after player and regime after regime just brought more failure, or the most middling of successes, and so jokes about a first-round series being Toronto’s championship hung in the air like so many Atlantic Division Champion banners.

But what if that residence in mediocrity didn’t have to be permanent? If 20 years wasn’t actually too long to find yourself? If the failings of the past two decades had literally nothing conceivable to do with this team, this deeper team, this more well-balanced team, this, the best team in franchise history?

And most importantly, what if Kyle Lowry decides the mantle of Greatest Raptors Of All Time (The GROAT) should no longer belong to Carter?

**

It is beyond fitting that on the biggest night in Raptors lore, all of these questions were answered. Sunday night’s 116-89 series-clinching victory over the Miami Heat felt like a season finale of sorts, filled with call-backs to earlier episodes and story arcs, tying everything together nicely by the end.

The Raptors were a little slow to get going, as they sometimes are, with their still-big starting lineup taking some time to settle in against the Heat’s small-ball attack. Those small Heat groups were killer over Games 4-6, and while the Raptors’ starting five was effective, too, most other lineup iterations struggled. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that head coach Dwane Casey made his first of many smart tactical tweaks on the evening by leaving the starters out for 8:26 to ensure a strong start. All night, the Raptors would commit to playing big – not just lining up big, but aggressively seeking out the advantage that doing so presents – and Casey’s belief in Biyombo and Patterson would pay off mightily, here and throughout a game in which they combined for 13 of the team’s 20 offensive rebounds and 27 of 50 overall.

“We wanted to make a statement, as far as me and him setting the tone,” Patterson, who was also responsible for a tone-setting pre-game speech, said.

The Raptors led by four when the first substitution was made, and two minutes later one of their biggest challenges of the season was presented: Surviving without Lowry. The Raptors have struggled to close quarters all year, in large part because Lowry sits briefly at the end of the first and third. Some DeRozan-led bench groups proved capable, or downright good, but that success was out of reach once the postseason started. That the Raptors bled just two points with Lowry on the shelf was a positive, strange though that sounds. DeRozan, meanwhile, tried to shoot himself into a rhythm, setting the stage for a 28-point performance that wasn’t particularly efficient but also saw him turn in one of his better non-scoring games of the playoffs.

Lowry checked back in to start the second and, well, he didn’t really look back from there. If there’s ever been a tangible moment when a player decided he was taking over, this was it. He willed his way to the free-throw line, he pushed the ball off of misses in transition, he set up Biyombo on the dump-off, and then, with Miami threatening to erase the lead, he hit a massive three in transition, a Lowry specialty. He’d hit another, a pull up out of one of the team’s pet plays, two minutes later to extend the lead to seven. Finally, because he’s Lowry and he wasn’t going to stand for any narratives or drain in confidence heading into the half, he drew a foul as the quarter closed to hold that lead steady at six.

At that point, the game surely felt familiar for Raptors fans. It was a solid first half, but with a few defensive collapses as the second wore on – DeRozan tried to cheat a passing lane and gifted Wade an open three, for example, and another gamble down low gave Goran Dragic an easy baseline look – and a few clean misses of their own, there was a sense that the Raptors had squandered an opportunity to firm up their grasp on the game. A six-point lead is not substantial against a team like the Heat, especially when a player like Dwyane Wade hadn’t begun to start trying to carry them back into it.

The Raptors didn’t do the Raptors thing, though. They didn’t wilt. They didn’t crack. They didn’t even let things start to slip away. They played a solid, if perhaps too loose, third quarter. They pushed their lead to eight in the process, on the back of 23 points from Lowry and DeRozan, four assists from their point guard, a huge three from Carroll, a big dunk (and foul) from Biyombo, and another non-disaster stretch without Lowry (a minus-3 in 2:15, and yes, that’s a non-disaster by playoff standards). When Tyler Johnson hit a three with 14 seconds left to cut the lead back to six, the Heat thought they had a chance. DeRozan responding by getting a quick mid-range heave to fall ahead of the buzzer told them otherwise.

“We haven’t played that type of basketball in the third quarter in the whole series, so I felt like we came out and we told ’em we weren’t gonna take no more,” Carroll said. “And we kept running it down their throat.”

There’s really no describing what happened in the fourth quarter. Lowry grabbed an offensive rebound and hit from 16 feet to start things off, and after Josh McRoberts finished his Bill Walton impression for the night, the defense locked in. Over the span of 3:26, the Raptors allowed the Heat one McRoberts layup and nothing else. Meanwhile, Biyombo threw one home. Carroll continued his terrific night with a big three (and later, more great defense on Wade). T.J. Ross hit a three. Cory Joseph got to the line. Frustration setting in, Biyombo was on the bad end of a flagrant foul from McRoberts. Naturally, once Biyombo missed the free throw, a bad scramble resulted in Lowry stealing a Dragic pass and sending Patterson to the line.

By the time Patterson hit his pair, the lead had ballooned to 20. It was a 14-2 run, and the Heat were on the ropes. For the next 7:30, the Air Canada Centre didn’t stop shaking, the only slight drawback to the proceedings being that there was no one climactic moment on which the ACC could explode – it was just moment after moment, bucket after bucket, new memory after new memory, building to a beautiful crescendo.

“I was just so happy that we could bust open that lead, and kind of give us the cushion so we could breathe, and just let the tension ease a little bit,” Joseph said. “It was a huge game for the whole of Canada.”

That crescendo came out of a Raptors timeout with 5:35 to play. The Heat had chipped it back to 16, and Casey wasn’t going to leave anything to chance or momentum. The timeout keyed another 9-0 run, concluding, of course, with a Lowry three and a scrambling Heat timeout, Spoelstra’s last gasp at an improbable comeback. It was for naught.

“They wore us down,” Erik Spoelstra conceded. “Toronto beat us. Fair and square. Give them credit.”

All night, the Raptors’ size was too much, their belief in their core group vindicated. All night, the Raptors’ role players were too much, with every non-star who played contributing in one area or another, each owning their own moment or two. All night, the Raptors’ defense was too much, smothering the Heat and forcing myriad late-clock attempts, forcing 14 turnovers, keeping them off the glass entirely, and shutting down Wade and Dragic to a reasonable degree. All night, the Raptors’ stars were too much, with Lowry and DeRozan combining for a playoff-high 63 points with 15 rebounds and 10 assists.

All night, every trait the Raptors promised before the season – a star-led offense, shooters around them, defense around them, the depth to handle an injury like Valanciunas’, a better understanding of the moment and a toughness in the face of it – was on display. Every question answered. Every doubt displaced. Every what-if come to fruition, proving DeRozan correct that yes, it’s a “scary thing.”

“You could enjoy it,” DeRozan said. “It’s Game 7 and it’s to go to the Eastern Conference Finals. You can see it in the fans’ faces. You feel the appreciation they get from just watching. It was a cool thing just to witness that and hear the crowd, being part of it…This organization deserves it. This country deserves it.”

**

Lowry checked out less than a minute later, showered in an ovation that no Raptor has ever deserved quite like he deserved this one. Carter put the Raptors on the map. He led the Raptors to the second round, even dropping 50 in the ensuing series. But Carter never did this. He never got the Raptors here. Lowry’s performance isn’t a referendum on Carter’s time as a Raptor, of course, but it’s impossible to discuss the prominence of one single player without Carter as a benchmark. And Lowry blew that benchmark away.

“No. You really can’t. It’s just been fun,” Lowry said when asked to put the night into words, continuing his long-held trend of being far more muted after playing well. “It was an emotional time, to be able to sit there, relax, and not be going to overtime.”

Weeks from now, when the season’s finished, we’ll watch this game again. As next season rolls around, we might do so, too. When Lowry’s time with the Raptors is eventually up, the game tape will be dusted off once more. And for years now, whenever Raptors fans want to think back on the greatest night in franchise history, they’ll think of Lowry. They’ll think of his 35 points on just 20 field goal attempts, his five threes, his seven rebounds, his nine assists, his four steals, and his countless moments. They’ll think of his struggles through bursitis and a slump and the psychological toll it seemed to take for a little while. They’ll think of the sense that after two decades of disappointment and close calls and what-ifs, the best regular season Raptors team ever briefly felt destined to be more of the same.

And then they’ll remember Kyle Lowry taking every one of those fears and doubts and all of that disbelief, pulling up from transition, and shooting it all to kingdom come. Because Kyle Lowry was never going to let this team be like every other Raptors team. Because Kyle Lowry wasn’t going to bow out. Because Kyle Lowry was too damn good this year to not find a way. And most of all, because Kyle Lowry Over Everything.