Photo Credit: Matt Azevedo/MattAzevedo.com
Raptors 905 109, Fort Wayne Mad Ants 107 | Box Score
Assignees: Bruno Caboclo, Fred VanVleet, (905), None (Mad Ants)
Thursday felt eerily familiar for about a half of basketball in Mississauga, with Raptors 905 and the Fort Wayne Mad Ants engaging in a game that too closely resembled Tuesday’s blowout in favor of the road side. Hitting more threes than twos for the bulk of the night, the Mad Ants utilized the same strategy that the 905 didn’t have an answer for 48 hours prior.
The 905 weren’t going to change their approach. If they were going to bounce back, they were going to find a way to do it their way, finding a way to defend the five-out attack flush with shooters using their base personnel and without shying from creating their own advantages with those looks. That’s not borne out of stubbornness but out of respect for the long-term plan.
“I could come out here with the lineup they’re playing and switch everything and it’d probably take them out of what they doing,” head coach Jerry Stackhouse explained before the game. “But overall of these guys getting better, once they get an opportunity to maybe going to another team, they’re gonna have to learns somebody’s scheme, and not everybody’s gonna be able to switch. Just to win a game tonight, it’s not about, yeah I want to win, I’m a competitor, I want to win. But at the same time, I understand the process, I understand what I want to try to get accomplished with these guys over this year, and I’mma stick to it.”
For a while it looked like the 905 needed some more time to figure it out. The Mad Ants were asserting their offense and getting threes too easily, but unlike Tuesday, the 905 had a lot more bounce-back in them, fighting off each run just enough to keep the game within reach. An early sequence stands out where the 905 had just blown a possession, with Bruno Caboclo missing a three and then Will Sheehey getting blocked on a jumper after an offensive rebound, and Fred VanVleet went full Kyle Lowry and just decided he’d had enough. He pressured Stone at the half-court line, Stone hit the deck and VanVleet came up with the ball, and then he launched a lob from just inside half to Sheehey for the bucket. It just didn’t seem as if the 905 would roll over in this one.
“It was big,” VanVleet said. “I think everybody had a bad taste in their mouth after that one. I think when they made their run Tuesday, we didn’t have anything to answer back with. And I think tonight we just did a better job of fighting, and scratching, and clawing, and refusing to lose. We were able to withstand it. Barely.”
Sheehey’s offense was a major factor all half as yet another new starting lineup struggled to get it going. Sheehey scored 11 of his game-high 23 in the first half, the only reliable threat in that group of starters into the break.
“Coach started me tonight. He started me the other game, too, I didn’t play too well.S o I tried to come back tonight and bring aggressiveness,” Sheehey said.
Another bellwether materialized when Caboclo had a terrific stretch of play in the third quarter. He struggled out of the gate, capped by a missed dunk in transition, but settled in some and then came out of the half a house afire. Bookended by a transition dunk he made and a big momentum three as the 905 pulled back even, Caboclo was incredibly active on the defensive end, defending post ups capably and using his length to disrupt passing lanes and baseline drives. It was an encouraging turnaround given his prior proclivity for shrinking in games where he gets off to poor starts, and it was a key factor in the 905 making their comeback run. He’d finish with 12 points, five rebounds, and the likely highlight of the night.
From there, it became the C.J. Leslie show, with the returning rights player using his energy to clean up the glass and draw a pair of and-ones on a night neither side was pleased with the tight whistle. Leslie would finish with 16 points, two assists, and seven rebounds, six of them offensive, doing the bulk of his damage in the second half. His play early in the fourth helped a bench-heavy unit keep things close, paving the way for the 905 to wrestle control away for the first time in the game.
With the somewhat empty Hershey Centre crowd surprisingly coming to life with organic chants at every break, the 905 built a bit of momentum midway through the fourth, with VanVleet, E.J. Singler, and Brady Heslip all hitting threes in short order around defensive stops to take a five-point lead. That let the 905 try to slow things down and get a bit more methodical, playing to VanVleet’s strengths and allowing him to control the game and take the Mad Ants out of their comfort zone.
“They made their run in the third and it kinda felt like the same game again, and I just wanted to put my stamp on it,” he said. “John Jordan came in and gave us a big boost off the bench, and others guys made great plays. When I got back in, I was just trying to close it. That’s what I have to do for this team when I come down and play.”
It wouldn’t be the D-League if there weren’t one last lesson in the closing moments, though. It was fitting on a night where the 905’s coach from last year, who spent the first half of the season talking about helping the team “learn how to win,” that the 905 had their first close game to close out. It wasn’t perfect – a Jarrod Uthoff pass to Caboclo was a little sloppy and picked off the other way, forcing a foul, for example, and VanVleet got trapped in the backcourt, leading to a late jump-ball in a one-possession game – but VanVleet’s composure and the 905’s ability to grind Fort Wayne down to the end of their shot clock for most of the second half won out. (Not that there weren’t some serious dramatics, with Fort Wayne nearly tipping in an offensive rebound after the 905 [correctly, in my mind] opted to foul up three in the dying seconds.)
As far as quick lessons and noted improvement go, making a 15-point comeback and closing out a tight game against the same team that shot you off the floor two days prior ranks pretty highly. That it also happened to be Fort Wayne’s first loss of the season makes it all the more impressive.
“Those guys competed their buts off, man. I’m proud of ’em,” Stackhouse said. “We kept grinding, kept grinding, and found a way.”
The 905 now face their next test, hitting the road for the first time all season, and with a back-to-back tomorrow in Canton no less.
Notes
- Los Angeles Lakers’ first-round pick Brandon Ingram was on hand to take this one in, as was his assistant coach and former 905 head coach Jesse Mermuys, who was the most popular man in the arena.
- It’s pretty crazy how much the 905 have gotten out of Sheehey and Leslie, two of their best players through six games. Both players had their returning rights selected by the 905 in last summer’s expansion draft, a reminder that nobody is ever just a guy and every move matters. General manager Dan Tolzman mostly used his RRs to facilitate trades in Year One (Scott Suggs was the only player from the expansion draft to suit up last year), and haning on to Sheehey and Leslie through that building process is really paying off.
- Edy Tavares drew the start as Stackhouse looked to settle the defense from the outset, but neither he nor Yanick Moreira were at their best. Leslie closed as the de facto center, with the 905 making their lone notable schematic adjustment as they showed a bit more on the red-hot Christian Watford in the second half after he torched the nets from long-range early.
- Raptors 905 now hit the road for the first time, a three-game trip that makes the parent club’s assignment decisions a little tougher (the daily up-and-down is no longer possible). I’d imagine Caboclo travels with the 905, for certain, but I’d expect VanVleet to stay in Toronto with the parent club.
- Here’s Stackhouse on the understandable but necessary difficulty with the guys going up and down: “It’s tough when we have ’em, our assignment guys, and then they go back and get recalled and we don’t get a chance to really the next day when we’re looking at film, Bruno and Fred aren’t here, and they’re two of our heavy minute guys. So we have to try to take film to them for them to see different things like that. We’ll make it work, we’ll manage it. It’s part of the growth.”
- The 905 return home Dec. 9. You can go to this link and use the promo code REPUBLIC905 all season long, as the 905 are hooking RR readers up with discounted tickets (including for the two Air Canada Centre games).
