Raptors 123, 76ers 114| Box Score | Quick Reaction | Reaction Podcast
Well, at least the Toronto Raptors now know what it feels like to be on the other end of one of these games, put in the same terribly annoying situation they so often put the league’s two elite teams in. The Raptors have a habit of refusing to go away easily in games against the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors and remain the lone team in the NBA without a double-digit loss. They are feisty, they refuse to lay down and die, and they make sure if they’re going to lose, an opponent has to fight to the wire to go home happy. The script is far less fun, albeit with a better ultimate outcome, when reversed.
On Wednesday, it was the Philadelphia 76ers playing the role of Raptors, lobbing a late salvo at the favorite to make sure there was, in the famous words of Zaza Pachulia, nothing easy.
It didn’t look like the game was headed down that path for most of the night, though. The Raptors came out of the gates slow, letting Philadelphia take the lead entering the second quarter, but there was no feeling that the game was ever in the balance. Head coach Dwane Casey opted to downsize after a brief stretch from Jakob Poeltl proved somewhat fruitless, and the returns were as encouraging as those hoping for more small-ball would expect – lineups with four perimeter players were strong around Jonas Valanciunas (plus-5 in five minutes) or even around Patrick Patterson as the center (a look they used for hardly a minute), and Casey shifting to a speedier look helped key a large Raptors’ run in the second quarter.
Coming out of the half with a six-point lead, there was a sense the Raptors would be able to put things away in short order. When Casey opted to start Patterson in the second half following Pascal Siakam’s rough showing early on, that premonition proved prescient. Despite the change, the Raptors made the Jahlil Okafor-Joel Embiid pairing uncomfortable in their first start together. That duo played to a minus-7 in 15 minutes, hardly a large enough sample from which to draw any conclusions, but it represented a clear win that the super-sized frontcourt wasn’t able to punish the Raptors beyond the game’s opening minutes. They also weren’t able to keep Toronto off the offensive glass, as the Raptors grabbed half of the available offensive rebounds against that look, negating one of its primary advantages.
In fact, the Raptors defended Embiid well enough that he turned in one of the worst performances of his young career. Okafor playing inside meant Embiid was perimeter-bound, and while he showed some really nice fake-and-drive moves, he didn’t seem particularly comfortable with – or thrilled about – being turned into an inside-outside option.
“I didn’t trust the process tonight,” Embiid summarized after the game. “I was just standing. I wasn’t moving. I was just standing on the perimeter.”
The Raptors’ bigs deserve some, but not all of the credit for that. Patterson was his usual capable self on defense, and the Raptors were smart about having their wings, particularly Norman Powell, show quick doubles or base traps, helping produce 14 turnovers. Valanciunas was essentially a non-factor on defense when opposite Embiid or Okafor, though, and while he made up for some of it on the offensive end after a shaky start, his night graded out closer to fine than good.
Plucking Siakam from the starting lineup for the half is a nice show of flexibility from Casey, and he should be more aggressive in that regard moving forward, either permanently or as matchups dictate. The specifics of how he managed it left a little something to be desired (it just shifted the Siakam-Valanciunas pairing to the fourth, when splitting that duo up should have been the goal), but he was trying things on the fly, and that’s better than just sticking with what wasn’t working. That’s part of the reason I’m pro-experimenting in general, is because those changes on the fly will be at least a little more familiar. (Lucas Nogueira’s absence hurt in this one, as he’s been the Raptors’ best defensive center so far this year and was a good fit for this particular opponent.)
The change worked, and the Raptors appeared to be cruising to victory. A make-up windmill dunk from human renewable energy source Terrence Ross was followed shortly after by one of the best in-game dunks of DeMar DeRozan’s career. The lead swelled to as large as 19, keyed primarily by groups involving DeRozan, Patterson, and Powell, and the conclusion of the game seemed a formality with a makeshift early-fourth lineup set to check in. DeRozan was likely told his night was over at his normal rest period, and Lowry was tasked with closing out with a lineup that had never played together before, a new but supposedly straightforward task.
Things…did not go as expected. That lineup struggled to find the usual early-fourth spark this team has, and the Sixers slowly began chipping away. Sergio Rodriguez and Robert Covington did their best Gerald Henderson impressions, the Raptors went ice-cold from the floor for about seven minutes, and as the clock found its way to the part of the game where Lowry would normally be subbed out with a big lead against a lesser opponent, that big lead was missing in action. Siakam continued to have a shaky night, Cory Joseph kept up his uncharacteristically on-and-off defensive season, and the lead was trimmed to as low as five, forcing Casey to bring Patterson back in to try to settle things.
The coach had warned the team about exactly this happening, and the Raptors continue to win despite not turning in full 48-minute efforts on the defensive side of the ball.
“If you let them get out and be free and feel comfortable, they get a rhythm,” Casey said at practice Tuesday. “We gotta dictate the physicality of the game from the beginning to the end.”
The Raptors, of course, pulled things out. Like when Toronto is the scrappy underdog coming back from a deep deficit, the threat of completing the comeback is still insulated by the need for a long, sustained run, for possibly a few breaks, and for the other team to neglect to wake up. Having played so long at this level, the Raptors are usually too good to fail to right the ship.
“We just understand what needs to be done,” DeRozan said when asked what he likes about this year’s team. “Not much has to be said. We kind of know after a lot of games what we need to be better at next game.”
In this case, Lowry broke out of the briefest of second-half slumps to ensure he finished with 20 points on 5-of-10 from long range in front of a large hometown crowd full of friends, family, and especially his mom, whose birthday it was. The 76ers continued to push, but when the end-game fouling situation played out, the earlier deficit proved too much (though a five-second violation made things even more interesting). They had made their push, given the Raptors their scare, forced Lowry to play 37 minutes on what should have been a light night, and prevent a Bruno Caboclo sighting. For a team far more focused on player development and what their failures now will bear as fruit down the line, that’s about a best-case scenario, save for Embiid’s off night.
That doesn’t make it a worst-case scenario for the Raptors, who still escape with a win, but they won’t exactly be riding the highest of highs on the way back home. Defensive showings like this continue to be somewhat worrisome, especially when that defense lapses for long stretches, and there will probably come a time and opponent when the Raptors can’t just bludgeon their way to victories with their offense and experience. The Raptors won in a way they shouldn’t be happy with. These games kind of just are what they are, and it only served to reinforce some of the concerns some have had on one side of the ball while things have been going swimmingly. Luckily, there are a handful of games to iron things out before the schedule turns arduous once again. Turn in a fourth quarter like this on that west-coast road trip, and the same plot line will come with a much different tone.
