Raptors 121, Hawks 125 | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Reaction Podcast
It should have been obvious when, one game after bringing the house down with one of the best-in game dunks of his career, DeMar DeRozan missed a two-handed flush in transition. Blown dunks happen, which DeRozan is aware of, but on a night he dropped 34 points, it was unexpected, to say the least.
If not then, it should have been obvious when Kyle Lowry drew a foul behind the 3-point line, where he’d wind up 6-of-8 on the night and is now shooting 45.5 percent from for the season, only to hit front rim on all three free throw attempts. He is an 84.4-4 percent free-throw shooter, making the odds of that about 1-in-263.
Or maybe it should have just been obvious after the Toronto Raptors trounced the Atlanta Hawks by 44 points two weeks prior. Disrespected, the Hawk were always going to come in hungry, and the fact that the Raptors declined to answer the bell out of the gate, falling behind by five almost immediately and by eight by the end of the first quarter as Atlanta built to what would become a 19-point lead at some point, should have been a clear indicator of what was to come.
“Oh yeah, without a doubt. Any competitor keep that in the back of they mind, if he felt like he got embarrassed, and coming back here, I think they understood that and you could tell,” DeRozan said after the game.
And maybe it should have just been obvious because the Raptors have been playing poorly on defense for the most part, and while their offense has been gunning them through those issues, there was a sense of late that it may finally catch up to them. Over the course of a full season, teams are bound to have off nights, and the Raptors have had a few off quarters and halves of late. Usually, though, those crimes of malaise are corrected quickly, with enough time for the good version of the Raptors that inevitably wakes up – they remain the only team in the league without a double-digit loss, while every other team has at least three – to catch all the way back up.
Slippage is going to happen, in other words. It probably doesn’t need to happen to quite the degree the Raptors let it on Friday, though, with a moribund first half putting them down 69-52 and with a 13-point hole to climb out of in the fourth quarter. The Hawks, looking to settle their own footing right now after a few terrible weeks on the defensive end, needed this victory, and they played with the requisite level of urgency to steal one in a home the home-side normally protects quite well. Toronto found that gear and that urgency late, and it was the rare case where they couldn’t make up for it through force of will or by bludgeoning with a lethal offense. It was too little, too late, and it made for a disappointing night, the Raptors clawing nearly all the way back only to fall 125-121 in the end.
“Yeah, you know, we play so many games,” DeRozan said. “But that don’t take away the effort we coulda brought. We brought it in the second half, but we didn’t bring it the way we were supposed to the first half, and they took advantage of it.”
What the Hawks took advantage of, primarily, was a Raptors’ defense that’s still finding its way at the point of attack. Dennis Schroder did as he pleased for most of the night, beating Raptors’ guards off the dribble or exploiting their decisions to fight over screens rather than daring him to shoot. Schroder finished with 24 points on 12 field-goal attempts, and his backup, Malcolm Delaney, actually keyed Atlanta’s biggest runs with a smooth 10 points and four assists of his own. Those two helped Kyle Korver rediscover a groove, too, with the sharpshooter knocking down six threes, a couple of them mindbogglingly open.
When it wasn’t the guard-play, it was Dwight Howard producing an absolute throwback of a night, with 27 points on 10-of-13 shooting and 15 rebounds, seven of them offensive. Howard sealed the Raptor bigs in the post early and effectively, cleaned up some wayward misses from his teammates, and generally lived around and above the rim by bumping Jonas Valanciunas or Lucas Nogueira from their spots. Valanciunas had a nice offensive game in support but Nogueira was in over his head, and the Raptors made their big fourth-quarter push only when they dared to go small and drag Howard from the rim.
Howard was also part of Atlanta’s huge rebounding edge, which really swung the game. The Hawks grabbed 15 offensive rebounds and held a 44-28 edge overall, leading to 36 second-chance points and helping produce a 62-46 advantage in the paint. The Raptors looked small and they looked overmatched physically, and rebounding continues to plague the team. Even if it was accepted that the Raptors would be a lesser defensive outfit this year than last, a reasonable assumption, defensive rebounding has always been a strength and is somewhat curious as a weakness. Toronto’s now dropped to dead-last in defensive rebounding, and it’s quite a terrible look to be surrendering more second chances than anyone else in the league when they’re struggling enough as it is to stop initial possessions.
Perhaps there’s a hope that Friday’s loss wakes the Raptors up some. Things have been going so well for most of the season, the offensive functioning so highly, the wins coming so regularly, that there’s always been a risk that the Raptors are almost too good to feel the urgency to correct their mistakes. That isn’t head coach Dwane Casey’s nature, nor is it in the makeup of the team, but an NBA season is a long time, and until Friday, the Raptors have mostly been able to use their offense or their late-game extra gear on defense as bandaids for the bullet-holes in their overall defensive performance. Getting a look at how a playoff-caliber team can exploit that, and how tough those comebacks can be on some nights, may be what was needed to drive home Casey’s repeated pleas for better on-ball defense.
“It should,” Casey said. “We scored enough points, 121 points, shoot 54 per cent, 47 per cent from the three. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where our problem is…I said this, we’ve got to have defence in the game. We can score, I’m not worried about us scoring. Until we individually make a decision to guard your man, my man, we’re going to be an up and down team.”
With the weather cancelling Saturday’s practice, Casey will have to lean on video to drive the point home ahead of a meeting with Orlando on Sunday. Whatever the root cause and whatever the solution – Casey continues to search for one, once again starting Patrick Patterson in the second half and using a ludicrous nine lineups in the second quarter to find any sort of spark – the Raptors need to figure it out in short order. An 18-8 record may not produce panic, and it shouldn’t, because the Raptors remain a very good team overall. But possessing the No. 22 defense (No. 23 when adjusting for schedule) means taking in far too much water on the team’s upcoming six-game road trip, one that begins in less than a week.
Maybe this is the wake-up call they needed, a reminder that there are two ends of the floor across all 48 minutes. Even in defeat, they showed that DeRozan and Lowry can be unstoppable even against immense attention, that they can score at a high volume even when Terrence Ross and DeMarre Carroll are missing threes, that they have some really effective lineup combinations they can use to storm back, and that Casey is open and flexible enough to at least try to adjust on the fly. Those are good things, and the Raptors remain good. They learned Friday that resting on good might not always be good enough.
