Raptors 95, Trail Blazers 91 |Â Box Score | Quick Reaction | Reaction Podcast
Christmas Day is an annual NBA tradition, usually with a terrific slate of excellent matchups that make for a marathon of awesome basketball viewing, or at least a prime 15 hours where you can tune in and out, getting brief respites from family or, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, getting an alternative to the cinema. Generally, it’s also a decent way to introduce family member to basketball, since the quality of games is often quite high. If nothing else, you can solicit a bit of understanding from those around you as to why ball is life.
Now, if you still had family obligations on Monday, your holiday season extending into Boxing Night, you would have earned no such nod of appreciation. Instead, your family likely would have held an impromptu intervention, asking why in Shammgod’s name you would invest so much of your time, energy, and heart into a game that looked like…that. Basketball?…Is it funny or something?
That’s because the Toronto Raptors and Portland Trail Blazers engaged in what could generously still be called a game but would more accurately be described as a slop-fest, two teams apparently hung in a holiday malaise, slogging their way through 48 minutes of scattered, uncharacteristic, turnover-heavy ball. If you missed the game, you picked the right one to miss, and you’d be justified in stopping at the final score, taking a victory as a victory, and calling it a recap. If you didn’t miss it, you probably don’t care to re-live it in vivid detail.
The game is probably best explained by a pair of sequences involving Terrence Ross. In the second quarter, he stole the ball, teamed with Patrick Patterson to commit a turnover, stole it back, then dunked. Early in the fourth, he turned the ball over, stole it right back, threw down a two-handed 360 with a defender nearby in a tie game, missed an assignment on defense that led to a Shabazz Napier triple, and then checked out, having hurt his left wrist on the dunk. If those two sequences don’t give you a feel for the game, well, two top-10 offenses and struggling defenses combining to score just 186 points probably fills in the gaps.
That the Raptors hung on for a 95-91 victory matters and is a continued statement about their ability to close out games, particularly when they’re not at their best. The league’s best offense was completely hamstrung by its worst defense, with the Blazers seemingly getting a boost in defensive focus and intensity with Damian Lillard sidelined with an ankle injury. (That is not to say they’re better without Lillard, but that the combination of knowing they were without him and getting a second larger wing into the starting lineup helped the defensive bottom line.) Toronto let some old bad habits creep in for long stretches of ineffectiveness, oscillating between over-dribbling or taking the first look that presented itself.
The officials also called a pretty loose game, and it took the Raptors some time to adjust to the physicality. DeMar DeRozan seemed frustrated early on, and the team’s frustrations as a whole may have crescendoed in a Flagrant-1 foul where Patrick Patterson pushed a dunking Moe Harkless. It didn’t seem as if there were ill intent beyond matching physicality, but a scary (yet ultimately harmless) fall that ensued actually seemed to settle the Raptors. DeRozan shifted his focus to quite masterfully using the inordinate attention he was seeing to facilitate for others, Patterson temporarily got red-hot from long range on his way to 15 points, and both players contributed far more on the glass than normal, working together to erase what could have been a major advantage for Portland.
Those extra efforts and the change in approach bought time for Kyle Lowry to find a groove, and after missing his first three triples of the night, the league’s hottest shooter did just that. He’d go 5-of-10 from deep from there and then direct his attention to the rim and the free-throw line later in the game, finishing with 27 points on 8-of-18 shooting. He and DeRozan (20 points on 22 shots) weren’t at their absolute best by any means, and the players around them struggled to contribute outside of Patterson’s shooting and Jonas Valanciunas trading buckets somewhat inefficiently with Final Boss Plumlee.
That put the onus on the defense to keep things close, and it did that for the most part. Portland shot 42.2 percent and coughed up 18 turnovers, and the Raptors limited them to just eight triples. With Lillard on the shelf, the scoring load fell into the capable hands of C.J. McCollum, who had 29 points with seven assists and carved the Raptors up with tough jumpers and difficult passes for large chunks of the game. Cory Joseph and Norman Powell did a decent job trying to slow him down late after he killed a slow-footed DeMarre Carroll to start the halves – head coach Dwane Casey must have preferred the job Joseph did, as he closed out the game over Powell despite an abhorrent offensive performance and despite the closing lineup with Powell in Joseph’s place playing quite well for a brief stretch – and the Raptors were able to avoid over-helping and opening up holes elsewhere in their scheme.
Lucas Nogueira had a really strong stretch in the third quarter, too, and of course the vaunted Lowry-and-bench group had done their usual damage earlier. (Lowry in a makeshift setup with Carroll in Patterson’s spot with that group in the fourth struggled, the result of Pascal Siakam once again not playing in the second half. Carroll becoming the de facto backup four in that setup remains one of the primary things that would have to be worked out if Casey pulled the trigger on a starting lineup change. Carroll’s had much better days than this of late, and that group still only has 22 minutes together to draw conclusions from.) Despite the stumble early in the fourth, the Raptors steadied, taking the lead back with 5:50 to play and not surrendering it over an offense-free 14-9 closing stretch.
The net result was the first ever win in franchise history while shooting under 34 percent and the end of a 16-game streak of scoring at least 100 points (it was also their franchise-record seventh consecutive road win and their 14th in 16 games overall, putting them on a 60-win pace). Those notes don’t mean a great deal, but it’s important to recognize that the Raptors were at something close to their absolute worst offensively and still came out with a victory. It’s particularly telling that Lowry and DeRozan both missed 3-point attempts in the final minute of the game, yet a Patterson offensive rebound tip extended a possession to nudge the game into intentional foul territory, where the Raptors closed things out calmly. Even when their stars weren’t shutting things down emphatically, the Raptors had enough to hold on, and that’s important.
You can look at that another way, to be fair – that the Raptors required the Patterson tip and some late free throws against a team that’s lost 10 of their last 11, is dead-last in defense, and was playing without their star player could be troubling. That the offense dried up against a bad defense due to a combination of variance, complacency, and poor response to a change in officiating style could be concerning. This team may have grown past the point of wins just being wins, but for a game in which they travelled as many as three time zones following quick trips home for the holidays, one that starts off a hellacious six-game trip at 2-0, they’ll surely take it. They’ll also take the improved defense against a top-10 offense, Lillard or no Lillard.
Really, the Raptors have little choice but to hope this was a bit of rust from a short break, and that they’ll bounce back quickly. The Golden State Warriors await on Wednesday, and there’s exactly a zero-percent chance the Raptors can steal a win in Oakland playing at this level offensively. They’ll need to have all of their guns firing, have their defense on a string, and still hope for some balls to bounce their way.
What the Raptors showed Monday is that they’re good enough to be at their worst and still beat decent teams. The next statement to make is that they can be at their best and beat elite teams.
