Raptors 82, Spurs 110 | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Reaction Podcast
Exhale.
So, that was certainly a game. In what’s become a bit of a trend of late, the Toronto Raptors engaged in a pretty ugly 48 minutes of basketball. On Tuesday, though, it wasn’t the good kind of ugly, the gritty, grind-it-out effort when you’re just not at your best. It also wasn’t ugly on both sides, because the San Antonio Spurs spent the entirety of the game – yes, including garbage time – doing very San Antonio Spurs things, scoring with ruthless efficiency, locking down one of the league’s top offenses, and generally outclassing an opponent.
Except that the Raptors aren’t supposed to be outclassed by the Spurs. The Raptors fancy themselves on the level of the Spurs, and an embarrassing 28-point loss, no matter the caveats, is exactly the wrong kind of statement to make. With five losses combined to the Warriors and Cavaliers, the Spurs presented an opportunity to add a marquee victory to their ledger and quiet any talk that this Toronto team hasn’t taken the step forward they hoped to. Being the class of the second tier isn’t exactly the highest of heights, but firmly entrenching themselves as among the league’s near-elite is important and can inform how they proceed building and tinkering with the roster from here. Even without Patrick Patterson, whose absence has confirmed he’s probably the team’s third-most important player, the Raptors should have expected to at least give the Spurs a stiff test.
They did not. Not only was the test not stiff, it couldn’t even be wrestled out of its pants. The Spurs came out of the gates swinging, going to LaMarcus Aldridge an almost painful amount in the post and the mid-range and unleashing Kawhi Leonard in full MVP-campaigning mode. By the time the Raptors blinked, they were down double-digits, and this wasn’t one of those nights they had the guts and tenacity to continually crawl back into it.
They were stuck 17 just eight minutes into the game, but unlike their meetings with the Cavaliers or Warriors or other nights against lesser teams where they’ve come out napping, the Raptors had no counter-punch. Dwane Casey got to tinkering – Jakob Poeltl and Lucas Nogueira played together for a moderately successful stretch that trimmed the lead to eight temporarily – but nothing worked. Where the Raptors are accustomed to continually fighting back when those opponent runs happen and those leads extend, they seemed to have little in the tank offensively outside of a terrific effort under tough circumstances from DeMar DeRozan and a bench spark from Terrence Ross.
If the lack of mention of Kyle Lowry’s game to this point stands out, well, it’s no coincidence that on a night the Raptors lacked the bulldog in them, their bulldog leader was restrained by a gentle leader. Lowry turned in what was unquestionably his worse game of the season, firing 0-of-7 from long-range on his way to a six-point, two-assist night. More telling than anything was that the Lowry-and-bench units got little traction, and that Lowry was an uncharacteristic minus-30 in 29 minutes. DeRozan retired with the same rating in 32 minutes, but he at least managed to score at a decent rate despite attention from a group of strong wing defenders in Leonard, Danny Green, and Jonathon Simmons. Lowry is bound to have a bad night on occasion – he is not perfect, although he at times seems quite close – but it was patently clear in this one that the Raptors can not hang with elite competition without an elite performance from their elite point guard. This is more or less accepted, anyway, and the Raptors need both pillars of their offense firing to score at their accustomed rate against strong defenses.
That they got little support from the rest of the roster was problematic, if not expected. The Raptors’ role players tend to thrive when the stars are playing well and getting them involved, and that just wasn’t the case here. The threat Patterson provides from outside was missing, and none of the team’s bigs offered much on offense beyond Poeltl’s six offensive rebounds. Jonas Valanciunas was hardly a rumor in scoring two points in 22 minutes, and the group of power forwards and centers combined for eight points in 96 minutes, including garbage time. The Raptors don’t need to run their offense through the post, but they need more help than this, wherever you want to place the blame, ball-handler or big-man. DeMarre Carroll chipped in briefly but struggled with Leonard on the other end, and Ross’ bench scoring wasn’t enough. DeRozan was mostly alone, and he and Lowry need each other more often than not.
Not that a bit more scoring would have solved everything. The Raptors shot 37.3 percent and hit just four threes, but they also bled 120.7 points per-100 possessions, completely at a loss for how to slow Leonard or the Spurs’ bigs. Pau Gasol didn’t have his best outing (on offense – he had four of San Antonio’s 15 blocks on the other side), but Aldridge was masterful knocking down jumpers – including a three – or making the Raptors’ thin bigs pay inside. Toronto spent large chunks of time with two natural centers on the floor, but Poeltl and Nogueira aren’t exactly bruisers, nor is Pascal Siakam, and so Aldridge was able to make work no matter the matchup. It should be noted that Poeltl played well in general, but the Raptors had little answer inside, even when David Lee checked in, apparently still very much alive.
A game like this is frustrating for a lot of reasons. It’s bad to watch, it’s a missed opportunity, and most importantly, there’s nothing to be learned here. There are no lessons with applications in a drubbing like this. Nothing at the margins mattered, and score effects and unusual rotations through wrenches into any extrapolations. Games where the team fights back and can see what works are useful, even in losses. Games where the recap could have read “Tuesday recap – this game was terrible. The end” give us nothing, and they give the Raptors little. It’s a wake-up call or whatever, but it’s mostly just an ass-kicking where only two or three Raptors even showed up. You can’t learn more about yourself from an effort like that, and it’s a wasted opportunity to measure and experiment against a very good team. That’s it, really: It’s a waste.
There are larger takeaways from the road trip as a whole. The Raptors went 3-3, which was the expectation (from me, anyway) going in. But their play got consistently worse as it went along, perhaps understandable given Patterson’s absence and the fatigue of a multi-week six-game trip, but it’s discouraging, nonetheless. The Warriors loss is whatever, it happens, and the win in Utah was a quality one. Everything else was at least mildly concerning, and the flicker of an up-tick in the team’s defensive performance has given way to more parallel-drawing between this team and the 2014-15 edition (that’s a column for another time, but I will offer that those concerns are perhaps a bit reactionary, and certainly exaggerated – this team has a lot of quality wins against the league’s second tier, and they still possess some stronger metrics when controlling for context).
You guys know by this point that I’ll never advocate for getting too up or too down. They’re not a disaster, they’re not going to trade the whole roster, and they’ll eventually look good again. The coming week should be more telling than the tail-end of a trip. They may have Patterson back, they’ll get some practice time in, and they’ll shift to home-heavy against firmly second-tier teams. Hosting Utah, visiting Chicago, and then hosting Houston and Boston is a stretch that should be representative of the Raptors’ place in the pecking order of the second tier. Somewhere in there is where they are, where they’ve been, and where they’ll probably remain, and how you feel about that is how you’ll feel about it.
