Raptors 106, Spurs 108 | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Reaction Podcast
Sometimes, when things are going terribly, you need a break. Deep in a hole, trying to just claw out can tear away at the walls and leave you even more helpless. Forcing it isn’t always the answer, and so the Toronto Raptors, mired in their first three-game losing streak in over a year, were trying not to put too much pressure on themselves Tuesday.
The visiting San Antonio Spurs, surely out of the kindness of their surgically efficient hearts, opted to extend the Raptors a ladder, or at least a fraying rope. Most Valuable Player candidate Kawhi Leonard sat out, taking away San Antonio’s best defender and all-around best player. Leonard’s understudy and a promising two-way piece himself, Jonathon Simmons, was unavailable to take up his mantle. Tony Parker joined them on the sidelines, taking away one of the Spurs’ best offensive threats. Pau Gasol, a tough matchup for Toronto’s bigs, was posting Twitter photos of his improperly wrapped and surgically repaired thumb.
It was an opportunity, and a window, and much needed ones at that. Sometimes, when things are going poorly, you need a little help.
The kicker, though, is that sometimes when things are going poorly, well, they continue to go poorly. A handful of looks at the rim spin out. A key transition opportunity that Norman Powell calls an “easy finish” doesn’t drop. An errant shooting night from a pair of starters render them more or less useless for the second half, cutting into the team’s new-found depth. And of course, there’s the matter of the Raptors having had to figure out how to score without starting Eastern Conference All-Star DeMar DeRozan, all while working two bigs back into the rotation in the returning Patrick Patterson and a very frustrated Jared Sullinger.
These, of course, are not excuses. Even a team as good as the Spurs shouldn’t be able to withstand missing four rotation players against a supposed East contender (Gregg Popovich’s words). Missing DeRozan is huge, but getting Patterson back was supposed to provide a stabilizing force, and the Raptors were supposed to be hungry as they tried to avoid their first four-game losing streak in almost two full calendar years.
And those things came true, eventually. Patterson stabilized the team defense a great deal in the second half, along with Lucas Nogueira, once head coach Dwane Casey gave Sullinger and DeMarrre Carroll a quick and permanent hook. The hunger came out, too, with the Raptors ultimately erasing what was once a 13-point lead. The issue, however – and it’s emblematic of their play over this 6-9 stretch as a whole – is that the requisite energy wasn’t there from the outset, and the Raptors simply aren’t good enough to be successful at half-speed.
“We were able to talk and communicate in the second half, pick up our defensive intensity, trust one another, help one another out on base-gos and different drives, scrambling out. Just playing for each other,” Powell explained of the halftime change in approach. “In the first half, we played with that compete level, but I just think we picked it up in the second. We played a lot tougher, a lot harder, a lot more physical on the defensive end.”
Powell’s right! So, too, was the post-game assessment of Patterson, who was absent down the stretch due to a minutes restriction in his first game back.
“Second half was, I think, Raptor basketball,” Patterson said. “We haven’t played that way in a long time.”
They haven’t. But it came a little too late, with the first half being an uninspiring 24 minutes of the same discouraging signs the team’s shown over the last month. Dump-offs in response to extra attention on drives, thanks to continued struggles containing along the perimeter, were plentiful for the Spurs. The offense early amounted to Kyle Lowry drawing tricky fouls and hurling himself at traffic in the paint for the most physically taxing free-throws possible – Lowry was terrific, but the style of play required of him for the Raptors’ to succeed without DeRozan is worrisome – and the team’s 3-point shooting just wasn’t there.
Again, they found it early in the third quarter. Powell and Terrence Ross stepped up in a major way to help share the offensive load, and the bench bigs helped the defense steady itself. The Spurs shot 34.9 percent in the second half, and the Raptors won the rebounding battle 26-16. They answered the call with what was essentially a seven-man rotation at that point, and it was nice to see the Jurassic Five (Lowry-and-bench) lineup pick up where they left off. But a 13-point hole is a 13-point hole, and that’s a lot of ground to make up in the final 21 minutes of a game. That left the Raptors in a tough close-out situation down the stretch. Patterson and Nogueira hit the bench after a long stretch of play that helped fuel the comeback, and the Raptors continued to succeed with a four-around-one approach with Jonas Valanciunas as the lone center (the big man responded quite well).
A Ross free-throw gave them their first lead of the game late, but the Spurs executed well in the closing minutes and the Raptors did not – Powell missed the layup mentioned earlier, a Ross block incorrectly got ruled a jump-ball (which ate a couple seconds, though the Spurs didn’t score), and then Ross missed a three after the Raptors (correctly, in my opinion) opted not to call a timeout off of a defensive rebound. Even still, the Raptors were down just three with nine seconds to go, but the Raptors curiously accepted a quick two despite having no timeouts left (it looks from the replay that Powell was the third option on the play), leaving Powell too little time to get off a clean shot off of one more defensive rebound-and-push.
“I was trying to vault it for the three, but I got undercutted where I couldn’t plant the way I wanted to, to get the lift to get my shot off,” Powell explained. “So at that point, I just tried to draw a foul.”
He couldn’t, and the spirited comeback left the Raptors looking to take positives out of yet another loss. And they were there, to be sure, I just can’t imagine they kept anyone warm last night, or helped them sleep on the flight to Memphis.
“I thought our team competed their behinds off in the second half. I was really proud. But it comes back to the little things. It’s not the 3-point shots, fancy plays. It’s fundamentals, box outs, free-throws, layups, tonight in the second half.”
The Raptors aren’t good enough right now to not nail the little things. They’re not playing well enough to give anything but a 48-minute, all-out effort. Even with the Spurs offering a selfless gesture of cautious injury maintenance, the Raptors weren’t able to climb out of the hole they find themselves in of late. To paraphrase DeRozan last week, the only way to get through it is to go through it, and the Raptors are decidedly going through it right now. A better second half is a fine start, but they remain a good margin from where they need to get back to.
