“Couldn’t get no worse.”
That’s what was running through the head of DeMar DeRozan early in the third quarter on Wednesday night when he saw teammate Kyle Lowry hit the floor hurt. Bumped by Tristan Thompson fighting for a rebound, Norman Powell had fallen on Lowry’s leg, and the point guard grimaced in pain on the floor before limping to the locker room.
“How things was going, see him down there, just hoping for the best,” DeRozan continues. “Just sucks to see anybody go down, no matter who it was. Just one of them things, when it rains it pours at this point. It was one of them.”
Lowry was able to return to the game and turn in a few more minutes, but as the deficit swelled, the Raptors opted to pull the plug and sit him down early. There would be no putting him back in once he cooled off and the ankle tightened up, and Toronto was making the decision to try to live to fight another day.
And they may. But the news out of practice on Thursday wasn’t good. Lowry sat out the session and is being sent for further diagnostic testing. He is being listed as questionable, and the team may not have an update on his status until shootaround on Thursday, the morning of Game 3. Lowry missing time would be an enormous blow to a team that can’t afford one, and Lowry at anything less than 100 percent threatens to make talk of a comeback in the series moot.
“A big problem,” DeRozan said. “Kyle is our driving force, our point guard, our leader. So for us not to have him anything close to 100 percent, it would be difficult on us. But next guy, everybody else gotta do something a little bit more to fill whatever void it is he can’t fully do out there on the court.”
The Raptors might not have the “everybody else” to do that bit more. Lowry is immensely important, whatever the team’s record without him. Those games did not come against teams like the playoff Cavaliers, nor did they come against a team with LeBron James. The Raptors need everything clicking to have a chance at a comeback, or even taking a game or two, and missing Lowry would severely limit their ability to have everything clicking.
We might not know Lowry’s status until game-time tomorrow. This is awful.
Dying by the 3
That whole live by the three, die by three saying? It’s kind of outdated at this point. While it remains true that threes are high-variance, which is the origin of that saying, you can not simply avoid trying the three any longer. That’s especially true against a team like the Cavs, who shot the second-highest volume of threes and the second-highest rate of conversion in the NBA this year, led the league in corner threes by a significant margin with a high efficacy, and have rained napalm on the Raptors through two games.
“You try to do your job correctly just to make ‘em miss and they’re still hitting it,” DeRozan said. “You gotta give ‘em credit, they’re a hell of a shooting team, they understand where they’re gonna get their shots from, and they’re still firing with a hand in they face.”
Firing with a hand in their face they are indeed. The Cavaliers somehow shot even better on contested shots than uncontested shots in Game 2, and while the Raptors defended the line better early on, they completely lost that late once the Cavaliers broke them with a ridiculous percentage. The Raptors simply don’t have the personnel to keep up, so it becomes a matter of limiting Cleveland’s attempts, or at least making them more difficult, or taking some more of their own, even if it’s not normally who they are. You just can’t get outscored by 39 points from beyond the arc.
Even James, only a hair north of an average 3-point shooter over the last five years, is killing the Raptors with threes.
“We can’t treat him like Antetokounmpo because he is a different breed,” Dwane Casey said. “We got to make sure they feel us, that we are close enough to touch where the guy doesn’t twirl the ball twice and then he shoots a three point shot.”
From an offensive perspective, the Raptors think they may actually be getting too cute moving the ball or too passive shooting. With James lurking as a free safety who can cover the width of the court in a couple of strides, the Raptors are running into more difficulty by trying secondary drive-and-kicks against a scrambled defense.
“A lot of times I don’t worry about too much of the corral,” DeRozan explained of their traps. “It’s about how they’re zoning up on the backside, taking away the short roll or the guy that’s setting the pick that’s popping, and it’s kinda forcing us to make that long pass to give ‘em time to get back out and close out, make it difficult for us…They’re recovering well and sometimes we try to take that extra move, that extra drive to try to create something, and we lose the momentum. If somebody got a shot, take it. Don’t hesitate and try to do something extra, because they do a good job of recovering.”
Basically, making the extra pass should only be on the table if the shot isn’t open. They have to shoot them more freely. It’s their only way of keeping up.
“We have to take them when they’re there,” Cory Joseph said. “For some reason we’re second-guessing right now, trying to find the balance between moving the ball and being aggressive looking for our shots. There are some open ones we passed up and we just have to be comfortable.”
Notes
- Think the Cavaliers are taking this lightly? Well, kind of yes and kind of no. They clearly don’t think the Raptors are much of a legitimate challenge, but they’re at least treating the games as meaningful….because they want a sweep. Here’s Kyle Korver explaining how the Cavs’ playoff approach was explained to him, a new arrival: “I know sweeps are hard to gt, but these guys have been doing that, and it’s like they want to sweep so they get that week (off). Having that thought in their heads, ‘If we sweep this team, we’re going to have that time off,’ not many teams go into a playoff series thinking that. You’re just trying to win the series. But they were like, ‘Trust us.’” That’s demoralizing.
- The Raptors are one of 17 NBA teams that will participate in the inaugural NBA 2K eSports league. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but this is probably cool for the people to whom that kind of thing matters, so good on the Raptors for doing it for them.
- ESPN’s Marc Stein reports that Raptors general manager Jeff Weltman is among the candidates that the Orlando Magic are interested in. Masai Ujiri dropped “general manager” from his title this past offseason in part to get Weltman the bump in title, and it would be surprising to see him leave one year later. But Weltman’s been a buzzy name for some time, and if he’ll have more autonomy there, maybe it’s something he’d consider. The Raptors still have Ujiri, and it’s possible rising star Bobby Webster could be ready to step into that role (with Dan Tolzman potentially assuming Webster’s assistant general manager duties, or some other change in structure). As always, having other teams after your people is a positive, so long as you can continue to find and develop good people.
- I’ve been posting some pics and quotes and other things to my Instagram story. Follow along there.
