Raptors 94, Cavaliers 115 (Cavaliers lead series 3-0) | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Post-game news & notes | Reaction Podcast
The Toronto Raptors are not good enough to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers.
That much was mostly believed to be true at the series level before their second-round series began. As that series has gone on, the breadth of the situations in which that statement holds true without additional context has expanded. The Raptors are not good enough to beat the Cavaliers when the latter are at their best, when the former are at their worst, or when the two sides meet in the middle. They’re not good enough when their effort isn’t consistent and forceful, or when the Cavs’ effort is there to any meaningful degree, or when the two energy levels meet in the middle. Down 0-2, it was pretty clear that the Raptors were not beating the Cavaliers in a series, but what wasn’t yet clear is whether individual games and circumstances could break in such a way that the Raptors could once again make a series (or competitive non-series) of this matchup once again.
On Friday, the Raptors found out moments before tip-off that they likely wouldn’t have the chance to even find out. Kyle Lowry, the team’s engine and co-star, would not play, try though he might. Lowry tested out the ankle before the game, joined the team in the layup line before anthems, and even dressed just in case.
“He went out and was going to try it,” head coach Dwane Casey explained after the fact. “It was still bothering him. He was limping badly but he just couldn’t go. He wanted to.”
The sprain would not cooperate, and the Raptors suffered their first blow before the ball had been rolled in.
“I didn’t’ know ’till late, ’till they did starting lineups, he wasn’t gonna go,” DeMar DeRozan said. “It was tough. It changed your mindset, not just for me, the whole team as well. We still competed. We still gave ourselves a great opportunity.”
DeRozan is correct. After talking in boxing analogies all day, the Raptors withstood what amounted to a blow before the opening bell. This could really have gone two ways, and to their credit, the Raptors opted for the response of fighting like hell despite the loss and 0-2 series hole rather than wilting, wallowing, or walking away. That’s perhaps to be expected rather than commended, sure, but since about three minutes into Game 1 an air of inevitability has hung over this series. The Raptors decided rolling over was not how they wanted to play this out, and so they fought.
It was valiant, too. The Raptors defended with great energy and attention to detail out of the gate, and it genuinely appeared to rattle the Cavaliers, albeit not enough to urge them to dial in just yet. DeRozan took up the offensive mantle with Lowry sidelined, turning in three masterful quarters as a scorer and finishing the game with 36 points on 23 field-goal attempts. With complementary Raptors missing more or less everything – non-DeRozan Raptors shot 40.6 percent for the game – DeRozan went head-on at the extra attention being paid to him by the Cavaliers, racking up fouls early and often on J.R. Smith, making life hell for Iman Shumpert, and eventually requiring the Cavaliers to change their defensive approach late.
Following one of the worst playoff outings of his career, the contrast was stark.
“DeRozan was amazing. He gave everything he had,” LeBron James said. “You watch last series when he didn’t have a field goal, he usually bounce back. That’s what great players do.”
DeRozan would eventually slow down, though. Whether or not that had to do with Casey’s decision to rest him early in the fourth will be a matter of some debate. To that point, DeRozan had been rolling, and the Raptors trailed by just two points. But with the offensive load he was carrying, Casey wanted to get him a quick reprieve. Afterward, DeRozan didn’t feel he needed one, given the weight of the situation.
“Yeah, I coulda kept going,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I needed a blow. At this point in time, there’s no need for a rest.”
That’s what a superstar is always going to say. There are those who will feel he should have been given the chance to stay hot and keep going, others who feel it was necessary, and others still, like Cavaliers head coach Tyronn Lue, who thought even with the rest, DeRozan simply wore down late.
“Casey did a good job of just running some different stuff for him, trying to isolate him,” Lue explained. “So we just try to keep doing different coverages trying to wear him down. Him having to play 40 minutes and playing one-on-one and trying to go score the basketball, I thought he got tired.”
Whatever the right decision, and it’s unknowable, with respect to DeRozan, Casey almost certainly erred in resting him with Cory Joseph and Jonas Valanciunas. The break was brief, but the Cavaliers used that opportunity and the earlier momentum of Kyle Korver heating up to pull away early in the fourth. When DeRozan and Joseph checked back in, the former wasn’t able to rediscover his form against a new, switch-heavy approach with James and Tristan Thompson, and it was then that the shortcomings of his teammates on this night became even more glaring.
Because try though they did on defense and to push the ball and make the right plays, the Raptors couldn’t hit a shot to save their playoff lives. Almost quite literally – they started the game 0-of-12 on threes before eventually hitting a whopping two, and the Cavaliers loaded up the paint and around ball-handlers throughout to take advantage. It’s easy to look at the final score – a 21-point margin that betrays that this was actually a well-played game for three quarters – and determine a lot of things went wrong, but the gap in 3-point shooting remains the biggest difference between these sides. While Cleveland was hitting 13 threes on a very reasonable 23 attempts, the Raptors could hit little, and so they stopped shooting in turn.
“They really locked in. They locked in,” DeRozan said. “They packed it in on us. We couldn’t hit no shots. Just myself, us as a team, we only made two 3-pointers and both of them came late. We had some great looks and we couldn’t get none to fall for us. They turned it up offensively and ran away with it.”
With DeRozan contained and the complementary players offering little, after the bench unit Casey entrusted had let the lead swell, the Cavaliers had a momentum they weren’t going to surrender. The way those first few minutes played out are almost a microcosm of the game and their chase of the Cavaliers in general – the Raptors could try very hard and do a number of things well, but if they weren’t perfect, it wouldn’t matter.
There were a number of possessions where the Raptors defended well until Cleveland eventually broke them and found a shot. A handful of times the Raptors went a step further and for a stop only to lose an offensive rebound. The good shots Toronto missed weren’t cleaned up, as their fear of James in transition held them to a single offensive rebound. They took terrific care of the ball but managed only 17 assists on 38 field goals because the low turnovers were borne a bit from passivity.
Basically, the Raptors worked their tails off and did a number of things they’re supposed to do (or at least tried to do them), and at a certain point, they ran into the reality of what the Cavaliers are. The Raptors have faced a bit of an identity crisis in trying to tweak things in three losses now, but one part of their identity that’s not in crisis is how they measure up to Cleveland.
“We were fighting. It was up and down. We were fighting,” Valanciunas said. “Honestly, today we were not giving up but they were better than us.”
There is not a lot left to be said in this series. After the game, the Raptors talked about playing Sunday for different reasons. Joseph was adamant the team will fight back. DeRozan less so, saying it’s an opportunity to create another opportunity and take it from there. Valanciunas talked of proving something, and it felt like he meant to themselves. Casey talked about avoiding a sweep for pride.
Whatever happens, it won’t change the story of this series for a second year in a row. There’s not a ton to be upset about, I don’t think, or at least if there is, the proper place for it was after Game 2. The Raptors had even less going for them here, psychologically, in terms of shooting variance, and without Lowry, and they still fought like hell. It didn’t matter, and the degree to which that matters will vary by person and player. Sometimes things just are what they are no matter how hard you tried.
“It hasn’t worked out the way we wanted it to,” DeRozan said. “We had different expectations each and every game. Each and every game been different. Tonight we competed extremely well. It sucks when you get down late in the game, nothing could fall for us, especially in the fourth quarter, the start of the fourth quarter, especially playing without Kyle, either. It was tough but I felt like us as a team, we competed.”
Maybe that’s all they could have asked of themselves here. Maybe things will be better Sunday. Maybe they won’t, but they’ll probably feel better if they go out with another effort like this where they can point to the other team just being better than them not having given it a proper shot to find out.
