Raptors 116, Nets 112 | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Reaction Podcast
It’s starting to get a little repetitive as the Toronto Raptors drift to the finish line of the best regular season in franchise history. While the schedule has been dotted with tests recently and its compressed nature has them feeling a little sluggish, a good deal of the Groundhog Day vibe, especially against lesser opponents, has come from a choose-your-intangible checklist. Focus, energy, respect for the opponent. Whatever the root cause, the mid-season Raptors known for bludgeoning opponents both good and bad has become a team content to skate by on late efforts or singularly spectacular performances.
On Friday, it was the Brooklyn Nets visiting, and the game played out quite similar to two of their three earlier meetings. A young Nets team with no reason to tank plays a high-energy, high-variance style, and the Raptors were once again willing to sit back and wait until a breaking point to find their groove. The impetus for change came with a drastic move from Dwane Casey – a near full-scale benching of the starters early in the third – and a tremendous Kyle Lowry performance, the Raptors eventually doing enough to secure the 116-112 victory and remain undefeated at home against losing teams.
Yes, it is the dog days, the playoffs just a few weeks away, physical and mental fatigue present, and the specter of a proper tune-up stretch just ahead. Still, it has to be growing at least a little stale for the team to hear the same message after so many games of late, and to repeat the same takeaways back after each win.
“It was terrible for us to come out and play like we did. It was terrible,” DeMar DeRozan said. “We can’t have lapses like that, feel like we can go into games and turn it on and off when we want. We are playing for something bigger. No disrespect to them at all, but we got bigger goals in mind and we got to go out and play hard out of the gate and not be in a dogfight coming down to the last couple of possessions.”
The script was pretty familiar early on, with the defense not coming out particularly engaged. Fortunately for the Raptors, there was no D’Angelo Russell insanity from long-range early. Instead, it was Rondae Hollis-Jefferson showing off his arsenal around the rim and old friend DeMarre Carroll hitting from outside to help build an early lead for Brooklyn. The ball was moving plenty the other way, though, with the Raptors starters coming out ready to score. OG Anunoby set the tone with a steal on the first possession he then finished with an alley-oop from Lowry at the other end, one of Lowry’s four assists in the blink of an eye. Serge Ibaka made his presence felt, too, sticking a jumper and driving the lane in a perfect four-for-four quarter.
The Raptors also carried over some of the strategy from the last meeting, feeding Jonas Valanciunas frequently even with Jarrett Allen starting. That included three 3-point attempts in the opening frame and getting a couple of touches on the dive, and he did well to defend the opposing bigs even as the Nets downsized with Dante Cunningham at the five for a stretch. As the Toronto offense pulled them ahead, Casey got a little experimental, giving Pascal Siakam the first nod off the bench and playing him for several minutes at the small forward position. Siakam filled the C.J. Miles role admirably with a corner three, and while there was some defensive slippage with the three-big lineup, the Raptors didn’t seem especially panicked to be down one after a quarter.
The all-bench offense struggled without Miles to space the floor initially, and the group went over three minutes with just a Siakam basket to their credit, allowing Brooklyn to star to pull away some. Siakam’s impression of Miles wasn’t done, though, and he and Fred VanVleet connected on consecutive triples to temporarily erase the deficit. Uncharacteristically, that unit’s defense began to slide, leading Casey to turn to Lucas Nogueira (a move I’m always in favor of in general; in this case, I didn’t think Jakob Poeltl was the issue defensively). He also tried going with three point guards around the Siakam-Nogueira frontcourt, and that opened up everything up on offense – VanVleet, Lowry, Delon Wright, and even Nogueira took turns hitting threes for a 12-4 run.
The ridiculous shooting didn’t quite paper over the defensive issues, which saw a number of strong stands end with the Raptors just ceasing to defend in the final seconds of the shot clock, the Raptors switching freely to no eventual benefit, and the Nets getting into the bonus. Even a nifty Valanciunas bank hook, giving him a team-high 13 in the half, wasn’t enough to give Toronto a halftime lead, and they entered the break down five despite shooting 49 and hitting 9-of-19 on threes.
Lowry started the second half off on an historic note, and it looked like the whole Raptors team was trying to follow by securing the team’s first home loss against a losing team this season. The defense just wasn’t there at all, and 14 Nets points in the first four minutes were enough for a displeased Casey to call a timeout and send a major message by subbing out all of the starters but Lowry. That’s borderline unprecedented, a near-hockey change less than four minutes in. You can’t say it wasn’t warranted, and it felt like something like this was coming for a few games now.
“I don’t want to embarrass players like that but, again, I owe it to the organization, I owe it to our fans to make sure we get guys out there who are going to compete,” Casey said. “Whoever was out there tonight just wasn’t in sync. We just had to get five guys out there to compete, to fight and have their give-a-crap level a little higher.”
There was also an extended delay to level out one of the rims that could have iced a hot Nets offense. Could have. Did not. Could have, though. The offense wasn’t quite as torrid as the last experiment with this group, either, their lone offense for an extended stretch being a VanVleet three and a VanVleet breakaway started by a Nogueira block and Siakam outlet. An early trip into the penalty didn’t help, either, and Hollis-Jefferson continued proving unguardable while Russell flirted with his first career triple-double. Lowry did his best, by force of will on offense, to keep things close, and when he hit the bench for DeRozan, the defense actually turned in a couple of decent possessions. By the end of the third, the Raptors were within seven, a reasonable striking distance if they could maintain some sort of energy level in the fourth.
“Everybody seen how the game was going. We wasn’t ourselves,” DeRozan said. “They were scoring on us. We were making everything look easy for them. That happens. It’s just a matter of how we respond when we get back in there and I think we responded well, but we should not let it get to that point.”
The Raptors couldn’t exactly hope to ride the bench for 20 consecutive minutes, so Ibaka got a look at center. DeRozan then took his first turn taking over in the game, scoring the team’s first five points of the fourth to carry the load until Lowry checked back in (fairly early by regular season standards). The Nets looked to attack Ibaka fairly regularly, and while that worked when the Raptors conceded unnecessary switches, Ibaka was better when able to stay at home, turning away a Caris LeVert drive to key a DeRozan drive the other way and send the Nets retreating to a timeout, their 14-point lead down to three. A DeRozan Euro-step and two missed Russell free throws later, and it was a one-point game heading into the closing run.
Casey set to close with the stars, VanVleet, Siakam, and Ibaka, and the Nets were prepared, sniffing out a pair of Raptor inbound plays. Valanciunas eventually returned (a little overdue at this point, given he wasn’t the defensive problem earlier), and Lowry went into savvy vet mode to bait a couple of fouls and put the Raptors ahead for the first time since the second quarter. Once again entering the penalty early threatened their new-found defensive presence (also overdue), but VanVleet looped a high-arcing three, Lowry turned LeVert’s aggression against him and veered right into Allen for a layup, and Valanciunas bullied his way to the line to wrestle control away (you guessed it: overdue). Russell responded, only for an out-of-timeout play to free Lowry for his fifth triple of the night, a fitting would-be dagger in a full KLOE performance.
Valanciunas bullied Allen once more, giving him 23 on the night and giving Lowry 12 assists to go with his 25 points (on 14 possessions!) and 10 rebounds, and it proved paramount – Carroll hit a late three and the Raptors coughed up in the inbound on a miscommunication, giving Brooklyn a window to tie. The Nets did the favor right back, committing a five-second violation despite having a timeout left. That opened up the intentional-foul game, and both sides continued to do each other favors, like fouling Carroll putting the ball on the floor, Carroll fouling DeRozan off-ball on an inbound, and both sides missing key free throws. And this goes on and on and back and forth for 90 or so minutes until the movie just sort of ends.
“He wasn’t happy. We weren’t happy. We shouldn’t be happy,” VanVleet said. “Obviously we got the win. We don’t take those for granted. They are hard to come by in this league. At the same time, the level we hold ourselves to and the expectations we have for ourselves, we’ve got to be better than we were tonight. We were able to put it out there late. We’ve got to play better. We know that.”
We’ve been over this a bunch by now. I’ve written this exact recap a half-dozen times in March. The malaise is understandable from a psychological standpoint, and that serves to make it no less frustrating game by game. And for the encouraging signs that do present themselves – namely, how much better Lowry looks right now than late in any other season – the Raptors have little time for.
“I don’t remember anything encouraging,” Casey said.
Things will change. There are six games in a row against good, hungry teams from here, and the Raptors will either round into form quickly with stiffer competition or be punched in the mouth enough times to get them there. Some of the rotation questions are worth monitoring with a close eye these next few games; the focus or effort or whatever you want to ascribe these nights to should sort itself out naturally.
