22-8 (Rest in peace Marcella Nurse)
10 things I saw from Raptors-Clippers (Dec. 12) – The Defeated
Return: Kyle Lowry broke out of his slump with a 21-point performance after totalling all of 25 points in his last five games. Lowry made a point to attack the basket early, and while he had some awkward spills and some airballs, he eventually settled into the game and drilled three triples in the third. Lowry still isn’t moving right, but seeing the ball fall through the hoop has to do wonders for his confidence.
Kawhi Leonard-less Raptors steamroll Clippers as Kyle Lowry bounces back – The Athletic [paywall]
2. VanVleet really helped with the playmaking duty early on, reaching a career-high 10 assists in the first half alone as he slotted into Leonard’s spot in a smaller starting lineup. VanVleet has looked better off the ball for large parts of this season, and him playing alongside Lowry (or the starters in general) has generally agreed with him. Here, he took on more of the creation role both with the starters and subbing back in with the bench group, threading tighter pick-and-roll passes than he has of late, picking out trailers in transition and using his gravity as a shooter to find passing lanes underneath, too.
“Just wanted to speed the pace up. I think we’re at our best when we’re out in the open floor making plays for each other,” he said after the game.
One play in particular stood out, with Lowry and Valanciunas running a pick-and-roll with VanVleet spotting up. Lowry kicked the ball to VanVleet and, instead of shooting, VanVleet fired a high-low pass to Valanciunas, who’d established deep post position. It was effectively a shorting of the pick-and-roll and highlighted the value in having dual ball-handlers who present shooting threats with a roll threat on the floor together.
VanVleet also had to play a bit more than maybe expected in the first half, as Delon Wright left the game to receive three stitches above his right eye. VanVleet took full advantage of the opportunity in this one, finishing with five points, six rebounds, 14 assists and a plus-21 mark in 29 minutes. Wright would eventually return, too, drilling a couple of threes in a strong third-quarter showing for himself.
Clippers suffer through an off night in 123-99 loss to Raptors – Los Angeles Times
In their five games entering Tuesday, the Clippers had fallen to 22nd in the same metric, four points worse per 100 possessions. The team also tumbled from fifth to 24th in net rating — the difference between points scored and allowed per 100 possessions — and after losing to Toronto, they’re tied with the Lakers for fourth in the West.
The loss showed that five-game stretch of poor defense was no outlier. Toronto made 59.5% of its field goals through three quarters. By halftime, four Raptors had scored in double figures. By the end, there were six.
“From the start you could see them pushing the pace at us the entire game and we really never caught up to it,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers said. “We played an overtime game last night, the schedule we’ve been on, we can make all the excuses and we have them but we don’t have to take them. I thought tonight we just gave into their offensive pressure. I thought they played downhill the entire night.”
Serge Ibaka scored a game-high 25 points and added nine rebounds. Lowry, who’d struggled to 3.8 points in his previous four games while shooting 14.3%, found a cure to what ailed him in the Clippers, finishing with 21 points on eight-of-13 shooting.
Even without Williams, a Clippers bench of Milos Teodosic, Wallace, Beverley, Mike Scott and Montrezl Harrell was effective in the second quarter, trimming a 13-point deficit to four with 7:43 to play before halftime. The bench’s play was the only positive Rivers took from the performance, but it couldn’t save the Clippers.
The Raptors responded by outscoring L.A. 15-7 during the next four minutes and opened the third quarter on a 7-2 run. The floodgates opened during that quarter as the Clippers were outscored 33-17.
“We played a good team today,” Beverley said. “Today showed we need a lot of work, which is fine, which is totally fine. We’ll get better. It’s a long season. We have no other choice but to get better.”
Clippers Destroyed by Raptors, Fall 123-99 in Humiliating Beatdown – Clips Nation
This was a horrible, no-good, very-bad game, and not much needs to be said about it. The start to the game, while not great, wasn’t disastrous: the Clippers were moving the ball well on offense, and seemed to be playing with movement and energy. However, the danger signs were right there, too, as the Raptors got whatever they wanted on offense from the jump. As the first quarter went along, the Clippers’ offense slowed, turning into isolations and dead-end handoffs, allowing the Raptors to build a double-digit lead.
The second quarter brought some good tidings for the Clippers, as the brand-new Milos-Ty-Beverley-Scott-Harrell lineup played with more ferocity on both ends, particularly offense. Milos was in his element, nailing several threes and making a couple gorgeous no-look assists for layups. The Clippers cut into the Raptors lead, but could never get closer than six points. When the starters came back, the Raptors’ lead immediately ballooned again. The Raptors just looked quicker and more athletic, and Serge Ibaka destroyed the Clippers in the pick and roll, nailing jumper after jumper.
The third quarter, however, is where things got unhinged. The starters played with effort, yet it just wasn’t helping them on either end. On defense, the Clippers continued to falter in the pick and roll, allowing wide-open dunks and threes in a seemingly never-ending barrage. On offense, they failed to penetrate the paint, settling for contested jumpers that inevitably started Raptors’ fastbreaks. Soon, the Raptors lead was 25, and the bench was in for good at the 6:00 minute mark of the period. While the reserves did their best, they were no better at stopping the Raptors. The rest of the game was extended garbage time, with the Clippers getting no closer than 20 points, and remaining hapless on defense until the end. The Clippers fell 123-99 in what wasn’t the worst loss of the year, but might have been the most overwhelming.
Raptors overwhelm Clippers without Kawhi Leonard – Sportsnet.ca
The Raptors (22-7) got their challenging four-game West Coast road trip off to a fantastic start with a 123-99 win. They were perhaps helped by the Clippers playing on the second night of a back-to-back and playing into overtime to boot. The Raptors made sure to take advantage as they jumped out to a 36-23 first-quarter lead and other than some shakiness in the second quarter when the Clippers got out to a 17-8 run against the Raptors bench, Toronto never faltered.
“Before the game we talked about our offence doing the work for us and it really did,” said Nurse. “I mean our defence was really good too, it was just a whole bunch of guys hitting them from all over the place – inside, outside, transition, executed our sets pretty good. Everybody got involved really.”
The Raptors pushed the lead back to 13 at the half, finishing the second quarter on a 20-12 run. They splintered the game in the third opening a 29-point lead and were able to coast home.
The Raptors shot 52 per cent from the floor and 48 per cent from deep while racking up 34 assists on 50 field goals, led by Fred VanVleet’s career-high 14 assists. Serge Ibaka had 25 points while OG Anunoby shook off his funk and contributed 12 points off the bench as six Raptors hit double figures. They forced the Clippers into 17 turnovers which they converted into 24 points, compared to just nine and five points, respectively given up the other way.
Game Recap: Raptors starters lead a rout of the Clippers, 123-99 – Raptors HQ
This game opened with a flurry of scoring from Lowry, who seemed determined to self-create after criticism for not doing so in the last two games. Lowry drove into the paint for his first bucket, then had a steal and a score to add to it. Tobias Harris had a good start for the home side, as the Clippers led 15-14 going into the first timeout. A transition period from the starters to the bench favoured Toronto, though, as a Lowry three pushed their lead to seven and a 10-2 run to end the frame saw them up 36-23.
Toronto went full bench to start the second, as the Clippers dug in and got some good minutes from Milos Teodosic. The tall point guard made a couple beautiful assists, setting up easy buckets to chip the Raptors lead down to five. The Raptors stuck with their pick and roll attack, though, as Jonas Valanciunas went full viking on Harrell, starting 6-for-7 for 12 points in the first 18 minutes (he finished with 16 total) to push Toronto’s lead back to double digits.
Late in the first half, the Raptors continued to attack a conservative pick and roll defence featuring Marcin Gortat, as Ibaka poured in a few more jumpers, VanVleet made a few more assists, and Toronto went into another Christian & Scooby halftime up 70-57.
In the third, they turned it into a blowout. A Lowry jumper put the Raptors up 15, which was followed by an Ibaka three. Toronto ran a ton of high-paced action with Pascal Siakam at the point of attack, as the forward would finish with 13 points and five assists. Even he was serving up Ibaka (in what should surely be a future reversed segment of ‘How Hungry Are You?’) to open the Raptors lead above 20.
The Clippers tried to revert to the bench lineup that gave them energy in the second, but Nurse stuck with his starters and kept the foot on the gas. That’s when Lowry put his stamp on the game, making back-to-back threes to blow the game open. It allowed the Raptors to play a garbage time lineup for the entire fourth, giving the game its final score.
Despite injury to Leonard, it was a get-well night in L.A. for Raptors | Toronto Sun
VanVleet, who got the start in place of Leonard as the Raptors went small, had already set a career-high in assists with 10 at the half and had four more before Nick Nurse started going to his end-of-the-bench guys with the lead up to 30 and just into the fourth quarter.
Without Leonard, Nurse said the onus was going to be on the offence as a whole rather than any one member of the team to make up for the absence and his wish as granted in spades.
In addition to the 21 the Raptors got from Lowry, there was a team-high 25 from Serge Ibaka, who has been the most consistent Raptor to date. There was another 16 from Jonas Valanciuans off the bench, who handed Montrezl Harrell his lunch at both ends of the floor, and a baker’s dozen from Pascal Siakam who may be the toughest guard in the Raptors lineup not named Leonard.
Delon Wright, who took a smack in the head that needed three stitches to close rallied after the swat to finish with 12 on the night, the same scoring total of Anunoby.
But as good as all that offence was from the Raptors, the defence might have been better. Until Boban Marjanovic and Tyrone Wallace started filling it up in garbage time, the only Clippers to even reach double-digit scoring night were Danilo Gallinari and Tobias Harris who finished with 11 and 10 respectively each on 4-of-10 shooting.
Murphy: A deep dive into Kyle Lowry’s slump and its impact on the Raptors – The Athletic [paywall]
Lowry still doing KLOE things
One of the nice things about Lowry is that even when he’s had these slumps in the past, he tends to still help the team. He’s long been the Raptors’ best playmaker, has hovered around above-average defensively (at least until last season, where his individual defence slipped a bit behind his team-level defence), and does myriad little things that help drive winning. There’s a reason that when the Raptors were clowned on for choking each year in the playoffs, one of the team’s two stars was still driving team success despite the poor shooting. Lowry’s slumped before, but it’s always been a shooting slump and rarely, if ever, an across-the-board slump.To wit, Lowry grades high across the league in deflections and loose balls recovered, and he’s become somewhat hilariously known for being the NBA’s best charge-taker outside of maybe Ersan Ilyasova and DeMarcus Cousins (Lowry currently leads the league with 12). These things are still happening as Lowry’s shooting has sputtered. In his last five games, he’s drawn two charges, recovered dive loose balls and recorded 12 deflections, which, as Chris Black points out, makes him still one of the Raptors biggest hustle contributors.
(An aside: Leonard has an obscene 32 deflections and 10 loose balls recovered over his last six games. He’s at 4.8 deflections and 2.9 loose balls recovered per-48 minutes on the year, both top-12 marks among qualified players.)
On top of all of this, Lowry is also still among the league’s best passers. During the worst part of this slump, he’s still totaled 45 assists over five games, and really only in the 76ers game failed to make an impact as a passer. Against the Bucks, there was a second-half stretch where Lowry’s passing was pivotal to the offence. Not only is Lowry leading the league with 10 assists per-game and sitting third with a 38.8-percent assist rate, he’s almost solely responsible for Toronto’s ability to create field goals with their passing — the Raptors assist rate drops from 60 percent to 52.9 percent when Lowry hits the bench, including a drop from 61.4 percent to 53.3 percent over the poor stretch in question. He’s still the guy making the non-Leonard, non-Pascal Siakam parts of the offence hum.
Yes, Lowry needs to be doing more than just those extra things and working as a distributor. He’s too important and too good to only be a hustle guy, and the Raptors need his secondary scoring. The point, though, is that he’s at least contributing in some way.
Raptors’ bench will never again be the mob, but they do have to be better | Toronto Sun
At least two key members of the group are gone, one to the starting unit, where Pascal Siakam is gaining traction in the most improved player category, while another, Jakob Poeltl, was part of the cost to bring Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green to Toronto.
All the average fan sees, though, is the unit that would routinely build leads is now giving them back and that’s just not good enough.
They don’t take into account that the second unit was together all through training camp, all through the pre-season and then remained intact throughout the year a season ago.
Put five talented players together for that long and chances are something good will come of it.
The difference this year is that continuity, when it comes to lineups, is no longer a goal. In fact, the exact opposite is closer to the truth. Nick Nurse wants interchangeable pieces, not two distinct units.
“It’s not going to be what last year was,” Fred VanVleet said. “We can admit that. Put that to bed. The bench mob is no more.”
VanVleet is by no means throwing up the white flag here. He still believes the bench can and will play a more impactful role on this team. It’s just not going to be as quick to get there as they were a year ago.
“There have been some (decent) fourth quarters of games, but it has just been a little harder to ratchet it up like we did last year,” VanVleet said. “Last year was the perfect storm and we got to let that go and figure out something else this year.”
C.J. Miles, another mainstay in that group these past two years, spends a lot of time with VanVleet discussing this very topic so it’s not a surprise that they both have similar takes on the situation.
Miles says the building of the kind of chemistry that produced that enviable play from the non-starters a year ago is just going to take a little more time to achieve.
Raptors’ Bench Mob 2.0 remains a work in progress | The Star [paywall]
There were expectations things would continue unabated, that the Bench Mob 2.0 would be the same as the original, that coach Nick Nurse could run out two groups of five different players and all would be well in the Raptors world.
Not so much, and one of the originals wants to make sure everyone understands that.
“You can’t expect different guys to replicate what other guys did,” Fred VanVleet said before the Raptors struck out on a four-game road trip that lands here Wednesday. “It’s not as easy as just plugging in OG (Anunoby) for Pascal (Siakam) or Jonas (Valanciunas) for Jakob (Poeltl) or whoever the case might be. Even CJ (Miles) for Norm (Powell).
“It’s a different group. That’s not to say we can’t be as effective, but the notion that we have to do exactly what the bench did last year? I mean I think we should probably let that go and focus on what we can do as a bench unit this year.”
It’s true that one-in, one-out alterations cannot work the same, the personal dynamics are different, the roles are different, the group’s usage is different. To expect the same dominance from different personnel is ridiculous.
But it is now up to Nurse to figure out how to mix and match players from two separate groups, because five on and then five more isn’t working.
The coach has already toyed a bit with different substitution patterns but he’s too often been caught with five backups on the floor and it’s not working well. Some nights, the subs hold their own but on too many occasions so far this season, they’ve struggled and haven’t helped the starting group enough.
Podcast: Locked on Raptors #434 – Tales from Brooklyn & Enjoying Kawhi w/ Katie Heindl – Raptors HQ
In Episode 434 of Locked on Raptors, Sean Woodley chats with Katie Heindl (The Athletic, Raptors Republic) about her trip to see the Raptors in Brooklyn over the weekend, the many delights of Barclay’s centre, and their growing appreciation of Kawhi Leonard.
Raptors’ Kawhi Leonard doesn’t want to talk about Christmas right now – Sportsnet.ca
Besides just trying to get Leonard to possibly wax poetic about the virtues of egg nog, he was also asked about how he deals with the noise from television and radio regarding his potential free agency.
“I don’t really watch TV too much,” Leonard said. “There’s a lot of different things you can do these days with different apps or websites you can go to and watch TV shows, movies, etc.”
Then adding: “I don’t buy into reading media. I don’t have any social media so I just focus on what’s in front of me, whether if its family or basketball.”
So Leonard is definitely a Netflix kind of guy and most certainly won’t be reading this post. But that won’t stop the rumours from circling around him all season long. That noise is especially loud on nights such as Tuesday’s, with the Raptors playing the Clippers and all the prior reports that Los Angeles — but not the Lakers — is Leonard’s preferred destination to sign when he becomes a free agent.
Given that, it’s only natural that the local media will try to get a sense of if an MVP candidate is paying any attention to what people are saying and writing about him and his experience in Toronto.
For now, however, Leonard isn’t offering too much one way or the other on which direction he’s leaning. One thing that we know for sure, though, is two weeks before the big day is still too early to be asking him about it.
Raptors’ Nurse’s 94-year-old mother dies – TSN.ca
“I’m here because my mother wouldn’t want it any other way,” Nurse said before the game.
In June, Nurse was promoted from assistant to head coach of the Raptors after Dwane Casey was fired. He has led the team to a record of 21-7, best in the NBA.
“She had a big impact because she had nine of us and I was the last one,” the 51-year-old coach said. “Lots of games — 94 years, nine kids and about 80,000 games watched are her final stats.”
Marcella Nurse lived in Carroll for more than 60 years. She endured a suspenseful wait in June before Nurse was elevated to head coach of the Raptors.
“The anticipation was just something you wouldn’t imagine,” she told the Daily Times Herald newspaper in Carroll.
Marcella Nurse followed her youngest son’s playing exploits in basketball, football, baseball and track and field.
“He was always busy, trying to learn about all kinds of sports,” she said.
The Clippers’ obvious interest in Kawhi Leonard, explained – SBNation.com
But the Raptors are rolling right now, and ultimately Kawhi could stay
The team who holds the superstar always has an advantage in keeping him. Management can talk to the player freely, he can get a clear vision for what the team is planning, and build a trust with the organization. We saw that happen with Paul George in Oklahoma City. There’s a chance the Raptors win out on their gamble to send their former star, DeMar DeRozan, out in a trade for Leonard’s soon-to-expire contract.Toronto is the best team in the East right now, with a 21-7 record. If Leonard values winning, there are few better promises to achieve those goals than what he’s seeing in Canada.
But Leonard is tough to predict. We don’t know what truly motivates him or what he values. And we won’t find out for another seven months.
For now, the Clippers’ interest is obvious. Finding a new identity in the post-Lob City era is crucial. And Kawhi could be the answer.
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