For giving fire to man, Prometheus was punished by having his liver picked out and eaten every morning by an eagle sent from the gods. It was probably too harsh a punishment; consider: Every night, Prometheus was forced to regrow his liver, a daunting task, only to have it withdrawn again in an instant. Hours of painful work only for an even more painful, and far quicker, end.
That was what it felt like to be the Toronto Raptors on Tuesday evening.
Sometimes everything goes right but the result. The Toronto Raptors improved across the board from game one. Their attention to defense, particularly in the second half, was immaculate. They forced 17 turnovers from the Boston Celtics and had a corresponding 16 points on the break, far better than the feeble seven fast-break points they managed in game one. OG Anunoby was a snarling, immovable demon on the defense end, contesting shots, poking balls loose, tipping passes away, and hounding whichever Celtics was unlucky enough to face him. Offensively, Fred VanVleet abused the Celtics when they left a big alone to defend him in space. He shot poorly from deep — like everyone not named Anunoby or Serge Ibaka on the Raptors — but he made far better decisions inside the arc. He controlled the defense, rather than letting it affect him.
Anunoby, in particular, was fantastic on offense. He hit standstill triples, side-step triples, jab-step triples. He finished four-of-six from deep and even mixed in some smooth baskets around the rim, including a spinning drive and an even-spinning-er and-one dunk. His 20 points both led Toronto and set a career playoff-high.
Yet it wasn’t enough. Toronto led from the tip and built a lead, only to see it evaporate by half. They scraped and scratched a double-digit lead in the third quarter as the defense kick-started Toronto’s deadly transition game. The defense indeed was fantastic, with Toronto’s bizarre zone bamboozling Boston, and Anunoby beaming around the court to create deflections. Ibaka hit a pair of wing triples. Against a normal team, it would have been a 20-point lead for the Raptors. But Boston is not a normal team, and Jayson Tatum’s forcefully aloof fire kept the Celtics within punching distance. Toronto’s offense sputtered to end the quarter, and despite momentum carrying them, the Raptors settled for poor offensive choices instead of extending the lead. The gap was a mere eight heading into the fourth.
And then, in instants, the lead was zero. Marcus Smart hit an open wing three in transition. Then another from the other wing. A third. Timeout Toronto, but then a step-back from Smart while running the pick-and-roll. Moments later, a bobbled ball is eventually passed to Smart, and this time he hits it while drawing the foul.
Smart’s five triples erased Toronto’s hard-fought lead. A full three quarters spent regrowing their liver, and in the earliest daylight of the fourth quarter Smart tore Toronto’s liver from body.
“I think we played our guts out,” said Nurse. “We gave everything we could give. At one end the guy’s making contested threes and the other end the threes aren’t going that were probably more open than they were at the other end.”
The end of the game was desperate. Crunchy peanut butter. Clawing with broken finger nails. Running barefoot, falling, in the twisted gnarls of the forest. The offense was a bog to end the game, as is correct for the playoffs. For long stretches of the game, no player seemed to want the ball. Every offensive possession felt heavy, like a must-score situation, and it weighed collectively on the Raptors. Lowry, Anunoby, and Siakam committed unforced turnovers in the meat of the fourth quarter. Lowry threw the ball between VanVleet’s legs. Siakam stepped out of bounds on a baseline out of bounds play intending for him to be in the corner. VanVleet missed uncontested triples. The Raptors had their teeth in their guts and their guts in their mouths.
“We got enough good looks to win the game and to play better, but when we got stops we missed some shots in transition, I missed a couple of threes in transition, Pascal missed some, he missed a couple of bunnies, Freddie missed an open three, but we had opportunities, man, we had opportunities, we just didn’t finish,” said Lowry after the game, frustrated but undefeated.
Toronto kept the deficit to one possession, but Fred VanVleet missed a buzzer-beating heave that would have tied the game. It was a good microcosm of the final moments. The Raptors couldn’t get moving, couldn’t run, were in a dream state trying to escape but unable to move their feet.
Don’t worry, though. Eventually Prometheus was freed by none other than the mighty Hercules. His liver regrew a final time, and then he was free, liver and all. The Raptors, too, could avoid their swift yet repeated punishment. They too need a hero like Hercules, but this time in the form of someone who can hit his jump-shots. This could be burying the lede, but Toronto shot 11-of-40 from deep in game two, 27.5 percent. They were open threes, though, that the Raptors were missing. And the 11-of-40 mark, dear friend, was better than their 10-of-40 in game one. That Toronto almost won the second game, practically tasted victory but for a Smart eruption, indicates that any positive regression would go a long way towards fixing Toronto’s problems. Despite the loss in game two, Toronto has found a winning formula. The defense was exquisite, and the offense much improved at creating good, open shots, if not cashing them into points. The Raptors know exactly what to do to beat the Celtics.
“We know if we keep shooting those same shots, we’re going to make them.,” said Anunoby, brief as always, but truthful. “We know we can shoot.”
The next time the eagle comes for Toronto’s liver, as long as the Raptors can make their open jumpers, it will be the eagle smarting from that clash.
