It’s hard to point to the precise moment when the Toronto Raptors lost to the Philadelphia 76ers.
One could point to the end of the second quarter. Toronto had previously been on cruise control. The defense was stringent, and the offense was creating good looks at will. Then with four minutes and change left in the half, Stanley Johnson and Norman Powell entered the game for Kyle Lowry and OG Anunoby. The presence of those two wasn’t directly the cause of Toronto’s demise (and Johnson in fact played a hard-nosed game that earned compliments from his teammates), but with Lowry out of the game, the offensive flow ground to a halt. Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet alternated missing shots. A 10-point lead evaporated in three minutes.
Of course, Lowry re-entered the game and through a grift for free throws and an artfully executed two-for-one, turned a tie into an eight-point lead, in under sixty seconds of game time. As has been true since 2012 when Toronto traded for him — the age of a universe, as far as timelines go in the NBA — Lowry continues defining the success of the Raptors. Thus far, that is perhaps more true than ever this season. That’s a problem.
Once again in the second half, with Lowry on the court with the starters, Toronto built its lead back to double digits. And once again in the waning minutes, Philadelphia ate through the deficit in minutes when Lowry hit the bench. The Sixers launched an 11-0 run when Johnson and Powell replaced Lowry, as VanVleet and Siakam traded turnovers. This time, when Lowry re-entered the game with a few minutes left in the quarter, he couldn’t reproduce his magic to right the ship.
Finally, like an obsolete boat too far from port, Toronto’s offense chugged to a halt in the fourth. The Sixers started switching screens, and the Raptors seemed too fatigued or unfocused to capitalize. They had their chances. VanVleet passed too early on a fastbreak to create an advantage. Lowry missed on step-backs and post-ups. Siakam committed five fouls in the second half of the fourth quarter, allowing Embiid to attempt more free throws over the game, 16, than the 14 the entire Raptors squad managed to scrape together.
Perhaps worst of all, the ingredients of the classic Raptors’ win were present. For the first time in the 2020-21 season, Toronto’s defense seemed itself for long stretches. Lowry, VanVleet, Siakam, and Anunoby played their patented scramble defense of cascading x-outs, challenging everything on the perimeter, cutting off driving lanes behind their partner defenders, and recovering ahead of the ball. Anunoby especially was brilliant, as he gathered steals like a dog’s paw gathers snow.
The shooting finally came around. The Raptors hit 17 of 45 attempts, massively outperforming the Sixers’ paltry eight makes. Those who’ve shot poorly finally experienced positive regression to the mean. Pascal Siakam (4-of-9 from deep), Norman Powell (2-of-4), and and OG Anunoby (4-of-7) all hit their shots after starting the season cold.
And despite all of that, and the Raptors playing well for maybe 35 of 58 minutes, the team lost again, falling to 0-3 on the season. They haven’t been 0-3 since the year 2005, otherwise known as the salad days of Mike James, Rafael Araujo, and the founding of YouTube.
So when did it all fall apart?
Aside from an ugly fourth quarter, it was whenever Lowry sat. The stats are not pretty. For the third game in a row, Toronto won Lowry’s minutes in a losing effort. This time, the Raptors outscored the Sixers by 12 points with Lowry on the floor, but they lost the other 11 minutes by an astounding 19 points. Perhaps related: this is also the third game in a row that Toronto lost after leading by double digits. The negative, of course, is that the team can’t sustain its high quality of play. The positive there is that Toronto could easily be 3-0 given some extra fortitude — a quality the Raptors possessed in spades last year.
“I think there’s a little bit of unsettledness with the team,” said Nick Nurse. “I think it’s evident with a lot of the guys’ offensive play being so erratic.”
Nurse pointed towards internal flaws. He didn’t question effort or refereeing, but rather performance.
“I think we’re not being strong enough with the ball,” said Nurse of the team’s play late in games. “We’re making some hard driving things, and it seems like we’re either having a late-pass [or] handling issue, a finishing issue, or even when we do go up without a pass we lost the ball out of bounds a few times. Kind of on our own.”
As well as the Raptors are playing at times, droughts have doomed the team in all three games. That’s not something you can pin on any one player. VanVleet — only a day after I noted he’s shot 1-of-11 in pull-up triples this season — shot 2-of-8 from deep. Powell continued his inexplicable start to the season, making poor choices at every turn. At one point, he tracked down a certain Sixers turnover only to throw it out of bounds and give the ball back to the Sixers. Siakam shot 2-of-9 from within the paint.
Teams are ultimately defined by their consistency more than their ability to be great. We know these Raptors can be great. The team has great players, and for much of each game, those various stars have played at their peaks. Led by Embiid and Ben Simmons, the Sixers are a fantastic team, and Toronto’s defense throughout the game — for the first time this season — was wonderful. They held the Sixers to 38.1 percent shooting from the field. Yet the Raptors’ offense failed them.
Toronto can surely put the pieces together. It’s only game three. The sky is not falling. There are plenty of positives, of course, within each game; anyone discussing tanking or trading Lowry or some other panic-induced move is off his or her rocker. But the pieces need to add together soon. Even the players are starting to get antsy.
“We don’t have time to waste no more, we’re 0-3 and we need a win really, really bad,” said Lowry after the game. “I feel like we’re getting to that point where it’s a must-win.”
A must-win against the New York Knicks in the first week of the season: that should be jarring enough on its own, even beyond the 0-3 start to the season. History dictates that the Raptors can indeed play winning basketball even when Lowry’s not on the court. Things change, but the Raptors hope not something as basic as the ability of their entire non-Lowry core. For now, it’s on the Raptors themselves to prove something that shouldn’t require proving.
