For those keeping track at home, the Toronto Raptors are now firmly back into the territory of moral victories. Yes, they sit at 7-11, and yes, they have now lost three of their last four after seeming to have found their winning ways. But these Raptors are not seriously equipped to handle the Milwaukee Bucks, especially without OG Anunoby in the lineup. Staying competitive until the final horn? That is no small feat. Nick Nurse was loath to call the game a moral victory, but he admitted that there was still plenty to like about it.
“Moral victory [is] probably too strong,” said Nurse. “I think there was a lot of good to take from the game, there’s a lot of positives to take from the game. I think we got some good sparks from Terence, Yuta, Stanley, there’s some positives again. The defense was pretty good, the schemes were executed pretty well.”
Nurse was absolutely correct — he usually is, as he is as straight a shooter as it comes with the media — that the Raptors played solid defense. They held the Bucks, a team with the best offensive rating in the league, to 43.0 percent shooting from the field and a few points below their standard offense. Now, if the Raptors had managed to corral a few more defensive rebounds, they would have really stifled their opponents. As it was, there was still plenty to like, even if things didn’t ultimately go their way.
Aron Baynes is now a real defensive piece. He’s starting to plug the gaps when his teammates rotate around the perimeter, and he’s great at taking contact without budging an inch. He met Giannis Antetokounmpo close to the summit on one play and finished with three blocks. His offense is still a work in progress, particularly considering he doesn’t offer much scoring utility inside the arc, which can hamper an offense when that’s true of a center. But his screen-setting is solid, and he continues to fire away from deep.
It wasn’t just Baynes who played great defense. Fred VanVleet turned in an all-timer. And sure, it was reflected in the stats, as he finished with three blocks and four steals, but it went far beyond that. His help defense was phenomenal, clogging the middle of the floor as soon as Bucks turned their heads, and he twice stripped Antetokounmpo cleanly on digs from across the floor. His shot was wayward in this one, but he was fantastic initiating in the first half especially, and he dished multiple nifty bounce passes in the pick-and-roll for Baynes dunks.
Perhaps most importantly, Toronto’s reserves are starting to alter the fabric of the game in positives ways. Yuta Watanabe entered the game and immediately slotted into the defense positively, rotating, using his length to contest, and rebounding well. He finished a team-high (tied) plus-eight for the Raptors. Stanley Johnson did much the same in the second half. Both hit triples for the Raptors, continuing their exceptional hot streaks to start the year.
Unfortunately for the Raptors, the Bucks are an incredible team. Brook Lopez was phenomenal finishing around the rim, and he even short-circuited Toronto’s rotations by attacking off the dribble rather than continuing to pass around the perimeter when the Raptors were recovering. Antetokounmpo is a nearly unstoppable finisher in the paint. Those problems are survivable. But add in that the Raptors fouled the Bucks so much that they attempted 26 free throws, and that’s almost impossible to surmount.
“I think we try to be the more physical team,” said Kyle Lowry when asked to explain why Toronto’s opponents attempt so many more free throws. “We’re a lot more handsy. I think we try to be a little bit more on the aggressive side. There’s a lot of things that I could say, but basketball reasons? We’re an aggressive team. We’ve got guys who play hard, and we reach.”
Even with the free throw deficit baked in, Toronto’s offense was actually the problem, not the defense. They shot well from deep, finishing 22-of-55 (!), for 40.0 percent, but that was really the only positive. The Raptors allowed themselves to be baited into low-percentage looks by the Bucks’ defense, which makes a living doing just that.
“We talked about that kind of midway through the fourth and from there on we started really getting those [better] shots,” explained Nurse. “You could see us doing multiple actions and side-to-side and kind of getting wherever we wanted to. I think we settled a little bit early against them. They kind of play that way. They want you to settle early and take that quick one or whatever and again for most of the game we did get those shots after multiple actions but I think there were two or three little stretches and they came in bunches. They came in three like three possessions in a row or four possessions in a row. We had just kind of dug ourselves out of a hole and we put ourselves right back in it I thought.”
To that point, Baynes and Chris Boucher combined to attempt 12 triples; that’s what the Bucks want out of opposing offenses. They plant Lopez at the rim, wall off the paint, and beg opposing centers to fire freely. Toronto obliged early, but in the fourth quarter, they pivoted into a hand-off back to the point guard, and Lowry splashed open triples in the fourth quarter as the Raptors fought back into the game.
Offensive discipline, then, was Toronto’s undoing. They continued to fight their way into the game only to fall back behind when they went away from what worked. It didn’t help that VanVleet ended up at the end of the flurry of passes — ordinarily, the idealized outcome for an offense — and missed his open looks. That’s life, and even if it didn’t work against Milwaukee, the Raptors are confident it will work going forward.
Realistically, the Bucks are one of the best four teams in the NBA, and the Raptors are not. They needed a huge amount to break correctly, and they checked perhaps three of five boxes, give or take, rather than all five. Without Anunoby, and with Siakam continuing to be a supporting offensive player, rather than a star, the Raptors have no margin for error against teams like the Bucks.
So, a moral victory, then. The Raptors are 7-11, but they have roughly three quarters of the season remaining and play two good teams in their next nine games. If the Raptors remain a sub-.500 team after that stretch, you can panic. For now, enjoy the low-calorie, unsatisfying, but ultimately moral, victory.
