https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyfaXff-iAY
Raptors re-establish their identity as fighters — evident even in loss to 76ers – The Athletic
When the Raptors defeated the 76ers on Sunday, it marked more than just their first time above .500 on the season. Asked about the team’s progress after that game, Fred VanVleet’s answer fell more in the categories of vibes and personality than in a defence ticking upward in efficiency, slightly improved rebounding or a hot stretch on 3-point attempts.
“There’s going to be ups and downs, but I think that we were finding ourselves being able to create an identity,” he said. “You need to create an identity each year, and it just feels like that we’re finding that here of late.”
A lot of our coverage of the Raptors this season has tried to dig into that idea. With the team displaced to Tampa, with a handful of new pieces, with some true culture-setters gone and with none of us physically around the team, the intangible felt, well, pretty intangible. That has seemed to be the case as much within the team as for those of us — writers, fans, curious organizational behaviourists — from the outside looking in. The Raptors knew they were better than their 2-8 start, something just about every metric and eye-test measure except for their crunch-time execution backed up. They seemed at a loss about the incongruence between the quality of the team and the quality of the results.
Winning has a way of revealing truths in the same way losing does. If a 2-8 start magnified flaws we expected and revealed new ones, their 14-8 stretch since has brought back into focus the team’s strengths and, yes, revealed new ones. They are dangerous going small and energetic. They have found a more optimized role for Aron Baynes, at least nudging them toward a feasible makeshift centre rotation. They have landed on a three-man bench unit of Terence Davis II, DeAndre’ Bembry and Chris Boucher that is helping transitional units drive performance and should make starter staggering much easier when Kyle Lowry returns and shifts an incumbent — likely Bembry — to the bench.
But winning also has a way of tying disparate ends together, of reinforcing the process and of building trust and belief.
Raptors scrap until the final buzzer, but can’t overcome Sixers – Yahoo
One — Split: It’s not easy to take back-to-back wins from a good team, and the Sixers bounced back in a major way with a wire-to-wire win. Unlike when the Raptors doubled the Bucks, the Sixers made tangible adjustments that proved useful. Their spacing was much better, and spacing is everything when the Raptors are constantly sending double teams toward Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. The Raptors made it tough and were closing in for most of the second half, but there just wasn’t enough time left. Still, it was a strong effort from the Raptors who could have taken both games from the conference leaders if they shot even an average night from three.
Raptors refuse to roll over but run out of time in loss to 76ers – Sportsnet
It wasn’t VanVleet’s strongest outing either, as he shot just 4-of-14 from the floor. But overlooking the fact that he contributed eight assists, two steals and four blocks is overlooking what really makes the Raptor guard all-star worthy — even when he’s not scoring he’s moving his team closer to winning.
In that sense it was a perfect encapsulation of VanVleet’s season: night in and night out he’s been a model of consistency, finding ways to move the needle almost independent of his offence, which has been pretty damn good in any case.
“Obviously, you know, I’m human. I’m disappointed. I really, as much as it doesn’t matter, it does matter, if that makes sense. I’m not gonna lie and say, ‘oh, I don’t care.’ Obviously I care, and it’s something that I want to be a part of someday,” said VanVleet of not getting the all-star nod. “But I think just having the proper perspective on it and the understanding that I’m not going anywhere. This is not going to be my last year being up for an All-Star… but I don’t play for that. I try to play the game the right way.
“And also it’s too much real s— going on the world for me to be crying about making the All-Star Game, you know what I’m saying? I don’t want to go anywhere. Let’s go with that narrative. I’mma be salty and be a sore loser. I didn’t want to go. How about that?”
That fits too, as the Raptors weren’t going to go anywhere all night even after getting off to such a slow start. They kept pushing, trying to find a way back into the game.
The Raptors were down six with 5:05 to play and it looked like they were positioning themselves to complete a comeback from down 21 in the first half, but the Sixers were able to respond with a quick 7-0 run on their way to what seemed like an insurmountable 17-point lead with 1:48 to play. But in a final closing flurry, the Raptors launched a 14-3 run that cut the Sixers lead to six with 21 seconds to play before the Sixers closed it down from the line.
Toronto held the Sixers to 41 per cent from the floor and continued their hex over MVP candidate Joel Embiid, who finished with 18 points and 11 rebounds but was just 3-of-13 from the floor — although he was 11-of-12 from the free-throw line. But the Raptors couldn’t connect from deep as they finished 11-of-37 from beyond the arc. The Sixers shot 17-of-38 and took 30 free throws to 13 for Toronto, and combined it was too much for the Raptors to overcome.
Sixers Bell Ringer: Sixers earn the Tampa split with 109-102 win over the Raptors – Liberty Ballers
A scorching-hot first quarter gave the Sixers a quick 19-point advantage, and although they tried to let Toronto back into the game late via some boneheaded turnovers, Philadelphia ultimately hung on for the 109-102 victory. As my LB colleague Dan Volpone pointed out on Twitter, it was the first game Philadelphia made more 3s than their opponent (17 to 11 tonight) since the Lakers win on January 27.
Sixers grades: Philadelphia wins defensive battle, ends Raptors win streak – The Sixer Sense
Despite the lead, Philadelphia’s offense scored only seven points over the final 7:07 of the quarter, all of which were scored by all-star snub Harris.
The third quarter consisted of more early offensive humiliation for Philadelphia. A Harris two-point shot was the only basket in the quarter until two Ben Simmons free throws finally, mercilessly broke a scoring drought lasting 11:56.
Philadelphia won this game on the road against one of the hottest teams in the conference. It still is a marvelous fact that an NBA team went nearly a quarter with only one player scoring.
The action picked back up after the tip-in as the teams traded baskets as Joel Embiid poured in nine points late in the third quarter to enter the fourth leading 79-65.
Despite an eventually scoring rush, the fourth opened dreadfully slow again. Several Terence Davis baskets closed the lead to eight before Shake Milton came through with a three-pointer to stop Philadelphia’s 4:20 scoreless streak.
The teams pushed down the stretch with an increased tempo combining for 67 points as Toronto managed to close the lead to five points before Philadelphia would ultimately close out the game, 109-102.
3 observations: Other 76ers step up to lead team past Raptors in Tampa – Sixers Wire
This cannot be overstated. With Toronto continuing to bother Embiid and them walling off Simmons a bit, the Sixers needed others to provide some offense until the two stars could get into a groove. The play of Korkmaz, Green, Harris, and even Milton and Matisse Thybulle off the bench was huge. Philadelphia needed all of that in this one as well as their defensive energy to be able to win with the stars struggling. Milton and Harris knocked down some clutch triples in the fourth when they really needed it.
Embiid has been superhuman all season, but the Raptors always seem to give him trouble every time they matchup. Also, he is not going to be a scoring machine every single time out, although it does seem like he will. On those rare nights, that is when others have to step up and provide production and that is what happened in this one.
Recap: Raptors fail to repeat, Sixers win in Tampa 109-102 – Raptors HQ
Sometimes, though, the other team is good too. Give the Sixers credit: after a demoralizing loss on Sunday, they looked every bit the favourite in the East on Tuesday. Ben Simmons and Tobias Harris, especially, turned their games up significantly for Philadelphia, as the two combined to score 38 points, all the Sixers starters scored in double-digits, and the road team won 109-102.
The combination of Harris and Simmons don’t always take headlines for the Sixers and were maligned for their poor play two years ago in a seven-game series against the Raptors. Tonight, they thrived off the extra attention thrown at Embiid by Toronto. Harris went 8-for-12 from the field and had five assists; Simmons went 5-for-11 and had seven assists and nine boards. Both got to the rim seemingly at will and demoralized Toronto inside, as the Raptors couldn’t quite find the balance between going big to protect the rim and going small to defrost their offense.
Shooting woes were the Achilles’ heel for the Raptors tonight. Losing the first quarter 37-18, Toronto shot just 36.7% from the field before halftime and 25% from three. Their splits would improve to 43/30 by the end of the game, but an 11-for-37 night from distance came with plenty of misses at bad times. The Raptors were constantly climbing back into the game, but just couldn’t make the shot to get it to a one or two possession game at critical points.
Still, the Raptors were pests. Through their shooting woes, Toronto had a strong defensive game. Fred VanVleet had four blocks and two steals. Aron Baynes (among others) held Joel Embiid to just 3-for-13 shooting. OG Anunoby did this to Danny Green.
It wasn’t a win, but it felt cool nonetheless.
“I’m very disappointed,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse, whose team’s streak of sending at least one player to the All-Star Game ends after seven years. “I was trying to stop the narrative. The narrative that I kept hearing was oh, if you guys wouldn’t have had such a bad start. Well, the voting just ended yesterday, I mean we’re like 14-7 in our last 21 [games]. I mean, were you still stuck on our 2-8 start?”
“Kyle’s been out a bunch of games, [VanVleet’s] picked up the slack for a six-time all star, won a lot of games, beat a lot of good teams, had huge games. I’m disappointed. I take nothing away from the guys that made it. I’m sure there’s some other guys on other teams that are very disappointed as well, but I think he’s played his guts out and our team’s played pretty well and he’s been a big reason for it.”
VanVleet will get over it quickly, and so will the Raptors. They’re probably already over it. With a couple of big wins over Milwaukee last week, as well as Sunday’s victory over Philly, it’s clear that they’ve turned a corner and have re-entered the mix atop the Eastern Conference. Even in defeat, they looked like their old selves against the Sixers on Tuesday.
After falling behind early, they dug in defensively, neutralized MVP candidate Joel Embiid for the second straight contest, and fought hard until the last second, even when they could have mailed it in with a game in Miami coming up the following night.
VanVleet was at the forefront of it, as he usually is. His jumper wasn’t falling for most of the evening – and he wasn’t alone in that regard, the Raptors shot less than 30 per cent from long distance – but he was typically impactful on the defensive end and hit a couple of threes late in the fourth quarter to push the Sixers when they thought they had the game wrapped up.
He added another 37 minutes-worth of mileage and will surely add a bunch more in what’s expected to be a physical contest against the Heat on Wednesday.
He would’ve loved to spend a few days in Atlanta next month, as unusual as this pandemic all-star weekend will be, but he’s not going to complain about getting a chance to enjoy some much-needed rest and relaxation on a beach with his family. Despite the disappointment, he still hasn’t lost that perspective.
“There’s too much real s— going on in the world for me to be crying about [not] making the All-Star Game,” VanVleet said.
Sixers split set in Tampa, but the Raptors don’t go quietly | The Star
They didn’t find a way Tuesday but that’s how the game often goes. Teams play hard, give it their best shot and sometimes the other guys are just better. But some nights, most nights, that kind of effort will be rewarded.
“You know, guys are injured, whatever, we’ll try to fight as hard as we can and that, for me, I can always live with it,” Nurse said. “I think we did give it a great effort tonight. Maybe a half a step slow ’til we got into it, but we finished it really hard and stayed through the full 48. And just some nights you just don’t quite shoot it well enough or … the breaks don’t go your way.”
The galling part for the Raptors was that it wasn’t the big-game Sixers that did them in. Ben Simmons, with 15 points, seven assists and nine rebounds, was very good but Joel Embiid was just 3-for-13 from the field on an 18-point night. Letting spot starter Furkan Korkmaz make four three-pointers in the first half and watching Tobias Harris go off for a team-high 23 points was Toronto’s biggest failing.
“It was a gamble we made going into the game,” VanVleet said of taking a chance the other Sixers wouldn’t have big nights. “I thought we did a better job of it in the last game. Obviously they probably just told their guys to be ready to shoot and line them up and take them, so they were they were a little bit better with their answer to our rotations tonight.
“We just didn’t do it well enough or hard enough or were a step slow so give those guys credit but, you know, that’s the gamble you take. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
DEEP-SIXED: Raptors struggle to hit threes in loss to Philly | Toronto Sun
The Raptors, a superior three-point shooting team to the Sixers, were uncharacteristically off all night from deep.
The three-point shooting improved a little for the Raptors in the fourth quarter but it was still a huge advantage for the Sixers over the course of the night..
Down by 21, the Raptors defence helped them get the deficit down to just six in the third but it quickly went back up to double digits.
The fight was there after that tough first quarter, but the hole was just too deep.
“That’s a positive to take away from tonight,” guard Fred VanVleet said. “Obviously we have been trending in the right direction. Given the way the game started, given the way we looked at times we could have easily caved and let them run away with it but we kept fighting. I thought we played a pretty solid game after that first quarter when Korkmaz got loose for a few. They made the shots that we gave them so give them credit.”
The Raps got it down to six again with five minutes to go on Chris Boucher’s second three of the night, but that was the last serious push the Raptors would make never getting it below that six-point margin.
Things don’t get any easier as the Raptors immediately packed up after the game to get to Miami where the rested Heat will host them tonight on a tough back-to-back.
The Raptors found a formula to save their season – SBNation.com
VanVleet and Lowry should be easy to expose on paper. It’s the league’s smallest starting backcourt with both players only listed at 6-foot. Neither player puts much pressure on the rim as a driver. Lowry will turn 35 years old next month. VanVleet has never dunked in his career, and Lowry hasn’t in a regular season game since the 2007-2008 season. This pairing shouldn’t work in the highest leverage situations against the league’s best teams, but somehow both players always seem to rise to the occasion.
The Raptors gave VanVleet a four-year, $85 million contract in the offseason, and he’s responded with a career-best season. While he’s only shooting 40.8 percent from the field and his scoring efficiency is slightly below average, VanVleet has emerged in some metrics as one of the league’s most impactful players. FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR WAR stat has him as the league’s third most valuable player right now behind only MVP front-runners Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid.
VanVleet is a master at creating shots for himself and his teammates. He’s one of the NBA’s best pull-up artists, taking 4.1 three-pointers off the dribble per game and hitting 36.5 percent of them. He’s also top-15 in the league in assists per game and is averaging a career-best assist rate of 28 percent.
VanVleet should be way, way too small to go head-to-head with Giannis Antetokounmpo and come out on top, yet his quickness and tight ball handling ability makes him so hard to stop.
VanVleet also plays much bigger than his size defensively. VanVleet is posting a steal rate above two percent again this season, and somehow has already set a new career-high in blocks. In his first 31 games this season, VanVleet already has 23 blocks. Last season, he only had 17 blocks in 54 games.
VanVleet never backs down against bigger players. Once again, just ask Giannis.
Lowry has also been as solid as ever even as he’s battled multiple injuries, including a thumb injury that kept him out of the recent win over the Sixers. Lowry has so many tricks as a scorer in his old age. He’s shooting a remarkable 70.2 percent at the rim per Basketball Reference and is making a career-best 52.6 percent of his two-pointers.
The Raptors have somehow won their last 16 games without Lowry. Trade rumors have started to swirl around as he plays out the final season of his contract, but the veteran guard very much remains the heart and soul of the team. Unless Toronto gets an offer they can’t refuse, expect Lowry to be leading the charge for the Raps in the playoffs, just as he does every year.
How The Best NBA Teams Juggle Their Lineups | FiveThirtyEight
The Raptors take things a step further. Toronto appears to believe it has four core players, as each of Kyle Lowry, Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby averages between 33.8 and 36.6 minutes per game.
Raptors coach Nick Nurse typically matches Lowry and Anunoby and staggers that duo with VanVleet and Siakam, who are also matched. He’ll also use different combinations of those four players on occasion, though he prefers to have at least two of them in the game at almost all times. It might be advisable for Nurse to mix it up a bit, though, because both the Lowry/Anunoby-only units and the Siakam/VanVleet-only units have negative net ratings so far this season.
The Raptors juggle their four best players
Minutes on the court and net rating for Toronto Raptors lineup combinations involving Kyle Lowry, Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet and OG Anunoby, 2020-21 seasonThe Raptors still have plenty of time to change things up if they want to. It will be fascinating to see if or how this rotation changes now that Anunoby has returned from the calf injury that kept him out of 10 games, especially considering how well Norman Powell fared as a starter in his absence. Because barring injury or some kind of roster move (like a trade or free-agent signing), those changes just don’t happen all that often — at least not for the star players.
The Raptors’ Fred VanVleet is left off NBA all-star game roster | The Star
VanVleet, and to some extent Lowry and Siakam, may have paid for Toronto’s relatively average record. The Raptors were just one game over .500 when coaches had to submit their votes as they continued a climb from a 2-8 start to the season.
“We’ve got starters on teams that don’t have good records,” VanVleet said earlier this week. “I’m sure there’ll be a guy or two off the bench that’s not on a good record team. You’ve got to pick the best players, who they think are the best players at the time.
“I think the way we’ve been playing should help all of our chances but, again, we’ll see where that ends up. I’m just happy where the team is playing and whatever comes with that, comes with it.”
‘Tim & Sid’ say goodbye: A look at the Sportsnet stars’ rise – The Athletic
“Those two might disagree, but it never felt like it was going to get to a ‘fuck you’ sort of point,” said James Cybulski, a former colleague at The Score now working as a morning host with Sportsnet 650, in Vancouver.
Those moments are not unprecedented in other shows, he said.
“I don’t think I can ever recall an instance where I heard — or somebody was talking about — ‘Wow, that really escalated to the point where it got uncomfortable,’” said Cybulski. “Usually, most shows have something where it gets a little tense.”
Micallef and Seixeiro said they made a decision early on that they hoped would prolong their careers together. They decided they would limit how often they would socialize outside of work, having heard the stories of other long-time sports broadcast tandems who did not get along.
They would not avoid each other at work functions, but they would not make a point of meeting each other outside the office. (It might also have helped that, initially, they were based on opposite sides of the city.)
“We had boundaries and we had honest conversations throughout,” said Micallef. “We had seen other people sewer each other, or put each other in bad spots, and thought, ‘That does no one any good.’ I think both of us learned from that.”
When they argued on air, on the show, they would check in with each other afterward, just to make sure the angst was staying on the air, and not making the commute home.
“Even if it went too far on the air, we always ironed things out within a couple of days,” said Micallef. “There might have been one or two that lasted a couple of weeks, but we’d always iron them out and made sure we always had the other guy’s best interest in mind.”
Some will argue that the full video of the incident was not yet public in October 2019, which is true. But one, we have no idea what footage Silver had seen or not seen up to that point. Two, the Alameda County Police Department already admitted before the HBO interview that Ujiri did present the officer with credentials. Three, onlookers had immediately more or less described what the full video shows. There’s also a little bit of precedent that police officers shouldn’t be taken at their word in moments like these.
If Silver was concerned with the optics of weighing in while the police officer’s charade was still “under investigation,” then he wouldn’t have said anything to HBO. I can only assume that he made a conscious decision to give a statement, which sounds even more tone-deaf and insulting now that Strickland has officially dropped his lawsuit against Ujiri.
Since the lawsuit dissipated a few weeks ago, Raptors fans on social media have been calling for Silver to apologize to Ujiri. I similarly saw people tagging various media members, asking them to reach out to Silver for comment, which felt like a fair request. He said something in 2019; why wouldn’t he say something a few years after the fact?
Send me any Raptors related content that I may have missed: rapsfan@raptorsrepublic.com
