React Pod | Quick Reaction | Rap Up
Parent Trap is a classic of the pre-9/11 era. A lost relic as philosophical question: is identity fated by blood or by culture? Plus, it has twins. I didn’t understand the heart of the movie as a child, but I was enthralled by the idea of parents not (immediately) recognizing their own children when identical twins trade places. Would you? In fact, if I showed you two basketball games, both fundamentally existing as separate from one another, yet visually irreconcilable, would you be able to tell them apart?
The Toronto Raptors start out hot at home, hitting shots with relative ease, building an early lead. A lack of attention to detail on the defensive end — poor rotations, missed blockouts, etcetera — combined with poor shot-making on the offensive end allow the woeful opponent to take control of the game, undoing all of Toronto’s good work. Then the team smartens up, taking the lead into the final moments. But a game that shouldn’t be close to begin with comes down to the final possession. Toronto is on the defensive end. A star Canadian guard drives, reaches the paint, draws an extra help defender. He waits, baiting a decision. More help comes. He rotates and kicks the ball back to his big waiting above the arc for a three-pointer. He lets it fly.
Are you seeing double yet?
Well in the previous game, Mike Muscala beat the Raptors. And last night, Julius Randle failed to deliver on his late triple. More concerning is that Toronto was in the position to begin with after yet again blowing a huge early lead. Toronto’s defense was stellar all night, but the offense was a struggle. It’s tough to put your finger on the single issue from which everything flowed. Pascal Siakam shot three of 18 from the field, but he still drew doubles and even triples when he faced up in isolation, allowing plenty of space for his teammates to fire away. Fred VanVleet shot zero for two from inside the arc, but he splashed triples and threw a ridiculous 11 assists. Even when VanVleet rested in the second half, Malachi Flynn played well — though he didn’t score — and created uncontested shots for himself and others. They just didn’t go down.
Ultimately, the Raptors were doomed by poor shotmaking. Doomed is strong — they won the game, after all. But the Raptors played a great game in terms of offensive process. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. The defense was immaculate, with Siakam bottling up Randle throughout the night and VanVleet was as usual a deity when helping at the rim, stripping the ball from countless (read: mostly Randle) unsuspecting victims throughout the night. VanVleet remains one of the best roll taggers in the league, and he does it by meeting opponents early, attacking the ball when it’s below the waist, and always being in the right spot. Great stuff.
But the real star of the night was Scottie Barnes. He was a monster on the defensive end himself, helping in the lane and at the rim and collecting two blocks and steals each. But more importantly, he almost never found himself out of position, generally rotating correctly — which has been one of his weaknesses as a defender. He rarely allowed blowbys, instead containing the ball at the point of attack and not offering a weak point in the structure of the defense.
And offensively, he was one of Toronto’s stars. Thus far, he has been a master of improvisation, keeping the ball on handoffs and driving for dunks, attacking the offensive glass, cutting into space on teammates’ drives. He did the same against the Oklahoma City Thunder, but he also mixed in some great initiating moments. He ate in the post. He even rejected a pick and roll to drive into a crowd, flipping in a little floater with ease because he has so much extension on that shot that it can’t be challenged. He whipped a seeing-eye pass crosscourt after an offensive rebound for a VanVleet triple.
With Barnes’ defensive precision and offensive initiation, this was a new type of game for the star rookie. Better get used to it: he’ll be continuing to grow and change rapidly over the next several years.
There’s always difference beneath even identical exteriors. Of course, the results were different for Toronto against the Thunder and against the New York Knicks. But so too were the elements invisible from a distance: the engine that was Barnes, the defensive improvement.
Lindsay Lohan played both twins in Parent Trap. She was the rad Californian and snooty Londoner. So for all the twins’ embodiment of competing elements of fate, they were the same all along. So too, of course, were the Raptors games different. Randle could not do what Muscala could. And as a result, the Raptors are proving that though they shouldn’t allow their fate to be decided by outside forces, they are at least unbound to a single destiny, even when two games run together on the same tracks.
