Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is a Neo-Impressionist masterpiece, a subtle story of modernity and degeneracy, urban and rural divide, and pet monkeys. It is also a pointillist painting, made up by uniform dots (anywhere from 200,000 to millions, depending on where you look) that each contribute to the story. They’re all significant on their own, of course, but they’re far more significant within the context of the piece’s entire whole.
So too can a basketball game be told within and made up by individual points, plays created separately that coalesce into a painting. The Toronto Raptors’ 128-111 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder was full to the brim of genius. It all combined to mean much more.
3:53, Q1: The first point of brilliance comes from the recently-but-no-longer slumping Pascal Siakam. He catches the ball in the post and faces up his defender. Too often his moves have been laboured, his back to the basket, his dribble protected, ending with hooks or other difficult looks. Not here. Siakam half pivots slowly, luring his defender, then jab steps right, rocks back to center, and immediately attacks right. The stutter rip is followed immediately by a spin move, a euro-step, and a layup on the other side of the lane. Siakam’s pristine three-punch combo combined three of the toughest dribble moves in basketball, and he kept his balance and burst through the entire series. He has not been making moves like this recently. Foreshadowing a huge game, dominant in all three levels, and his best in the month of March.
10:49, Q2: Christian Koloko is in the game playing center instead of Precious Achiuwa. Achiuwa has had trouble containing the pick and roll recently, and his offense has been tentative, so Nick Nurse benched him in this one. Koloko has more size and has been more effective, in his minutes, at walling off the rim. In one of his first possessions, the Thunder test him in the pick and roll, and Koloko plays far too high, opening up a simple bounce pass to Dario Saric on the roll. Koloko, impossibly, recovers with immediacy and pins Saric on the backboard. He is out of position on the next defensive possession, a zone look for Toronto, but he teleports to the rim and forces another miss with verticality. He wins his 12 minutes by six points — without scoring a point of his own — largely because of his eminently playable defensive contributions.
4:45, Q2: O.G. Anunoby catches the ball in the corner but is too defended to fire a triple. He drives baseline and puts his defender on his left hip with a power dribble, engaging the help defender early. He euro-steps towards the middle of the floor, seeing another body, again on his left hip. He keeps his balance, jumps, extending the ball with one hand towards the rim, hanging, and dropping it in off the glass. The move is one of Anunoby’s most controlled, balanced, and impactful drives. (Maybe one of the best of his career, if we’re being honest.) He attacks multiple defenders, chains together a move to overpower each, and he does it with reasonable and controlled applications of force and grace, each time.
3:37, Q2: Chaos ensues as Anunoby and Jakob Poeltl turn into Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. Poeltl throws a lob pass in transition to Anunoby, and it’s a bad one, thrown behind Anunoby. But good alley-oops are always the result of bad passes, and Anunoby gathers the pass and hammers it home. Then Anunoby tags a pick and roll from the corner and blocks a shot at the rim. And Poeltl throws down a one-handed dunk in transition, powering it home over Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Anunoby steals the ball, and Poeltl posts up in transition, sealing, and throwing in a layup. Another block for Anunoby, this timed called a shooting foul, which ends the two-man run of hilarity. Everyone is developing unique chemistry with Poeltl, but few have been able to win 30-second stretches by six points with such loud and diverse domination.
11:47, Q3: Fred VanVleet chases Gilgeous-Alexander around an off-ball screen, but when Gilgeous-Alexander takes another en route to a handoff, VanVleet switches onto the screener and Scottie Barnes switches onto the Thunder star. VanVleet pitches a wonderful game at the point of attack, but Barnes doesn’t miss a beat when replacing the smaller player, using his length to close any passing lanes, denying him the ball, and ultimately forcing a tough miss elsewhere simply by disallowing Oklahoma City from running its play. VanVleet sprints into a transition triple with the possession Barnes earned. Quietly, Barnes’ defense has been trending upwards for a few months. He is playing with aggression still, but he’s not falling behind the play because of mistakes on the perimeter. When he does have to recover, he chooses better angles and finds better territory to cover in the process. He didn’t have the highlight blocks against the Thunder that he had, for example, late last month against the Chicago Bulls. But his defense was subtly as effective as its ever been.
10:40, Q3: Josh Giddey throws a bounce pass behind the back to a cutter for an uncontested finish at the rim. It is one of the smoothest passes of the season. Not to be outdone by a fellow sophomore, Barnes posts up the following possession, probes, and finds a crack on the weakside defense. He rockets a 100 mph fastball across the court into Anunoby’s shooting pocket for a triple. Barnes is one of the most psychotically competitive people I’ve seen. If you think he didn’t add extra flair to his pass because of Giddey’s on the other possession, you’re underrating his mean streak.
9:53, Q3: Poeltl posts up almost at the arc in transition, and Siakam cuts from the weakside. He doesn’t beat his man, but he does seal him, and Poeltl throws a lob entry pass over the entire court to Siakam for the easy layup. It’s nice to have bigs who can pass as well as anyone! It opens up so many avenues on the offensive end.
10:55, Q4: The Raptors sloppily overpass in transition, and the ball is in Gary Trent jr.’s hands — which usually means a shot is going up, especially in transition. Instead Trent throws a lateral to a streaking Anunoby, who rises and drops a nuclear bomb with one hand on the defender. For a brief instant, as he holds the ball aloft with one hand and spreads his legs, he looks exactly like the Jumpman logo.
7:12, Q4: The Thunder start to (pretending to unintentionally) intentionally foul Poeltl to send him to the free throw line. This is a bizarre choice, as he is shooting 61 percent from the free throw line on the year. That means the Thunder are conceding a points expectation of 1.22 (which is better even than the best NBA offense in history, this year’s Sacramento Kings, who are scoring 1.20 points per possession on all offensive possessions, including transition). Translation: The Thunder can’t stop the Raptors, admit they couldn’t stop the Raptors, and do so publicly and shamefully. Poeltl shoots 6-of-8 from the line during the period of intentional fouling — with a Barnes putback on one miss — meaning the Raptors score 2.0 points per possession as a result of the gamble.
And that’s the game. The Raptors close out the Thunder and turn the game into a blowout. The benches are even emptied. Virtually everyone who plays plays well, and they don’t need to cheat the possession game to win. Significantly, the Thunder play also play good and impressive basketball. Gilgeous-Alexander drives as well as he has all year, and he’s virtually unstoppable with the ball. His teammates shoot well from deep. It doesn’t matter.
Each moment, each artful moment in Toronto’s pointillist win, combined to mean so much. For one of the first times all season, Siakam and VanVleet were at their best at the same time. Every one of Toronto’s most important players is developing important and individually unique chemistry with Poeltl. The bench rotation is starting to make lots of sense. (Of course, if Achiuwa finds his game, the bench will truly pop.) Toronto’s defense, led by Anunoby and Poeltl, is starting to solve most problems it faces, especially over the time period of full games. Toronto’s point-of-attack defenders who had been having trouble, namely VanVleet and Barnes, are thriving in recent games.
It’s easy to dive into “the Raptors are back!” territory on the coattails of such ideal games, but there’s no need for such claims. They’ve had too many such moments before plummeting back down into the dumps for us to trust a simple two-game winning streak. Besides, this game doesn’t have to have meaning beyond itself. It was a genius game, played wonderfully on both sides, and the Raptors still easily outclassed a talented and competitive team from the West. Every Raptors’ rotation player succeeded in his role. For one night, each player, each point in the game, combined into a work of art far more beautiful than any individual moment on its own.
