At one point, it looked like the Oklahoma City Thunder might lose only two games all season. On Tuesday, they came close to losing both of their games against the Toronto Raptors.
The game started out rote and slowly brewed and boiled until it became an all-out slugfest between the two defensive juggernauts.
Basketball is a game of runs? The second half was a game of four-minute miles. Long-distance wind sprints.
In the third, the Raptors fell apart. The Thunder romped to a 26-7 run as triples poured down from the heavens unabated – four of them from a scorching-hot Isaiah Joe. Oklahoma City did its thing, aggressively battering the gaps and stopping all drives short of the rim while the Raptors failed to make reads under the mounting pressure. The Thunder led by as much as 25 with 14 minutes of game time remaining. It was over.
But in the famous words of Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over until it’s over.” The Raptors proceeded to orchestrate a 30-5 stretch over 10 minutes, and a Jamal Shead pull-up 3 tied the game at 101 with 4:06 left on the clock. Oklahoma City scored only one basket in the first eight minutes of the fourth – a driving layup from Jared McCain. Of course, any extended scoring drought always has an element of shot variance involved, but the Raptors, and Scottie Barnes, did everything in their power to drag themselves back from the dead and make it a game.
Barnes pinned a Holmgren layup on the glass, the second of two blocks he had against the Thunder’s Defensive Player of the Year frontrunner. Getting stuffed so often by a competitor in the DPOY race has to count for something, right? Toronto’s defensive superstar swatted another rim attempt on the run, bringing his total on the night to four, giving him a new career high of 91 on the season. Barnes also had three steals, vaulting him back ahead of Victor Wembanyama for the NBA lead in stocks (steals+blocks).
Aside from drumming up excitement, it was all for naught as Cason Wallace stepped back into the shoes of the absent Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and jetted to the rim for a drove of layups, lighting up the Raptors for 27 points and leading the Thunder to a 116-107 win.
Wallace morphed into the star Oklahoma City required, knifing into the lane and banging a bevy of pull-up triples as the Thunder first surged ahead in the second quarter. He checked out with four minutes left until half with 17 points on perfect 7-of-7 shooting. Forget about meticulously crafted advantages, they’re not needed when someone starts pumping heat from scratch. The six-foot-three guard finished 11-for-16, 4-of-5 from deep and added eight rebounds and seven assists.
Initially, the Thunder struggled to generate advantages as they searched for creation without their stars. Isaiah Hartenstein and Chet Holmgren ran a handoff above the break and Holmgren’s drive was easily walled off, his shot easily denied by Barnes.
Alternatively, the Raptors are accustomed to finding offence with hardly any dribble creation – outside of Brandon Ingram’s self-creation of course. Ingram canned only one of his signature tough turnaround middy-fades in the first. Far more interesting, the Raptors ran a twirl action and Ingram banged a triple lifting off the second screen.
Meanwhile Magneto was getting his mitts on the ball like it was made of adamantium. Collin Murray-Boyles batted the ball away from Wallace and hit ahead to RJ Barrett for an open transition dunk.
Barrett’s had an extended stretch of below-normal production and has looked a step slow after returning from his second lower-leg injury of the season one month ago. But he got his legs under him early against OKC, also making three catch-and-shoot triples in the first quarter. Later Barrett roiled his way to the rim, took a bump and finished a touch shot from a few feet out. His driving game is the most valuable aspect of his play to the Raptors’ offensive ecosystem. All-in-all, this kind of lift from Barrett would go a long way going forward. StarJ finished with 21 points on 8-of-15 and 4-of-6 from 3, plus eight boards, four assists and two stocks.
Barnes’ had minimal box-score impact on his first shift, but that changed fast. He first finished an and-1 on a cut down the lane. After he picked Alex Caruso on back-to-back possessions for points; first a circus backwards finger roll and next a well-timed Jamison Battle cut. The bona fide all-star drove an 11-0 Raptors run to end the opening quarter and Toronto took a seven-point lead into the second.
That and Shead’s tying 3 capping the Raptors’ gargantuan run were the high points of the game. The low points were of course Oklahoma City’s tear, and also a smaller, more specific moment. With seven minutes left and the Raptors having pushed the deficit to 10, Immanuel Quickley made the most forced post-entry pass to Ingram of the season.
The Raptors killed 17 seconds of the shot clock while Ingram tried to wrestle his way out of the Dorture Chamber in an attempt to come off either of the option screens the Raptors often set for him in clutch situations. Quickley then telegraphed the pass as he attempted to fit it into an impossibly small window between Lu Dort fronting and McCain on the backside. The force feeding was emblematic of a Raptors offence that often tries too hard to achieve a specific result instead of reading and responding to what the defence is doing.
Notes
- The Raptors squandered a 99th percentile shooting night for them, as they went 18-of-38 (47.4 percent) from 3. There was Barrett’s 4-of-6, Ingram and Shead each went 2-of-4, Quickley was 4-of-9 and Ja’Kobe Walter was 5-of-7, tying his season high. Walter’s firmly seized the bulk of the backup wing minutes.
- I wonder if the Thunder have even a shred of regret for the Caruso-Giddey swap. Despite Giddey’s ascension to a near all-star, I’d guess no, because Caruso is such a super-utility knife (oh and they won a championship). He was elite at doing all the little things for OKC in this game, including scoring efficiently (6-of-10 from the floor, 2-of-5 from 3), playing sharp and shrewd defence, and making smart passes from the middle to tee up a couple of Joe’s 3s on the Thunder’s big run. Caruso was a game-high plus-22.
- The Raptors are now 4-14 against top-10 teams and continue to struggle against physically imposing, aggressive defences. It’s hard to see a solve for this within the current roster construction.
