Paul Jones

Paul Jones is the voice of the Raptors on the FAN 590 and writes regularly for Sportsnet.ca.

If you stayed up Tuesday night to watch the Toronto Raptors and the Los Angeles Lakers, you had to be entertained. It's the kind of game that wins folks over and if they were sitting on the fence, they might just become basketball fans after a game like that one. And if you are hard core and call yourself a basketball fan, well, it's the great theatre and drama of NBA basketball you live for every night.

The Lakers needed Kobe Bryant's heroics to pull out a 109-107 win over the Raptors as Bryant scored 14 of his 32 points in the final quarter including the game-winning shot with 1.9 seconds remaining. Cue the superhero music as Kobe does it again.

The Raptors dodged a bullet back in January as Bryant misfired at the end of the game in the same situation but this time, the "black mamba" bit them hard.

Sure Kobe did his best Reggie Miller impersonation at the end of the game to get open. He pushed off Antoine Wright with a forearm to the throat to make the catch on the right wing before dribbling to the baseline for the winning bucket. Raptor fans will lament the lack of a favourable call but the next time they call Kobe for a foul on a play like that will be the first time. In fact, the Lakers got a generous whistle all night playing at home. Wright did about as good a job as you can do defending in that situation but he commented that when Kobe squared up, he had to allow him to go to his right on the drive as Bryant attacked his left knee with the dribble. If he hadn't, Bryant would have "tripped" over his knee and then gone to the foul line. Wright evaded it once, but if they decide to make another "NBA, Where Amazing Happens" commercial, Wright could find himself in it as the victim once again.

The play that was executed by the Lakers in the dying seconds is one they had run before, with the most recent viewing by this reporter being Bryant's game winner against Memphis in February.

The good whistle for the Lakers goes back to my circle theory of officiating and in a nutshell, here it is. The NBA will hate me for it and never admit to it but this is what I feel. Circle one, the good one. Good teams get calls, win games, get respect, so considered a good team (repeat circle). Circle two, the bad one. Bad team doesn't get calls, no respect, continue to lose games (repeat circle). Again, the NBA will never admit to it, but it's the way I see it and in some circles that opinion might be deemed outlandish or misinformed, but I still stand by it, regardless. But doesn't it seem like the good teams just get the calls?

OK, enough Jones, I know, I know.

But give the Raptors some credit as they battled the Lakers right to the end but came up short. True, there are no moral victories in the bottom line business that is the NBA but as Wright commented in the locker room postgame, the team has to do this again. By "this" he meant play solid defence and exert maximum effort every night. If they do, they will set themselves up to win games as we head toward the end of the NBA schedule with Toronto having only 20 games left.

"Playing hard tonight isn't going to help us beat Sacramento," noted Wright as he addressed the media. You know what? He's absolutely correct and the Raptors had better find a way to bring that effort and focus at both ends of the floor the rest of the way this season.

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OK, to answer the questions about Jay Triano not having a time out at the end of the game, he managed them well enough to get them to the tie and he was not upset about Jarrett Jack's time out late in the final quarter. If they get a stop, the game goes to overtime but the Raptors are now in a long line of teams that could not stop Kobe from hitting a game winner.

According to the coach, he "gives" the players a timeout if they need it to keep a possession alive at a critical point in the game. Good thing that Jack used it as Bryant locked him up in that bad spot just over the mid-court line against the sideline with little room for retreat as the time line was acting as another defender. Still, Jack, a quick NBA point man could have withdrawn slightly with a bounce and then beat Bryant avoiding the time out while creating a scoring opportunity for Toronto. In the end it didn't matter as Toronto scored following the time out as Triano had the opportunity to set up a play but who knows, the extra time out may have come in handy as Toronto could have used one following Bryant's corner jumper that proved to be the winning margin.

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Wonder if the NBA can put in a rule about fans touching the ball when it is in play as it happened twice last night in LA with Toronto getting ready to save the ball both times as it was going out of bounds. It was Jarrett Jack with a few words for a Laker fan sitting in the $2500 a ticket courtside seats between the Los Angeles bench and the scorers table in the fist half. Jack tried to run the ball down but it was touched by a fan before it was officially blown dead. The same thing happened to Jose Calderon late in the game and while it didn't look like Jack could save the ball, Calderon not only was not only looking to save the ball, he was looking back to a teammate who he could have passed the ball to when the fan interfered.

Oh yeah, the fan, was Lapo Elkkan, the heir to the FIAT car company fortune. So what do you do? From my understanding there is no official rule or protocol but the referee should have blown the whistle and signaled for a jump ball and centre court. You don't know who would have come up with the ball and if in his judgment, and it sure looked that way, Calderon could have saved the ball back in bounds then why not jump it up at centre.

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You know what was really cool last night? Dyan Cannon bringing the broadcast crew homemade brownies. Now they were not nearly as good as my wife's and her baking, honestly, in fact not even close but still it was a nice gesture to have a Hollywood Star bring you a halftime snack.