Defensively-improved Raptors let one get away they shouldn’t have

Marco Bellinelli led the Hornets with 21 points as they edged the Raptors for a 110-106 win.

TORONTO – It’s been a long time since Steve Clifford was a high school teacher in small-town Vermont, and even longer since he was twice named the best defensive player on the varsity at the University of Maine at Farmington.

But given the chance, you get the sense he could spend a lot of classroom time teaching defence, a subject close to his basketball heart.

Clifford’s travelled a long and unlikely road from rural high school basketball to a head coaching gig in the NBA. Duties which brought him to the Air Canada Centre Wednesday night where his Charlotte Hornets were matched up with the red-hot Toronto Raptors.

But he’s never strayed far from his roots. And in his mind, defensive basketball is winning basketball, forever-and-ever. Amen.

“It’s so true in sports,” Clifford was saying before Wednesday’s game. “If you want to win consistently on the road you have to defend, rebound, be low turnover. Playing defence every night is critical.”

This is true. And will always be true.

But the NBA has a three-point line and it is the great equalizer. The Raptors did a lot of good things in their 110-106 loss to the Hornets. They defended well, over all, and very well in spurts. They largely contained the Hornet’s catalyst, Kemba Walker, and they entered the fourth quarter having turned around a 10-point second quarter hole to take an eight-point lead.

But Charlotte, who came into the game as the NBA’s 16th-ranked three-point shooting team, went into Houston Rockets-mode and dropped 16 threes on the Raptors on 32 attempts.

The most significant damage came in the fourth quarter where Charlotte, playing on the second night of a back-to-back, had the legs to go eight-of-10 from beyond the arc. That math is hard to overcome.

It was a flurry of five triples by the Hornets in the game’s last 3:44 that proved the difference. Walker’s 7-of-25 line won’t matter after he hit three of them, while Hornet’s big man Marvin Williams knocked in a pair, the last with 8.7 seconds left that put Charlotte up four and sealed it.

Prior to that, the fatal blow was a Walker three over the outstretched hand of Cory Joseph, who hounded Walker all night only to see him wriggle free at the end.

“Good move by him,” said Joseph of Walker’s 26-footer with 37.5 seconds left that put the Hornets up three. “I felt like I was right there, it was one of those where it was fingertip-to-fingertip but he still got it off. Good player, he made a good shot.”

The loss ended the Raptors’ winning streak at six and dropped Toronto to a game-and-a-half behind the third-place Washington Wizards for third place in the Eastern Conference before the Wizards played the Los Angeles Clippers late Wednesday night. Given that the first-place Boston Celtics lost at home to the Milwaukee Bucks, the loss was also a lost opportunity as the Raptors will start Thursday three games out of first, rather than two.

“It seems like it’s been like that for the last month and a half, two months,” said DeMar DeRozan, who grimaced when told of the Boston result. “It’d be funny if Washington loses tonight, too. It’s just how the see-saw has been going. We’ve got to take advantage of the games that we do have left now and understand Friday, let’s get back on track.”

The loss should only underline how important the defence-first leaning the Raptors have embraced since the all-star break.

Clifford was talking defence because the Raptors are now approaching a nearly quarter-season sample size as one of the NBA’s elite defensive teams, ranking third in the NBA in defensive rating, allowing just 102.2 points per 100 possessions since the mid-season break.

There is no better example of the kind of defence they can play than the third quarter against Charlotte, when the held the Hornets to 5-of-22 shooting and even heavy-footed Jonas Valanciunas was sprinting out to help defend the ball on the perimeter before getting back into the paint to block three shots on his way to a 14-point, 15-rebound effort.

At that point the Raptors were leading 74-66 and seemed to have the game in control, limiting Charlotte to 36.8 per cent shooting and a tolerable 8-of-22 from deep. Little did anyone know what was coming.

“They were hot as fire in the fourth quarter,” said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey. “We went from one of our best defensive quarters, 16 points in the third, to 44 in the fourth and that was the difference in the game.”

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But if the Raptors can hang on to what they did in the third and what they’ve been doing more often than not the past month, they could be going places.

They’re a better defensive team.

Are the Raptors doing anything different, from his vantage point, than what Toronto was doing prior to the all-star break when the Raptors were on a rapid slide to the bottom-third of the league defensively, Clifford was asked.

“No,” he said. “They have better defensive personnel out there. They have more size, more physicality. If you look at the characteristics of the best defensive teams every year it starts with size … it always starts with size. And with the [Serge] Ibaka and [P.J.] Tucker trade they have more size. They’re bigger. They’re more physical. Size is [a key factor].

“Contesting shots, for instance, is always an indicator of good defensive play and the numbers prove it every year. The percentage of contested shots that go in versus on shots that don’t. Well, what’s a big part of contesting shots? Size.

“If I’m bigger than you I can give you more cushion and, simply put, you’re not going to get by me as easily. If you’re smaller it hurts your one-on-one defence and ability to contest shots and, two, you’re not going to get beat as easily and put your team in rotations.”

It’s always interesting to hear what other teams and coaches think about the one you watch night after night. Clifford’s view is interesting because he was the last coach to see the ‘old’ Raptors – the Hornets played in Toronto in the final game before the all-star break before Ibaka and Tucker were in the lineup.

What he sees now is a different team.

The Raptors see it too. They just need to hone in on what they’re doing well. That and get Kyle Lowry back. Their most essential player – with apologies to DeRozan – has been out for a month after surgery on his shooting wrist.

There is no official update on his return but the most promising sign is that Casey said before the game that Lowry has progressed to shooting with his right hand which would seem to suggest that – barring a setback – he’s close to returning, ideally before the end of the regular season.

When he does get back all appearances are he’ll be joining a more defensively talented team than the one he was on before the all-star break and trade deadline.

The Raptors’ primary mission was to somehow contain the Hornets’ Walker, who came to the Air Canada Centre having averaged 32 points and eight assists against Toronto in three games this season, while shooting a mere 19-of-31 from three.

Mission accomplished, in the early going at least, as Walker shot just 4-of-20 before he hit his last three triples. The impact of Ibaka and Tucker was evident. Joseph was clearly more confident putting pressure on the lightning-quick Walker and for good reason: he had help behind him.

On one possession, late in the second quarter, Ibaka, at 6-foot-10, was able to string Walker out nearly to the sideline as he came out aggressively on him when his man set a ball-screen for Walker well above the three-point line. The disruption essentially ruined the possession before it even started and the Raptors got the stop. A moment later, Walker was successful at splitting the Raptors’ defenders at the point of attack but when he got to the paint Tucker had slid over to meet him, chest out, arms up and Walker missed the lay-up.

All the more reason to be frustrated by a game that got away.

“I can’t see how we lost this game,” said Tucker. “Especially when you consider the last few games, how the season is coming to an end, how close the race is. We can’t come out like that. There’s no excuse for us coming out and playing like that. We got to be better.”

The frustrating thing is they are better, and while Casey was disappointed that they weren’t aggressive enough in the first half against Charlotte and didn’t carry the defensive momentum they’d established in the third quarter into the fourth, it would be wrong to completely write it off.

The Raptors have what it takes to make some noise in the playoffs, in particular they have Ibaka and Tucker.

They lost a game they should have won, undoubtedly, but there are reasons for that too.

“We hit a bunch of threes,” was Clifford’s no B.S. assessment, the old high school coach never far from the surface. “At the end of the day Coach [Pat] Riley always says most nights it’s a make or miss league, and we had eight threes in the fourth, got a couple of stops when we needed it. But at the end of the day in the biggest possessions we got some open threes and knocked them in.”

And there’s very little defence for that.

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