There’s got to be a panic button around here somewhere. Feel free to jump on it with both feet. Imagine your hair on fire, or drowning at sea, or hurtling down a mountain road with no brakes.
Basically whichever scenario comes to mind to describe going out of your mind fits just fine.
The Raptors are a team on the verge of nervous breakdown. Or their fans understandably are. Wednesday night’s 116-103 loss to the Chicago Bulls was the latest installment in a free-fall that is hard to dress up as anything else but a hopeful season being disassembled game-by-game.
The loss dropped the Raptors to 42-30, which isn’t all that bad except they started the season 24-7 and were 37-17 just over a month ago.
Since? Debacle city. Sure they clinched a playoff spot thanks to losses by Charlotte and Boston, but that’s seeming more and more like a consolation prize than a reward.
Wednesday night was the Raptors second straight loss and dropped them to 6-13 since the All-Star break. In their last 41 games – or half a season – they are third-worst in the NBA in defensive field goal percentage (46.5 percent) and 26th overall in defensive rating, allowing an average of 106 points per 100 possessions. All four teams behind them lottery bound. No projected playoff team defends worse.
As one insider put it, “our defense has fallen off a cliff, and we’re not sure why.”
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DeMar DeRozan offered his explanation as to why the Bulls could rip his club for 39 points in the fourth quarter, upending the 82-77 lead Toronto enjoyed after three periods, and it sounded an awful lot like a team that doesn’t quite get it.
“We have to understand that we are playing against a team like Chicago [and] they are going to execute and run their bread-and-butter plays at the end of the game,” said DeRozan, who finished with 20 points on 19 shots.
“We have to understand that they will pick it up, offensively and that’s when we have to pick up defensively. … It’s focus and understanding what plays they are going to go through. That’s why we go through walkthroughs and scout their high-frequency plays that they run at the end of games … we have to be prepared for it.”
And then there was the situation in Detroit on Tuesday. Not only did the Raptors give up 60 first-half points, but after they fought back from down 17 to get back in the game, there was a horrible final possession in which Lou Williams forced up a long three-pointer that missed.
Worse, there was confusion afterwards about whether Raptors head coach Dwane Casey had called a play or not – he said he did, Williams said he didn’t. The whole thing looked bad.
To his credit Casey addressed the matter before Wednesday night’s start and chose to wear the entire mess.
“It was my fault,” he said. “In hindsight — I’m taking responsibility for it — I should have called a timeout.”
But lost in the hubbub was a more important point, the Raptors didn’t start competing until it was essentially too late.
“It came down to us not being in fight mode until we got hit first, and we didn’t start fighting until the second half,” Casey said. “We’ve got to play desperate to be effective.”
That was the Raptors calling card for the second-half of last season and the first half of this one – the good old days, in other words.
Now that might be the only hope they have.
Only their tenancy in the NBA’s Eastern Conference has preserved the illusion that the Raptors are a team that needs to be reckoned with. And the potential that Lowry can play at something approaching an MVP level – something he hasn’t done consistently since Christmas and can’t be relied to do anytime soon given that he already required a three-game maintenance holiday after the all-star break and lasted only 10 minutes in his return to the floor Tuesday after missing two games with a back injury — seems more remote all the time.
Those were the circumstances before the game ever started. The frightening thing is there are no obvious reasons why they will change any time soon, which is a problem given Toronto has 10 games left in the regular season.
And then, just as predicted, the Raptors calmed the waters by playing a near perfect first quarter against the visiting Bulls — who had dealt with them routinely and easily in their previous three meetings this season.
That was a joke, by the way.
Based on the messy loss in Detroit the night before, given that Lowry was out indefinitely, and that it was the Bulls at the ACC, had the floor caught fire you couldn’t have been surprised.
But out comes Terrence Ross connecting on a pair of threes on his way to a dozen points in his first 11 minutes, supplemented by three triples by Greivis Vasquez and some semblance of team defence — the Bulls shot 47 percent from the floor which is good for the Raptors these days — and Toronto led 29-20 after one.
But the Bulls kept creeping back in and the Raptors’ porous defence re-emerged. In the second quarter, Chicago shot a comfortable 12-of-20 from the field and knocked down five of the 10 three-pointers it took.
Bad luck or bad planning? Aaron Brooks is shooting a very respectable 39 percent from the three-point line this season as he fills in for the injured Derrick Rose and yet the Raptors gave him multiple open looks in the quarter and he knocked down a pair of threes. Similarly, giving renowned marksman Mike Dunleavy time to do a house inspection as he set up his own wide-open three.
The Raptors competed. They made the Bulls push, but you could see the end coming well before it arrived. The Bulls shot 54 percent in the first half and 55.6 percent in the third quarter. The Raptors were returning to their defensive norms.
“If a team shoots 61-percent, 52-percent from the three and scores 116 points, there isn’t a lot of defence being played,” said Casey.
The fourth quarter was predictable: the Bulls out-scored Toronto 39-21 and shot a tidy 75 percent in the final period.
No one wins playing defence that way. Hit the button.