TORONTO – What the Toronto Raptors really need is practice. A long, hard, detailed practice. Perhaps several of them. This is head coach Dwane Casey’s wish.
He probably won’t get it. The demands of the NBA schedule are such that most smart organizations look for pauses between games for opportunities to make sure players get the proper recovery and rest, and the Raptors have bought into that.
In the bigger picture, what the Raptors might need is some kind of roster adjustment—that’s a fancy way of saying trade—to bolster their frontcourt, but that’s likely not something that’s coming in the very short term, if at all.
In the meantime, what they need most of all in the absence of either of those is a win.
That might take while.
The Raptors didn’t get it on Sunday night as they melted down the stretch against the Phoenix Suns, losing 115-103 in one of their least impressive efforts in an otherwise consistent season.
And to make a worrisome situation worse, the Raptors will now have to monitor the well-being of DeMar DeRozan’s right ankle, which he twisted while stepping on teammate Jonas Valanciunas’ foot in the fateful fourth quarter. He kept playing until the game was out of hand, but was limping noticeably in the Raptors’ dressing room later.
“It’s sore, yeah,” said DeRozan, who has been an ironman throughout his career, missing a total of 30 possible games in nearly eight seasons.
Does he think he’ll get over it quickly?
“I hope so. I try to be a hopeful guy all my life,” said DeRozan, not so convincingly. “So we’ll see.”
Next up, the Raptors will play San Antonio (34-9) at the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday before jetting off to take on the Memphis Grizzlies (26-20) on Wednesday. Not pretty.
The visiting Suns (15-29) were supposed to be Toronto’s soft landing spot after hitting the mid-season doldrums.
They arrived in Toronto in last place in the Western Conference, having played the night before in New York and at the end of a stretch of five games in eight nights in three countries (they played in Mexico City last week).
But the Raptors (28-16) couldn’t take advantage, getting out-scored 33-18 in the fourth quarter as the NBA’s second-rated offence couldn’t muster a field goal from the mid-point of the period until a meaningless Norman Powell triple with 16 seconds left.
It was the young Suns that looked poised down the stretch. Kyle Lowry was ejected with 1:30 left after he got overzealous with an intentional foul on the Suns’ Brandon Knight. Knight made both his free throws and the Suns scored on the next possession after the technical, pushing their nine-point lead to 13.
Ball game.
Lowry claimed innocence and apologized via text—he expected Knight to shoot a floater and he kept dribbling instead—but had it been a frustration foul, it would have been understandable.
“When you lose three in a row you should be frustrated, you should be upset,” said Casey. “I don’t want anyone in the locker room not to be upset and frustrated because we’ve set a standard for ourselves to be better than that.”
The Raptors have now lost three straight for the first time since November 2015—the second-longest streak without such a skid in the NBA. It will likely ramp up the growing concerns about which direction the club is heading at the midway point of the season.
The short-term argument is that the Raptors desperately need Patrick Patterson to return–they have been allowing 3.7 more points per 100 possessions since he got hurt.
The bigger question is, why are they so vulnerable to an injury from one role-playing power forward?
“[It’s] the little things you don’t see,” said Casey of Patterson’s missing contributions. “One is the spacing he gives you, automatically by walking on the floor. His intellect is missed. His talking to other players on the floor. He’s a valuable piece to what we do, no question.”
The Raptors led 60-57 at the half, which was nice. With the exception of the first couple of minutes, they actually led the entire first half. They were ahead after the first quarter, which is a bigger deal than it sounds.
Toronto’s chronically slow starts have become a notable problem recently.
It could have something to do with who has started. The last few weeks before the All-Star break in mid-February are the dog days of the NBA season. It’s an easy time for a team to swoon.
Patterson’s knee injury–the Raptors’ official glue guy missed his fifth straight game with a balky knee and his 10th in the last 12–came at an inopportune time. Toronto is now 6-7 since he got hurt in a game against the Suns just after Christmas.
There is no word when Patterson will return, but the Raptors did get a boost from Lucas Nogueira, who started alongside Valanciunas for the fifth time this season. He figured to be fresh after not playing since getting elbowed in the head against the Brooklyn Nets on Monday, and showed it.
Nogueira alone was the reason behind the Raptors’ quick start. He had six points before the game was three minutes old, all due to his own hustle, starting with a steal and a run-out dunk on his first touch of the game.
He got another easy fast-break basket when he correctly read that Valanciunas would emerge from a scrum with a rebound and leaked out early for the easy score. Just to finish off the tantalizing 12 minutes, he knocked down just the third three-pointer of his career–a shot he has looked comfortable taking in practice for a while now.
The Brazilian’s 11 first-quarter points on five shots was the key to the Raptors’ 31-28 first-quarter lead.
Nogueira’s readiness was in contrast to Jared Sullinger, who is in the early stages of what could be a long slog back from having foot surgery in late October. He made his Air Canada Centre debut and showed some signs of what he can provide–his wide body and soft hands make him a very good defensive rebounder—but it’s not fair to expect him to be up to speed any time soon after a long layoff. That he’s battled weight problems for most of his career could complicate things as well.
When might he hit top gear?
“The guy hasn’t played in a game for six months, and that comeback is real, the rust is real, it’s there,” said Casey. “It will take him a little while. We just have to make sure we put him situations where he can get some run in without the rest of us losing our chemistry and losing the game.”
Sullinger showed some life in the third quarter as he chipped in with seven of his nine points, including a three-pointer which helped the Raptors head into the fourth leading 85-82.
The Raptors pushed their lead to seven early in the fourth quarter and there were hopes the Suns might give in to fatigue at that point after their long travel schedule. But it was the Raptors that stalled after the Suns came back and took the lead with 6:04 left.
The Suns went on an 18-3 run as Toronto had no answer to the challenge of containing Eric Bledsoe, who got into the paint at will and finished with 40 points and 13 assists, with 15 points in the fourth quarter.
“They were getting to where they wanted to go,” said Casey. “Some of it was on our perimeter players, some of it was on the bigs [but] …That’s where the attention to detail, the entire year, we can’t rely on our three-point shooting, we have to make sure we get stops and understand what we have to do on that end of the floor.”
It has become a pattern. The question is how to change it.