TORONTO — When the Toronto Raptors entered their dressing room for halftime Friday night, heads hung after 24-minutes of clumsy, disorganized basketball that resulted in an appropriate 40-40 scoreline with the far inferior New Orleans Pelicans, DeMarre Carroll got up and told the room it was on him.
“It’s my fault, guys,” Carroll told his team. “I let Gordon get like 20 points.”
That’s true—Pelicans guard Eric Gordon did score 20 points in a torrential first half, taking almost half his team’s shots in the process. But the Raptors also shot 31.6 per cent (12-of-38) at the other end and started the game 1-for-9 from three-point range, which likely had a lot to do with it as well.
There’s never a lone reason for something like this. What matters is Carroll’s team had continued its season-long trend of looking completely flustered early in games (head coach Dwayne Casey described them as “running in mud, lethargic”) and you could feel the tension throughout a sold-out Air Canada Centre. And that’s when Carroll hit a shot that dragged his team out of that mud.
There’s was less than a minute left in the half and DeMar DeRozan was driving into the paint. He drew a collapsing Pelicans defence which left Carroll wide open beyond the arc, where he collected a DeRozan pass and hit his team’s second three-pointer in 10 attempts, tying the game and giving his team a discernable sense of relief in the process.
The ever-demonstrative Carroll stuck out three fingers on his right hand, held them to his ear and then his mouth (“I don’t know what that was, really,” Carroll said of the celebration), as a once-tense crowd went nuts all around him.
On the bench, Raptors rookie Normal Powell dabbed—it’s an Atlanta thing; YouTube it—and told Carroll as they walked into the dressing room for halftime that he should have done one himself.
“I told him, I’ve gotta hit four or five threes before I can do the dab,” Carroll says. “But once my shot starts falling, that’s when you need to watch out.”
The Raptors took off from that point, dominating the third quarter (as they do) and cruising to a 100-81 victory that wasn’t as easy as the scoreline suggests. Carroll was being overly self-deprecating saying the team’s weak play in the first half was solely his fault. But if that’s the stance he’d like to take then he should also get credit for the Raptors going on a 63-41 run from the time he hit that three-pointer on, playing much more like the defensively-sound, unguarded-shot-creating team they can be.
After the game, Carroll said that as he watched the ball go in he sensed a weight come off his shoulders, and the shoulders of his team as well.
“Oh yeah, that felt good. Once you see one go down, it makes it a lot easier,” Carroll said. “I felt great. My timing was a little off in the first half but it felt great to be back out there with my teammates and kind of be a relief for some of the guys like DeMar and Kyle on the defensive end.”
Carroll’s talking about being back from his team-mandated three-game sabbatical, with strict instructions to stay off his feet as much as possible in order to rest, and hopefully heal, the plantar fasciitis in his right foot that he’s been playing through for practically the entire season. He never wanted to miss that much time, or any at all. But the Raptors coaching staff forced him to stay home, knowing the only truly effective treatment for plantar fasciitis is extended rest.
Carroll didn’t touch a basketball for 10 days and watched the games from his couch (“In hindsight, it was probably good I wasn’t on the bench—I was going crazy,” Carroll says) itching to get back on the floor and work towards fulfilling the four-year, $60-million contract he signed with the Raptors this off-season.
The team is clearly much better defensively with Carroll in the rotation, and he was sorely missed in all three of the games he sat out, but perhaps none moreso than Tuesday’s 111-109 loss to New York, when the Raptors struggled to contain Knicks superstar Carmelo Anthony.
“Watching, man—I hate it a lot,” Carroll says. “When you see guys like Carmelo go for 30 and you know you can impact and you can really help the team, it’s tough. When the energy is down, I feel like I can be the energy booster. So it really hurt me a lot.”
Carroll brought exactly that kind of energy early in the fourth quarter Friday night, when he ambushed two Pelicans who thought they had an easy rebound under their own basket, ripping the ball away and hitting a contested put-back for two points and a foul. He stalked away from that play pounding his chest as the building, and his teammates, went berserk.
“That’s just me out-working them. That’s what I do—I try to out-work everybody on the court,” Carroll said. “I get the put-back, the crowd’s really getting into it—it was a good momentum play.”
Carroll ended up playing more than 33 minutes in his return, and likely would have seen more time if he didn’t pick up his fifth foul midway through the fourth quarter, which forced Casey to nail him to the bench. Casey asked his 29-year-old forward how he was feeling whenever he came to the bench and Carroll gave him the same positive answer each time he asked.
Not that Carroll’s ever going to say anything less, as he didn’t complain about the injury at all until it grew unbearable a week and a half ago. Part of the Raptors’ rehab strategy was to get Carroll enough rest so he wouldn’t need to be held back from his usual amount of playing time.
“I didn’t want to come back and play 10 minutes and be on a minute restriction. I want to come back and go full out,” Carroll said. “And I think coach and them did a great job. They said once you come back, you’re coming back full strength.”
Of course, the process continues. Carroll was saying all this while standing a little taller than he normally does, as the Raptors have outfitted him with an apparatus for his right shoe that lifts his heel and adds arch support, all in the hopes of taking stress off the area affected by the plantar fasciitis.
“I’ve got like a million things in my shoe right now,” he said. “I feel like I’m like 6’9 or 6’10.”
How Carroll’s foot responds when he wakes up Saturday morning will go a long way towards telling him if he’s truly through the weeds or not. He says his timing feels off and that he’s dying to get back in the gym and work his body back up to full speed. And as he left the Air Canada Centre Friday night, after a grinding, workmanlike game, he had a plan to continue his therapy.
“Once I get home, I’m gonna make my wife do some wifely duties with my foot,” Carroll said, leaving the exact details of that process up to everyone’s imagination. “I’ve just got to keep trying to get better. And keep trying to help this team any way I can.”