If the NBA is a night club, the Toronto Raptors have only rarely been ushered past the velvet ropes and into the VIP rooms where someone else picks up the tab for the bottle service.
Thursday night was one of those nights. And while the etiquette calls for keeping it cool – and yes, Thursday’s meeting between the Chicago Bulls and the Raptors was just the ninth game of the season for Toronto, after all – it’s not easy in a city where so much bad happens, sports-wise.
Not when Shaq and Charles and Kenny are laughing it up in the studio back in Atlanta and Reggie Miller and Kevin Harlan are courtside.
The problem is that if and when the Raptors are invited to be on the league’s main stage, they’re not going to be there by themselves – they’re not that good. They’re going to share the marquee with another team, likely one of the NBA’s elites, which the Bulls very much are.
“They’re pretty damn good,” said Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry who finished with 20 points, eight rebounds and eight assists without a turnover.
So the question – after the Raptors were fairly convincingly dismissed 100-93 despite having a seven-point lead at half time – what does this say about a club that is well on their way to be providing Toronto basketball fans with their best ever November?
Are they the guys who failed to meet the dress code? The one’s who got too rowdy and got sent out on their butts?
They went down fighting, but you know they would: After trailing by 16 with six minutes left the Raptors cut it to seven with two minutes to play after a stumbling Derrick Rose turnover resulted in a Terrence Ross triple. A Lowry steal and an Amir Johnson dunk cut it to five 20 seconds later and the crowd at the ACC could be heard through the television sets of our great neighbour to the south, but that was a close as they got.
But the encouraging ending aside, the truth Friday morning will be that the Raptors couldn’t close the deal on their home floor. Was it because the bright lights crept into their focus as Raptors head coach Dwane Casey feared?
Or are the teams inside those ropes simply better, bigger, tougher, more experienced?
The Bulls recognized the Raptors’ DeMar DeRozan as an all-star and guarded him accordingly as Jimmy Butler and some help defenders held him to 3-of-17 shooting.
It’s worth asking about the Raptors readiness as it was the club’s biggest game at home since Game 7 against the Brooklyn Nets and everyone remembers how that went.
“You have to make a muscle and fight their physicality, their bump-and-grind” said Casey, whose team was held to 31.9 percent shooting in the second half and outscored 35-14 in the third quarter. “We didn’t meet that challenge very well in the third quarter, but I commend our guys for coming back in the fourth quarter and turning the tables.”
But coaches can stumble on a big stage too, and Casey may have erred in not altering his defensive approach sooner.
The Bulls came into the game fifth in the NBA in three-point shooting so Casey opted to run shooters off the line, with some success as the Bulls shot just 4-of-15 from deep. But the compromise was one-on-one coverage of Pau Gasol in the post, and he went off.
He was 9-of-11 in the second and third quarters combined, and finished with 27 points on 12-of-18 shooting. If any single player was the difference it was him, and even he was surprised at Toronto’s approach.
“I got the ball in positions I was comfortable and I got in a good rhythm,” said Gasol, who seems revitalized after signing a three-year, $22-million contract this past summer. “Sometimes against a great team like us you have to pick your poison [but] sometimes it’s better to mix it up so you can keep people off-balance and second guessing. But the doubles didn’t come and I tried to take advantage.”
The Raptors began trapping in the fourth and the results showed as Gasol was scoreless in the final frame allowing the Raptors to make a mini-run of sorts, cutting a 16-point deficit with six minutes left to five with 1:44 left.
While the Raptors weren’t copping to the significance of being on the NBA’s signature Thursday night broadcast from the ACC for the first time since 2002, it wasn’t lost on the Bulls, who are constants on the league’s national broadcasts and thrive on it.
“It’s exciting when the games are on TNT, back in your hometown people can watch you play. In New York City there’s not a lot of Bulls games on, so I get a lot of texts and things when our games are on,” said the Bulls’ Joakim Noah who finished with six points, eight rebounds and six assists. “Toronto is a very good team so it’s a big deal that they’re on. I’m sure it’s not easy to travel here with all the cameras and crew and stuff, so it’s credit to them that they’re forcing people to pay attention.”
But what would they see?
Led by their bench – in particular James Johnson who had a 12-point second quarter – they were able to go into half time up 52-45.
But that was the high point. Alerted for the second half, the Bulls looked an awfully lot like the 62-20 team that went to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2010-11 when Rose was the league’s MVP.
Defensively, they held the Raptors to 6-of-21 shooting while offensively they did whatever they wanted. Gasol finished the period with 27 points on 18 shots, Chicago shot 67 percent in the pivotal frame.
The Bulls on paper are justifiably the favourites in the Eastern Conference, which made Thursday night’s game a measuring stick, inevitably. With the return to health of Rose – who has only played 10 games in two seasons due to knee injuries – and the addition of Gasol, even grumpy Bulls head man Tom Thibodeau had to concede his club appears loaded.
“You’re talking about a point guard and a centre that can really score and really pass, it makes it easier, now we have a lot of shooting,” said Thibodeau. “We have two guys that can break the defence down – Derrick off the dribble and in transition and Pau in the post. You force the defence to collapse and on the kick-out you have guys stepping into their threes, so those are high percentage shots.”
It’s a great formula, but it will take time to gel.
The Bulls came to Toronto riding a minor wave of controversy after Rose – playing in his second consecutive game after sitting out three of the past four games with a pair of ankle sprains – said that he would take his long-term health into account when deciding if he could play or not.
Naturally, given the Bulls are in win-now mode, the comments were construed – fairly or not – as Rose putting his own long-term interests ahead of the short-term interests that is paying him $60-million over the next three years to lead his team to a title.
Rose didn’t back off his comments on Thursday before going out and scoring 20 points by getting to the line 10 times.
To add to the intrigue, he left the game with two minutes left after apparently cramping up. Afterwards his teammate Noah defended him: “He’s coming back from two crazy [knee] surgeries, obviously we’re being conservative with him … he has to listen to his body more than anybody, so everyone needs to chill out.”
Said Thibodeau: “He’s going to be asked a million questions, he’s navigating coming off two-and-a-half years off. He’s going through a lot, so everyone needs to take a step back and let him go through this process. He’s going to be special, but it takes patience.”
He wasn’t quite at his peak level Thursday, which is a scary thought given how good the Bulls looked with him playing below par. But Rose’s team was pretty good when then needed to be. On the big stage they looked at home.
The Raptors, for now, remain an understudy – a guest at the NBA’s coolest parties. Welcome they may be, they don’t quite belong just yet.