After Friday’s win over the Miami Heat, the Toronto Raptors seemed to have finally moved past their post-all-star break dysfunction.
They got solid performances from DeMar DeRozan (12-of-13 from the charity stripe, six assists) and Kyle Lowry (eight rebounds, eight assists, seven steals), key contributions from the bench, and even flashed some reliable defence—ingredients that made this team one of the best in basketball through the first half of the season.
Three days and a 113-97 loss—their 10th in 12 games—later and, instead, only one thing is clear: One game ain’t enough to break bad habits.
On Sunday night against a Portland Trail Blazers team that (even without their best two-way player, Wes Matthews, who is out with a torn Achilles) makes Miami look like a D-League team, things looked all too familiar for the Raps.
There they were, the same frustrations that, even amidst a successful 2014-15 campaign, have presented themselves again and again.
There was the turnstile perimeter defence and overall lack of reliability on that end of the floor, another off-night from Toronto’s lone all-star, and yet another game that had us all scratching our heads wondering, “Wait, why isn’t Jonas Valanciunas on the floor right now?”
Of course, Portland is a very good team. And they played like it, showing off their potent offence. Hell, they moved the ball so well on Sunday that their small forward had 12 assists!
It left the Raptors scrambling on defence much of the night, chasing Trail Blazers through screens, always seemingly a step behind, and failing to properly contest on Portland’s 13 made threes.
“When the ball moves like that, it creates a rhythm for your shots,” Blazers head coach Terry Stotts said after the game.
“We have to worry about defence first and everything else after,” said a visibly frustrated DeRozan after the loss. “We get to scrambling against a team like [Portland] that has a lot of shooters and smartly passes the ball … We make it hard on ourselves when we let teams get into their rhythm.”
Greivis Vasquez echoed the sentiment. “It’s not only one guy, it’s hard to play one-on-one defence in this league,” he said, highlighting an issue that seems magnified on a team devoid of one-on-one perimeter stoppers. “The good teams defend as a team … In this stretch, we haven’t been able to get stops. We have to play with more pride—all of us.”
Vasquez was on the floor when the Raps’ bench nearly played their team back into this one early in the fourth quarter, alongside Lou Williams, James Johnson, Patrick Patterson and Tyler Hansbrough.
That group did manage to get some key stops, forcing turnovers and taking advantage of the opportunity on the offensive end. They brought the Blazers’ lead to single digits with nine minutes to go in the final frame and it looked, for a sliver of time, like the Raptors were going to make a game of it.
“Our offence didn’t get us back in the game,” Dwane Casey made a point of noting after the game. “We got it [to single digits] by getting stops and rebounding. We got consecutive stops, pushed the ball down the floor and created offence on defence.”
But enduring a quiet night from DeRozan (who still managed 22 points and eight rebounds, but only got to the line on three occasions) and a poor showing from Lowry (10 points, 3-of-11 from field), the Raptors had nobody to turn to to finish the job.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. They did. But he was on the bench.
Through the first three quarters, Valanciunas was his typical, assertive self, responding to the physicality of his matchup—in this case, agitator Robin Lopez. JV played effective defence down low and, more noticeably, was getting whatever he wanted offensively, showing off an arsenal of driving hook shots and timely put-backs. Through three quarters and 20 minutes of action, the 22-year-old centre posted 12 points, went a perfect 6-of-6 from the floor and added seven rebounds.
Yet when the Raptors were making their brief fourth-quarter run and starters were brought back on the floor, the big man remained on the bench as his coach favoured the defensive mobility offered by the likes of Patterson instead. By the time Valanciunas did check in, with 3:30 left on the clock, the game was already well out of hand. He managed a pair of boards and another basket in a whopping 1:47 minutes of fourth-quarter action, as moving away from Valanciunas late in games—apparently regardless of his performance—continues to be a theme.
When the Raptors were winning, it was perfectly defensible. Now that they’re not, and with the playoffs around the corner, it’s yet another worrying trend for this club. Was the absence of JV down the stretch the reason the Raptors’ lost on Sunday night?
Nope. Just add it to the list.
