With the monkeys chased away, history shoved aside and every moment no longer carrying an ominous double meaning, the Toronto Raptors have finally arrived at the place most decent basketball teams would love to be: Hosting a second round playoff series, with a reasonable chance to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals.
Barring some kind of stigmatizing pratfall against the Miami Heat, all that matters for once is what happens after the ball goes up at the Air Canada Centre Tuesday night.
But that doesn’t mean the series will be without drama, without it’s own game-within-a-game intrigue.
The Toronto Raptors have arrived at this stage as a team and an organization thanks to Kyle Lowry. The tough-minded point guard has reshaped the Raptors over the past three seasons and transformed himself into arguably the best point guard in the Eastern Conference with two all-star appearances to show for it.
But Lowry doesn’t become a Raptor if not for Goran Dragic, the Miami Heat point guard who he will be facing in a match-up the Raptors probably need to win to advance.
They were teammates for two seasons on the Houston Rockets where Dragic was Lowry’s understudy initially. But in 2011-12 Lowry struggled with his health and injuries. He missed 21 games and was hospitalized at one point with a bacterial infection.
When he returned to action he’d lost his place in the starting lineup to Dragic, who had earned the trust of then Rockets head coach Kevin McHale.
Not surprisingly, Lowry didn’t take it well. His relationship with McHale was fractured. They had a physical confrontation after a timeout in a late-season game against Denver.
After the season Lowry had surgery to repair a sports hernia that he had played with all year, and soon after made clear that he wasn’t prepared to make those kinds of sacrifices for the Rockets if McHale was coaching and Dragic (who the Rockets ended up losing in free agency) was going to be the starter.
“If things aren’t addressed coaching-wise,” Lowry told the Houston Chronicle at the time, “I guess I have to be moved.”
Raptors fans know the rest of the story. Then Raptors general manager Bryan Colangelo saw an opportunity and was able to acquire Lowry for what ended up being the 12th overall pick in the 2012 draft. How Lowry left Houston was a big part of the image that followed him to Toronto as tough-to-coach malcontent; a reputation that is part of his past as he’s matured and thrived carrying the load for Dwane Casey.
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It would be fun if there were on-going issues between Lowry and Dragic, lingering resentments.
No dice— at least for public consumption.
“Goran’s my guy,” Lowry said on Monday. “It’s just one of those things where he went from not playing to playing and I went from playing to not playing. We’re cool, I say hey to his family. It’s just one of those things.”
But that doesn’t mean the Raptors don’t need Lowry to take the matchup personally.
There was lots of good that came out of their win over the Pacers, mainly the chance to have a clear mind, the doubts and questions silenced for once.
“You see it. Everyone is jolly, everyone is encouraged, everyone is confident,” said Raptors forward DeMarre Carroll, who will likely cover Joe Johnson, the former Brooklyn Nets star who helped make Miami one of the league’s most dangerous offensive teams after he joined them following the All-Star break. “ … The first one is always the hardest and now you can go back to playing basketball like you know how to play. I think that is what is going to happen.”
Carroll was a bench player with the Rockets when Lowry and Dragic were battling for minutes. He sees the rivalry as pivotal in this series.
“I see a lot of big games for a lot of guys in the future, Kyle Lowry especially,” said Carroll. “We are going to need him to dominate his matchup.”
“They went pretty hard in practice,” Carroll said of Lowry and Dragic’s match-ups in Houston. “You could tell there was tension but at the same time they had to play with each other and one guy was starting and the other guy wasn’t so it was one of those things. I’m very encouraged and very excited to see this battle.”
The pressure the Raptors may have been feeling offers some excuse for the struggles DeRozan and Lowry had offensively, but that’s gone now.
What remains are some ugly numbers, only somewhat masked by the fact the Raptors survived. Together Lowry and DeRozan missed an astounding 161 field goal attempts against the Pacers as each of them are shooting just 31 per cent from field, compared with 42.7 and 44.6, respectively, in the regular season.
Lowry’s shooting has been a free fall since he was diagnosed and treated for bursitis in his shooting elbow in late March, shooting 32 per cent from three down the stretch and now 16-per-cent— 7-of-43— in the playoffs.
Lowry swears his elbow isn’t a problem and club insiders back him up his version. Bursitis makes the elbow painful when banged but doesn’t typically impinge movement in the joint. Lowry has been able to come in and put up extra shots at night and doesn’t appear uncomfortable when he shoots.
The hope is Lowry can figure it out. Maybe he’ll be inspired to prove his old coach, Kevin McHale that he backed the wrong point guard or maybe his experience going against Dragic in practice all those years ago will give Lowry an advantage.
Maybe it will be as simple as putting Pacers point guard George Hill in his rearview mirror.
Regardless if the Raptors are going to advance against the Heat they’ll need Lowry to be better than he was against Indiana, and better than the guy for Miami who triggered his arrival in Toronto in the first place.
Lowry may have lost his starting job to Dragic way back then, but for the Raptors Lowry’s revenge would be sweet.