INDIANAPOLIS – The Toronto Raptors owe a lot of people gas money.
Not so much for the result in Game 4 of their best-of-seven first-round series with Indiana Pacers. There are no guarantees in sport. If you want to drive through the night and spend your hard-earned cash on food and drinks and tickets, it is by definition a high-risk investment.
You can’t come all that way and then complain when your team loses.
But the Raptors didn’t lose to the Pacers. They were outworked, out-hustled and outplayed.
With a chance to take a 3-1 lead in a series, and an opportunity to clinch at home, the Raptors fumbled and stumbled and looked like the moment was too big for them.
That’s what the Raptors’ 100-83 loss to the Pacers represented. A moment missed by such a wide margin it’s like they never saw it coming.
Tied 2-2, they are left preaching calm even as the dog bolts from the yard and heads for traffic.
“I’m positive, I’m confident, we’re staying level,” said Raptors all-star Kyle Lowry. “We’re not getting too high, we’re not getting too low. And that’s the one thing that we’ve been preaching throughout the whole season. Stay level-headed. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. We gave up home-court advantage, and we kind of got it back with the win in Game 3, but tonight, they played extremely hard. We’ve just got to stay within ourselves. You can’t think about this or that. We’ve got to learn from tonight and get better.”
So sure, there are no guarantees in fandom, but when the team you’ve travelled that far to see simply fails to execute fundamental basketball at either end? Yeah, some sort of make-good might be in order.
The details: The Raptors were held to 36.5 per cent shooting and their all-stars, Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, shot 8-of-27, and are shooting 31 per cent for the series.
Despite the Pacers’ success, the Raptors seem determined to stay with the same approach. To a man the Pacers emerged from the game and noted their efforts to move off the ball and play for the extra pass. The Raptors don’t seem ready to embrace that concept yet. They still believe their contested shots are going to fall.
“To be honest, I feel like the shots I’m personally taking, and DeMar’s taking, we’ve made all year,” said Lowry. “They’re just not falling right now. But I’m not going to shy away from taking them. And neither is DeMar. Neither one of is going to shy away from taking shots that we’ve made all year. Tip of the hat: They’re scheming for me and DeMar and they’re making the shots tougher. But at the end of the day we’ve still got to make shots.”
In Games 2 and 3 the Raptors’ massive rebounding advantage off-set their shooting woes – Toronto came into the game with a 141-109 rebounding edge and plus-23 on the offensive boards. But Indiana started rookie Myles Turner at the four and got a series-best 22 points, 10 rebounds and five assists from the previously shackled Ian Mahinmi as the Pacers out-rebounded the Raptors 43-40, the first time they won the rebounding battle.
That was just part of it. There were all kinds of plays that spoke to what the score ended up being.
Like the moment in the first quarter, when the Pacers starting to blow things open and DeRozan passed up a wide-open jumper to dribble hesitantly into traffic and turned it over? Followed by the Raptors all looking at the Pacers’ Monta Ellis standing alone at the three-point line and expecting someone else to go cover him? Too late as Ellis drilled a shot that should never be that wide open.
Or in the second quarter when Lowry ran up the floor, ignoring Jonas Valanciunas inbounding the ball, only to have Valanciunas throw it to him anyway and watch as Ty Lawson picked it off and scored the easy jumper?
The Pacers came into the series as the NBA leader in points off turnovers and in their Raptors’ two losses they have turned the ball over 39 times for 50 points. On Saturday the numbers were 19 turnovers leading to 25 points.
All game the Raptors consistently complained to the referees about being slapped and hit when they dribbled and on their jumpers. They might have a case.
What they failed to recognize was that the reason it was happening so often was because so many of the shots and drives they settled for were closely contested. A lot of the credit goes to the Pacers, who came into the series as the third-ranked defensive team in the NBA, but the Raptors didn’t seem to have a plan to make them work for it. They kept forcing their way into the heart of the Pacers defence.
After trailing by 28-16 after the first quarter the Raptors began to scrap their way back into it late in the second quarter, but not until a pair of George Hill (22 points) free throws gave Indiana a 53-28 lead, the largest of the game until that point.
Rookie Norman Powell came on for the first time and made a steal to score a fastbreak lay-up and then added a triple, while a DeMarre Carroll three and a pair of Lowry free throws added on another five points in the final 34 seconds as the Raptors finished the half on a welcome 14-4 run. Powell was the only Raptor to make more than half his field goal attempts as he finished with 10 points on five shots, making an argument that he needs more than the 13 minutes of playing time he did get.
Before the second half began Lowry and DeRozan were alone on the bench, trying to ignore the fans that had travelled to Indianapolis and were trying to get some of their attention. Neither budged. They were speaking with each other about the mountain they had left to climb.
The third quarter showed some signs. DeRozan finally hit a jumper, Carroll knocked in another three and Valanciunas got active in the paint, getting a tip-in and midway through the period the Raptors had cut their deficit to a more manageable 12 points.
But the Raptors couldn’t get over the hump. They had 10 chances to cut the Pacers lead to 10 points or less but couldn’t convert, and on the last possession of the quarter the Raptors forced a miss only to have C.J. Miles push past a too-passive Terrence Ross for the tip-in and push their lead to 73-58, the same 15-point deficit they started the quarter with.
The fourth quarter offered little hope. A Patrick Patterson floater did cut the lead to 12 but the Pacers’ Paul George responded with a dunk to start a 9-2 run that put the lead out of reach with just over five minutes to play.
There was a small skirmish between Valanciunas, Carroll and George, with all three players picking up technicals. The smarter play would have been for Carroll to try and get George ejected in the second quarter.
“All night Jonas is throwing his elbows, flailing his elbows and trying to lock arms,” said George. “It was almost the play before he did almost the same thing and I let it slide and Ian [Mahinmi] shot a free throw so I crashed to try and get a rebound and next thing you know his hands are once again coming up towards my throat and I didn’t like that.”
It takes a village to lose a game, but this is one that DeRozan is going to have to wear as he finished with eight points on 15 shots and six turnovers.
After showing some signs of breaking out in Game 3, in Game 4 DeRozan kept forcing the issue offensively, trying to create a shot off the dribble on a day when he seemed to have trouble dribbling the ball. In fairness, he did have four assists and if the likes of Luis Scola (0-for-5) or Lowry (0-for-5) could have knocked down some threes when he did pass, he might have had more.
The Pacers’ blowout win in Game 1 was at least partially explicable by the Raptors nerves. This one? Maybe the Raptors weren’t nervous enough.
The Raptors knew what was going on. They saw the hundreds of Raptors fans gathered around the team hotel. They saw the Raptors jerseys far-outnumbering the Pacers jerseys on the streets outside Bankers Life Fieldhouse and they couldn’t help but notice when they got on the floor that the visiting fans seemed to have nearly half of the seats available courtside surrounding the Raptors’ bench.
The whole “We The North” idea is a powerful thing. It’s the rare marketing slogan that captures and expresses an existing feeling or sentiment. It’s been the rallying point for something that is about as close to an organic movement as you can get in professional sports, where it seems like everything has been thought of and sold before it come to life on it’s own.
But movements require fuel. As they grow they need more proof that what it stands for is meaningful and not just the case of a whole bunch of people chasing their tail. In the case of the Raptors and the fan base they’ve inspired to watch games outside Air Canada Centre in the rain or drive through the night to Indiana, a lot of accommodations have been made.
Crowds flocked to this team when they were a surprise to make the playoffs two years ago. They stuck with them through the debacle against Washington last year. And while the regular season was a revelation, the playoffs are supposed to be the payoff. A long post-season run would be nice, but getting through the first-round unscathed was the minimum.
The Raptors haven’t screwed that up yet. They’re still in a good position to win the series and advance in the playoffs and keep the story moving. But they missed their best chance to do it the easy way and sent a lot of fans in Indianapolis back on the highway with a legitimate cause to wonder if it was worth the trip.