For the first quarter, at least, it looked like Dwane Casey’s message to his starters had paid off. After sitting out most of his starting five during the fourth quarter on Monday against Milwaukee (Kyle Lowry played the final 1:38, but you get the point), the Raptors best players responded early on Wednesday with the Brooklyn Nets in town.
Amir Johnson dropped nine points and hit his patented delayed-release three; DeMar DeRozan had a pair of rebounds and three assists; and Lowry, in particular came out like a man possessed, posting an emphatic eight points, four assists, and four rebounds. The team shot 60 percent and held the Nets to 40 percent as the Raptors finished the frame with a 28-22 lead.
And then, as quickly as it came, that momentum was gone, as the Nets caught fire and never relented in a convincing 109-93 win.
“I just think we were really aggressive tonight,” says Deron Williams, who came off the bench in his second game back from a rib injury. “The same things they were doing wrong, we were doing right, and we were able to take advantage of it.
So what were the Raps doing wrong? Tonight it started and ended with perimeter defence, as the Nets backcourt — Williams, Jarrett Jack, and Alan Anderson — carved up the Raptors.
And like a rookie driver without winter tires in a snowstorm, the wheels began spinning out and the Raptors seemingly couldn’t do anything about it.
Anderson, the former Raptor who always seems to come up big against his old club, caught fire in the third, going 3-3 from the field and 2-2 from deep. He finished the game with a season-high 22 points on a very efficient 7-9 shooting, as the Raptors struggled mightily to rotate and help on the outside when Jack or Williams would beat their man for uncontested drives inside. Jack scorched the Raps for the second straight game and dropped a team-best 24 points on 9-13 shooting. He was also one of three Nets with at least three assists and helped move the ball efficiently, and often — something Brooklyn emphasized heading into the game.
“Against a team like this,” explains Williams, “you have to move the ball so they can’t get into their rotations, you don’t want to play on one side of the floor against them and I think we did a good job of that.”
After the game, the problems outside the paint defensively were woefully apparent to Dwane Casey.
“They shot 49 percent, and with ease,” Casey said, voicing his concern over the Raptors inability to keep the Nets’ backcourt out of the paint. “We need to keep the guard’s in front of us on the perimeter for the whole nine yards. If you don’t come in with the mindset that you’re going to outwork that team you’re going to have nights like this.”
Brooklyn came into Wednesday’s game playing arguably their best ball of the season, beating the Los Angeles Clippers (who the Raps face next) in a nail-biter on Monday and, of course, nearly beat Toronto when these two teams went to overtime in Brooklyn last week. The Nets got great production from their big men versus the Clippers, but on Wednesday the Raptors just had no answer for their guards.
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“As the game developed [our guards] were clearly shooting the ball really well,” says Nets forward Mason Plumlee, “so we just had to set screens and get them open.”
Plumlee will be front and centre for the Nets during the upcoming All-Star weekend in front of his home crowd. The seven-footer will be participating in the Slam Dunk contest, and the fans at the Air Canada Centre got a mild preview of what to expect when the big man caught a long lop pass and slammed home a ho-hum two handed dunk. When I asked Plumlee if that was the kind of effort he was going to bring at the dunk contest, he took the bait “No, I’ll be better, trust me.”
But back to Wednesday night. It was a worrying outing for the Raptors given what we saw in that Milwaukee game, and knowing that this is the same Nets team that gave the Raptors fits on the perimeter less than a week ago.
The Raptors voiced their frustrations after the loss, compounded by the fact they, like us, know just how good this team is capable of playing.
“The past two games we are not playing like ourselves,” said DeRozan, who was ejected from the game after receiving his second technical foul, committed while bodychecking Nets rookie Bojan Bodganovic late in the fourth — a sequence that summed up the teams’ feeling on Wednesday. The foul was a “Flagrant 2”, meaning the league will now review it to determine whether or not he’ll be suspended for Friday’s game against the Clips.
With three games on the docket before the all-star break, there’s a sense of urgency for the Raps to begin moving forward again as a team and re-tread the tires in time for the run up to the playoffs, to get back to the Raptor team that put the NBA on notice on their run to the top of the conference (where, it should be noted, they still remain, currently in second place in the East).
“That didn’t just happen by osmosis,” Casey said in reference to the team’s winning ways. “That’s who we are. For whatever reason, we‘ve lost that, that’s work ethic, that fight, that grit, that grind. And we have to get it back.”
