TORONTO — It was truly a ridiculous ask. Less than 24 hours after an intense, emotionally draining, come-up-painfully-short-against-your-nemesis battle with the defending NBA champions, turn around and take on the champs from the season prior. A hell of a team; a team that had been resting in your city for two days; a team that’s renowned for its unstoppable, internet-breaking, video-game-fast offence and absurd collection of talent.
And yet, for the first 12 minutes and a decent stretch of the second half, the Toronto Raptors almost made a game of it. They stubbornly stood in the centre of the ring and swung, trading combinations with a Golden State Warriors team that has built its brand on volume and persistence and an outright refusal to stop. But as Toronto head coach Dwane Casey said, standing in the aftermath of a 127-121 loss, trying to keep up with a team like that can be a dangerous game to play.
"I thought we got into outscore-them mode and tit-for-tat. And sometimes great scoring teams like last night’s and tonight’s get you in that mode," Casey said, reflecting on the Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers, two of the NBA’s best teams who dealt his Raptors back-to-back losses. "We got away from our defensive focus. Same thing last night. We got screwed up on some switches. And made mental mistakes that cost us. And once a team like that gets on a roll, it’s very difficult to get a stop."
If there was any hangover from Tuesday night’s dispiriting loss in Cleveland, Casey’s squad wasn’t showing it in the early going Wednesday. The first quarter was arcade basketball—fast-paced, relentless, crazy sequences up and down the court as the two teams traded three point attempts and combined for more than 70 points. Toronto did its best Golden State impression in that quarter, and it worked because the rapid fire passes were finding hands and the shots were falling. The Raptors shot 55.6 per cent in those 12 minutes and took a four-point lead into the break.
But in the following quarter, the Raptors came apart. The crisp passes and pretty sequences that worked so well in the first suddenly devolved into sloppy, unorganized series. The Raptors—who shot 20.8 per cent in the quarter and missed all six of the three-pointers they took—couldn’t score, couldn’t move the ball and couldn’t stop Golden State’s unyielding fast-break assaults. Toronto turned the ball over five times, allowing both Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant to put up 10 points apiece as Golden State surged out to a 13-point halftime lead.
It was frustrating, agonizing stuff. And you could see it all over the faces of Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan late in that first half as they each earned a technical foul for antagonizing the officials well into a timeout after DeRozan was suffocated on a drive and sent crashing to the floor by a committee of Warriors.
The game could have essentially been over at half but the Raptors, bless them, kept pushing, with Lowry and DeRozan logging big minutes in the third quarter, taking turns driving into the heart of the Warriors defence and earning some of the fouls that hadn’t gone their way in the opening half.
"Once we got in the second half, we got focused in, locked in. We started switching some things properly. Talking, communicating," Casey said. "We kind of got back in the game."
And while Golden State kept doing Golden State things—scoring quickly, scoring often, and making it look a lot easier to create open-look threes than it certainly is—the Raptors reached deep down and found something. DeRozan scored 19 points in the quarter, getting to the free throw line 11 times and never missing. Rookie forward Pascal Siakam played the entire 12 minutes, providing inspired defence, keeping Curry as contained as possible when he switched on to him, and throwing down an energizing dunk off a deft feed from Lucas Nogueira late in the frame. Suddenly, we had a fight.
"It would’ve been easy to just quit and be like, ‘It’s done,’ with the lead that they had," Siakam said. "But it shows the type of guys that we have. We just go out and compete until the last second."
But evidently, the undertaking of that laborious, combative third quarter gave way to a fourth that was undeniably flat as the Raptors finally showed the collective fatigue of their 48-hour gauntlet. Cory Joseph tried to bring what energy he could, sprinting up and down the floor, whether the ball was in his hands or not. Siakam continued to busily get involved at both ends. And Casey stuck with Lowry and DeRozan for about as long as he could without their chassis coming apart.
But the mountain Golden State had built was just too high, and it didn’t exactly help that they kept piling dirt on top of it by scoring 32 points in the final quarter on 10-of-19 shooting. At some point the Raptors needed to get a series of stops, or needed the Warriors to go unfathomably cold, or needed Curry and Durant and Draymond Green and Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala to simultaneously sprain their ankles. But even then, little-used forward David West went 3-for-3 from the field in the fourth as he found open looks with the Raptors scrambling around their own end trying to take away Golden State’s embarrassment of weapons.
"It’s really tough because any one of them can get it going," DeRozan said. "They move the ball extremely well. They execute coming down every single time. It’s not just one guy you have to worry about. You have to worry about every single guy out there. "
Alas, the immense task of stopping every single guy was simply too much to handle for the Raptors on the latter half of the toughest back-to-back the NBA has to offer. It’s certainly challenging to be sanguine in the wake of consecutive losses, but the Raptors did their best.
"We played both of the best teams in the NBA. We were right there and had a couple of stretches where we could have put it away," DeRozan said. "We were right there with two of the top teams in the league."
It’s true. Say what you will about Casey’s team—they rarely, if ever, get blown out. No matter the competition, no matter if they played the night before or the night before that, no matter if they’re missing an integral piece or even two. They just hang around. And even against the best competition on the planet, the Raptors were a missed shot here or a turnover there from pulling off a pair of upsets. And that has to be worth something.
"We have a lot of fight to us. We’re never going to lay over. We’re always going to fight to the end," said Terrence Ross. "I think that’s the biggest thing. We have a lot of heart. So, no matter what, we’re always going to find a way to put ourselves in the game."
