TORONTO — Sometime before his team’s Thursday night tilt with the Denver Nuggets, Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey took a black marker and started scribbling on the white board in his team’s dressing room.
He wrote down the matchups for his starters, making note of a few points of emphasis for his team. And then he took a green marker and switched to all caps, hoping to make this particular message stand out: “VERY CAPABLE!!”
It was a memo to his team that the Nuggets squad they would face that evening — near the bottom of the league in scoring, losers of eight straight, and in the midst of a five-game road trip — weren’t to be taken lightly. Below the all-caps message he noted the margins of defeat in some of Denver’s recent games against tough opposition: Nine points to the San Antonio Spurs, eight points to the Golden State Warriors, nine points to the Chicago Bulls the night prior.
The Nuggets had been in each of those games, and hadn’t rolled over and accepted defeat against some of the best teams in the league. Casey wanted his troops to understand that they should expect no different.
About twenty minutes after the game — which the Nuggets won, 106-105 — Casey didn’t sound particularly happy that he had been right.
“This team tonight, they had their backs against the wall,” he said. “You’ve got a wounded animal coming into your house and we didn’t respond.”
No, they did not. Instead, Casey’s Raptors continued their troubling season-long trend of allowing the opposition a tall early-game lead before attempting to overcome it. This time they fell behind by nine before the game was even four minutes old, and let the Nuggets extend that lead to 14 by the time the two teams left the court for halftime.
This is frustrating stuff for a pertinacious coach like Casey, who’s constantly stressed his team’s need to get off to quick starts and then watched as they’ve finished the first quarter with a lead in just six of their 20 games this year. He may have reached his tipping point as after Thursday’s game he ruminated about potentially altering the starting lineup or his rotations going forward in a search for better beginnings. Informed of this, Raptors guard and emotional essence Kyle Lowry — the last guy you’d consider taking out of the starting lineup — remained unfazed.
“He’s the head coach,” Lowry said. “Sometimes you’ve got to mix it up. It’s his call. Teams are coming out aggressive and we’re not matching their intensity. So we’ve got to figure out a way to match other team’s intensity or come out with more intensity ourselves.”
Lowry wasn’t at his best on Thursday, which was more than excusable considering he played one of the best fourth quarters in Raptors history the night prior while battling a stomach flu. But what was bad about his shots not falling on this night — he was just four-of-16 from the field but did his best to distribute, leading the team with eight assists — was that they weren’t falling for many of his teammates either.
DeMarre Carroll, who politely declined to answer a post-game question about his health, was three-of-12 from the field. Luis Scola was three-of-eight. The forever maddening Terrence Ross, one-for-nine. The only Raptors able to consistently score were Cory Joseph, who chipped in 15 points in 28 energetic minutes off the bench, and DeMar DeRozan, who had one of his best games of the season in one of the Raptors’ worst.
After the game, standing in the locker room with Casey’s pre-game warning long scrubbed from the white board, DeRozan couldn’t provide a reason for his team’s awful starts.
“I’m not even sure,” he said. “We’ve just got to come out with a sense of urgency and not wait until we get down and have to exert that extra energy to get back in the game.
“We’ve just got to have a conscious effort of that every single night, no matter who we’re playing. No matter if it’s an early game or a late game, if we’re playing an okay team or playing a great team. We’ve got to put our stamp on the game earlier and control it the way we need to control it instead of fighting back.”
All of this fighting back — which, it should be noted, usually works out for the Raptors, like it did Wednesday night when the team came from behind to win a game it didn’t deserve to against the Atlanta Hawks — takes its toll.
The Raptors’ best players are logging hard, extended minutes, battling their way through fatigue, while several members of the supporting cast have hit funks. Carroll is clearly limited by whatever physical ailment(s) he’s carrying; Ross has scored 15 points in 76 minutes over his last four games; the 35-year-old Scola — who was playing 30 minutes a night a week ago — hasn’t scored double digits in his last four games.
With sincere apologies to Lucas Nogueira — who provided solid minutes for a second consecutive night, unexpectedly helping to fill the void left by the injured Jonas Valanciunas — the Raptors need a dose of piss and vinegar from someone outside of Lowry, DeRozan and Joseph if they’re going to find a way to not cough up games to inferior teams, which the Nuggets most certainly are.
“If you are serious about being a playoff team and being a playoff contender, you’ve got to make sure that you’re consistent in your performance, in your approach, in your energy, in your focus,” Casey said. “We’ve got to play for 48, or as close to 48 as we can, and we have not done that.”
For the Raptors, it seems the most important minutes of those 48 come shortly after tip-off. The second halves have been fine — great, even — but the first quarters have consistently fell flat, and Casey sounds like a man who’s had enough of it He may begin to deploy a different unit to start games, perhaps as soon as Saturday when the Raptors welcome the 20-0 Warriors to town. Maybe that’ll spark something, maybe it won’t. It’s not likely Casey thinks it’s his best move—but it might be his only one.
“We can’t wait until we get our teeth kicked in before we start to play,” Casey said. “That’s been our M.O. Whether we change the starting unit or change whatever the rotation is, just to get that jump start — we’ve got to do it.
“It’s just too many games in a row now where we get out, dig ourselves a hole, and then have to dig ourselves out of it. It’s just too hard in this league to do that.”