TORONTO – They didn’t even hang around to the end. The game safely in the bag, the Indiana Pacers strolled up the court – playing here-you-take-it-no-you-take-it as the clock wound down in front of an eerily empty Air Canada Centre … and the Toronto Raptors reserves were already on their way to the locker-room, with scarcely a glance back to the court.
Their head coach wanted to look at the videotape before analyzing another first-game loss. But Twitter had already done that. Dwane Casey all-but promised that his team would “play to our identity” in Game 2 on Monday. Here’s hoping he didn’t have the same feeling in the pit of his stomach that a lot of us did: your franchise is playing to its identity coach. Eight consecutive Game 1 losses out of seven series. Plus Paul George squeezing the life out of the Raptors and, maybe, getting in their heads.
What if this series turns into just another chapter into his remarkable comeback from a gruesome injury suffered ahead of the London Olympics? What if he is the best player on the court in this series? Unless you’re the San Antonio Spurs, the team with the best player usually wins in the NBA. What if, what if, what if ….
“It’s been a long road for him, in terms of actually getting back on the court, but before his injury, we were in the conference finals,” Pacers head coach Frank Vogel reminded everybody. “I think this is an exciting day for him to get back to playoff basketball.”
There were undertones of previous Raptors’ playoff flops all over the place: an early start time, a referee who was named as the worst in the NBA in a Los Angeles Times survey in January (Scott Foster; among the complaints levelled in the survey being that he favours road teams) and then poor performances from DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, with DeRozan compounding a horrible shooting day by being found wanting when asked to guard George. The Pacers, who used George’s rehabilitation to change the complexion of their team en route to trying to be Golden State East, outscored the Raptors from the three-point range 33-12 and even bettered them from the free throw line, hitting on 72.4 per cent of their shots to the Raptors’ 68.4 per cent – the latter 10 percentage points off their season average.
There is no sport with less consistent officiating than the NBA, which is why the Raptors’ ears twitched when Vogel started the playoffs by accusing them of being, shall we say, overly-expressive in drawing fouls. Fair play to Vogel, who in addition to planting a seed of doubt in the officials’ minds about DeRozan and Lowry’s frequent trips to the line, no doubt knew that the physical edge provided by the Raptors’ Jonas Valanciunas and Bismack Biyombo could be a factor. And it seemed as if that would be the case early, when Valanciunas whip-sawed Pacers rookie Myles Turner and was the most dominant player on the court. But Valanciunas lost steam after Casey subbed him out and picked up his third foul early in the second quarter. Foster and his crew were just this side of brutal, but in the end George’s transcendence told the tale. And send some more credit to Vogel, who made strategic use of his timeouts in the first half to stop any major Raptors run.
George tore the Raptors to shreds in the third quarter, scoring 17 points including three three-pointers. After going 2-for-9 in the first half, he went off for 10-of-13 in the second.
“I was able to watch film at halftime,” said George. “I figured out a better approach and was more focused. I could see areas and spots on the floor where I could elevate myself. I had to slow the game down, (not) get too rushed. Let everything develop; make the right plays.
“I’m still not the player I was before my injury,” George said, referring to the broken leg he suffered on Aug. 1, 2014. “Maturity-wise I’ve grown. The physical part is where the pre-injury Paul George was better.”
George dismissed questions about his knockout of DeRozan in their head-to-head battle. He will, he said, “have my hands tied” in Game 2. “He just missed shots,” George said with a shrug. “He’s going to make shots.”
The Pacers, who came into the playoffs as the seventh seed but won six of their last seven regular-season games, lost seven of their last eight meetings with the Raptors, including five consecutively at the ACC. The 20-year-old Turner, who kept body and soul together to log 10 points in 26 minutes and finish plus-15 (second only to George’s plus-16) said that fact didn’t come up in pre-game meetings – nor did the Raptors’ habit of first-round flops. As for the team being on a roll? “Nah, the playoffs and regular season are really different,” he said. “They (the referees) let a lot go in the playoffs; it’s a lot more physical than the regular season. What I wanted to do is come out and just keep my energy up.”
Turner gave as good as he received physically, and was credited by Vogel with doing a good job of adhering to his instructions heading into the series. “Absorb contact … show your hands (to the officials.) (Turner) played like he’d been in the playoffs for 10 years.” Tellingly, perhaps, that last trait – keep your hands visible – was one that Casey said his team, particularly Valanciunas, needed to show more of in Game 2.
It’s just one game of a best-of-seven series, but you have to wonder what it means that while Vogel told reporters he believed that he’d settled on his playoff rotation, Casey suggested he needed to change how or more particularly who guarded George; that that was more important than exorcising any playoff ghosts. New questions piled on top of the same old questions? Not what anybody in this place wanted after Game 1. Not at all.