TORONTO — There are a lot of reasons why the Toronto Raptors blew out the Milwaukee Bucks by 22 points Monday night.
Hitting more than half their shots certainly helped. As did another routine 30-point night from DeMar DeRozan and an underrated plus-29 performance from Kyle Lowry. And if you only took a cursory glance at the stat sheet it’s easy to miss Terrence Ross’ name down somewhere near the bottom with a 25 in the points column on 10-of-17 shooting and 4-of-6 from beyond the arc.
So, that’s all good. But there were also some more subtle reasons why the Raptors looked as sound as they did Monday. Here’s three.
Hustle plays
White uniforms were littered all over the floor in the first quarter as the Raptors seemed to wage an intra-squad contest of who could dive further for a loose ball. It started when Lowry threw himself full tilt after one, as he does, and continued with DeMarre Carroll streaking across the floor and even big man Jonas Valanciunas flying after a rebound.
And it didn’t stop there. At one point, backup centre Lucas Nogueiria covertly ambushed Malcolm Brogdon from a blind spot, stripping the ball and feeding a sprinting Ross for a resounding dunk. At another, Cory Joseph ran full flight from basket to basket to disrupt a developing Milwaukee fast break, poaching the ball and immediately heading up floor to set up a quick open look for Ross.
“It’s huge,” Raptors head coach Dwane Casey said of the extra effort. “Our whole job now, no matter who we play, is consistency. Consistency offensively and then consistency defensively. Our standards have to be higher. We can’t just be satisfied with a win. We have to achieve other things to see the big picture. And those hustle plays are a big part of it”
The quiet contributions of DeMarre Carroll
His final stat line won’t blow you away, but Carroll lit a fire under his team early in the game, making a notable impact in the first quarter as the Raptors raced out to an early lead.
Carroll was the first to try his hand at guarding Milwaukee superhuman Giannis Antetokounmpo, holding the matchup nightmare to 0-of-2 shooting while he was on the floor in the first. And on the offensive end, Carroll hit a pair of transition threes and ran a textbook pick-and-roll with Valanciunas to set the centre up for an easy two points. That’s a play the Raptors have tried to run many times before with Carroll and Valanciunas, but not often with such success.
And if that wasn’t enough, late in the quarter there was Carroll diving across the floor through a array of legs for a loose ball, earning a rebound for his effort and a round of applause from Casey as he called a timeout.
Carroll took a back seat for much of the second quarter but picked back up in the third with a nice floater in the paint, another three-pointer and an absurd offensive rebound in which he snuck around Antetokounmpo and snared a bricked shot out of the air with one hand. That capped off a night of quiet-yet-crucial contributions.
Adjusting to the adjustments
As they quickly fell behind by 20, it didn’t take much of a basketball savant to decipher that what the Bucks were doing in the first half wasn’t going to work. And so, Milwaukee came out of halftime with a new initiative to trap Toronto dribblers as much as possible and blitz both Lowry and DeRozan with sometimes as many as three defenders in order to disrupt Toronto’s offensive onslaught.
That kind of aggressive defence can be extremely difficult to manage as bodies swarm around you and make it tricky to find your teammates through traffic. At first, the Raptors struggled to overcome the pressure. But as the quarter wore on, Lowry and DeRozan started to figure it out, finding Valanciunas and Nogueira, who were often left alone in favour of double teams.
“You can’t out-dribble a trap. You’ve got to move the ball and beat it with a pass,” Casey said. “Kyle and DeMar got off of it and understood what they were trying to do. They both did a good job of finding the weak side and finding the big. … JV and Lucas are doing a good job of playing out of the trap when teams try to trap us.”
Meanwhile, at the other end, the Bucks channeled the hustle the Raptors displayed in the first half, forcing five turnovers and fighting their way to five offensive rebounds. Antetokounmpo created a couple steals and found his rhythm as he played the full quarter, scoring 15 to help cut down the Raptors lead by half going into the fourth.
But that’s where the Raptors fought back, as Casey went to his oft-efficient Lowry-and-the-bench unit and asked the ever-lively Cory Joseph run the floor as Lowry worked off the ball. That drew defenders away and let Joseph set up other Raptors for scoring opportunities, particularly the mercurial Ross who at one point made back-to-back catch-and-shoot three-pointers and at another bricked a wide-open windmill dunk.
“We just had to pick up our intensity again,” Ross said. “They made their push. They made their run just like everybody else will. So, we had to come back and make ours. And I think the second unit helped to do it.”
In fact, that rotation of Lowry, Joseph, Ross, Patrick Patterson and Nogueira outscored the Bucks 39-17 in nearly 13 minutes of floor time Monday night. The success of that group is what makes the Raptors one of the deepest teams in the NBA, with a 10-man rotation providing consistent, sustained production. To that point, Casey says he doesn’t even differentiate between the players who start the game and those who come off the bench.
“To me, Pat Patterson is a starter. Terrence Ross is a starter. You can throw Norm [Powell] in there,” Casey said. “Those guys all compete at a high level.”