SALT LAKE CITY – One day we’ll find out exactly how good the Toronto Raptors are, or at least how good they could possibly be.
There will be a time when they have Kawhi Leonard healthy and running on all cylinders. They’ll have their bench unit connected and co-ordinated and stepping in to extend leads like it did so often a year ago. C.J. Miles will get hot from deep.
Whenever it happens it will be a wonderful sight – and a terrifying one for the rest of the NBA.
But for now the Raptors and the rest of the league simply have to get used to ho-hum dominance by a team that can play without its best player (Leonard was ruled out with a sore ankle for the second straight game) and have its best offensive threat of late – Serge Ibaka – foul out and as a group shake a legitimate case of road fatigue while still rolling over a quality team like the Utah Jazz 124-111.
The win extended the Raptors’ record start to 10-1 and pushed them to 3-0 on their road trip with one game left on Wednesday against the Sacramento Kings. You’d have to bet that Leonard will be back for that one and the Raptors are a perfect 7-0 with him in uniform, so, yeah.
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The Raptors have taken “next man up” to unlikely heights. OG Anunoby got the start for Leonard and the second-year wing was excellent on both sides of the ball, chipping in with a season-high 17 points including two steals that he converted into solo fast-breaks and three timely triples in five attempts. Ibaka was outstanding again as he was a perfect 8-of-8 from the floor for 17 points in just 14 minutes. He’s now 27-of-29 from the floor over his past three games.
The wonders may never cease.
“We had a kid in my high school state championship in three games go 25-for-28,” marvelled Raptors head coach Nick Nurse after the game. “I was telling [assistant coach Nate Bjorkgren] he reminded me of Roger Gehling. Nate said ‘Who?’
“Kid averaged eight points a game and wound up making the all-tournament team. Serge is playing Roger Gehling-like”
When Ibaka ran into foul trouble Greg Monroe saw his first meaningful action of the season and the well-respected veteran was a perfect 3-of-3 from the floor himself. Five Raptors had at least 16 points and none had more than 17, while Kyle Lowry (who had 17) extended his franchise record of consecutive games with at least 10 assists to nine as he contributed 11 helpers.
The Raptors’ third quarter was worth framing if the exhibit was meant to demonstrate a 90-foot defensive tenacity. Leading by 11, it would have been understandable had the Jazz came out with a surge or if the Raptors let their foot off the gas even a little. Instead the opposite was true. The Raptors were sparked offensively by Lowry and Danny Green who each had seven points in the period, but it was their defensive effort that shone through.
“We talked about getting through the first quarter — usually on the back-to-backs it takes you the first quarter to get your legs moving a little bit and it looked like that for us — then getting the game to the halftime and then try and take control in the second half,” said Nurse.
They held Utah to 6-of-19 shooting – and just 1-of-5 from three – in the third, while forcing six turnovers. What projected to be a gravely challenging test on the road without their marquee player turned into a rout in a matter of minutes. Lowry and Danny Green hit a pair of early triples and then Anunoby forced a steal and took it the length of the floor for a score. In an instant it seemed the Raptors lead was 20 and they pushed it all the way to 24 before the period was over.
They may be too polite to boo in Utah, but if they ever had a case this was it. After threatening to run the Raptors out of the building early – Toronto turned it over seven times in the first quarter but somehow escaped trailing only by one – the Jazz were held to a not-as-good-as-the-number-suggests 44 per cent from the floor and just 26 per cent from three while the Raptors shot 57 and 39 per cent, respectively.
The game marked the first-ever meeting of two former G League coach of the year winners. Quinn Snyder won his award in 2009 while coaching the Austin Toros and Nurse spent six seasons in the G League split between Iowa and Rio Grande, winning coach of the year in 2011. They overlapped for three years.
For each of them coaching in the G League represented different things. Snyder was a golden boy – a former Duke star who got his first break in coaching working for Mike Krzyzewski at his alma mater, having great success in his first head coaching role at Missouri before he got snagged by some NCAA violations. He eventually took a year away from coaching and has said that the relative anonymity and grind of coaching the minors saved his career. He realized that even in a less-than-ideal environment he still loved the nuts and bolts of running a team and the G League was the perfect learning environment.
Nurse’s rise was more circuitous. Without significant playing credentials or being part of a high-profile coaching tree Nurse had to work his way to the U.K. and back. The G League was his leg up after coaching in England, whereas for Snyder it was a safety net.
But despite different paths to the same place the two men developed a friendship born of working in small towns in front of even smaller crowds.
“I didn’t know much about him and then we started coaching against each other and quickly developed a lot of respect for him. His teams were really well organized, really well coached,” said Nurse. “He was one of the really good ones in the league. We kind of became friends out of mutual respect. We kind of beat each other’s heads in a couple of times and that’s kind of how it goes sometimes.”
Against the Jazz, Nurse’s challenge was how to manoeuvre his theoretically fatigued team – Toronto was playing its third game in four nights and on the second night of a back-to-back while losing an hour’s sleep by flying west to east – against a Jazz club that has been struggling, relatively, but is widely expected to be a top-four team in the West when all is said and done.
Nurse’s first move to was to start Jonas Valanciunas – in theory a better matchup at centre against Jazz giant Rudy Gobert – but that backfired when the big Lithuanian struggled at both ends against Gobert, one of the best defenders in the league. Valanciunas was in the middle of a horrible start where the Raptors made six turnovers in the first 6:30, which allowed Utah to jump out to a 20-12 lead.
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Nurse quickly went to Ibaka who was coming off a career-high 34 points against the Los Angeles Lakers Sunday night and was rewarded when Ibaka picked up where he left off as he knocked down his first five shots for 11 points as the Raptors clawed their way back into the game, taking the lead for the first time on a Ibaka hook shot early in the second quarter.
But Nurse had another choice to make when Ibaka picked up his third foul trying to figure out what to do with Gobert who was having his way rolling to the rim for 11 first-half points to lead the Jazz.
Nurse chose to go to little-used Monroe and was rewarded as Monroe was more than serviceable in a three-minute stint where he made both his field goals. Nurse adjusted again by having Pascal Siakam set screens at the point of attack for Lowry and then clear out the floor behind him to let him attack the basket.
With the floor spread and the ball in his hands the hyper-mobile big scored seven of his 14 first-half points during a 17-6 run the Raptors used in the final four minutes that sent them into the half with an improbable 65-54 lead.
“At full speed I always feel like I can get to the rim whenever I want to,” said Siakam, who finished with 16 points and seven rebounds. “The guys, Fred [VanVleet], K-low, they do a good job [clearing out] whenever they feel I have a matchup and especially with my speed they just give me that freedom.”
The Raptors are playing free and easy, and one these days they’ll even start playing well.
Imagine that.
