TORONTO — For the Toronto Raptors, it’s literally never been better than this. And for once, ‘literally’ is being used correctly. Through 21 games — the not-quite mathematically correct quarter pole of the 82-game NBA season — no Raptors team has ever won 17 games.
The Kawhi Leonard-era Raptors pulled that off by disposing of the under-manned Miami Heat 125-115 Sunday night at Scotiabank Arena. It was their fifth-straight win and kept them comfortably on top in both the Eastern Conference — where they lead Milwaukee by two games — and across the league as a whole. How good a start is this?
The Raptors are up three games on the Golden State Warriors, who are 14-7.
Toronto has made it look easy, for the most part. They have only been man-handled once and that was on the road on the second half of a back-to-back against Milwaukee — one of seven games Leonard has sat out due to ‘load management’ or injury.
Their record could be something really gaudy had they not blown a 19-point lead at home against Detroit, or failed to shut the door on the road against Boston. In other words, these Raptors are a few possessions away from being 19-2. With so much good behind them, it’s hard not to get excited about what lies ahead:
“We’ve dropped a couple of games we should not have dropped — that Detroit game was one we did not want to drop, the Boston game in overtime — it’s going to happen,” said Danny Green who knows first-hand what championship seasons look like. “No one is going to be perfect, no one goes 82-0, but we have a lot of potential. There’s a long way to go but there are a lot of good pieces here and but the biggest thing is — from our leaders and vets — we have to build some sustainable habits defensively that we can stick to and rely on where we can win games whether we’re shooting well or not.”
They showed why they can allow themselves to think big against the Heat. Most of the ingredients of their early-season success were in plain view against a Heat team missing Goran Dragic, Tyler Johnson and Dion Waiters to injury. Only a super-human effort by the ageless to Dwyane Wade — who scores 35 points off the bench at age 36? — prevented a complete blowout.
The Raptors led by as much as 26 midway through the third quarter before Wade helped Miami cut the lead to eight early in the fourth to cap off a 35-17 run before Toronto pulled away again. A 32-foot three from the claw logo just over mid-court by Kyle Lowry with 4:54 left put Toronto back up 15 and the Heat were done.
Otherwise? The Raptors were the Raptors:
• Kawhi Leonard is really good. The Raptors’ prize off-season acquisition was boringly excellent again. While his former head coach Gregg Popovich was questioning Leonard’s leadership back in San Antonio, his new boss, Nick Nurse, was praising him and says he’s still waiting for Leonard to really explode offensively — to turn one of his standard 29-point, 10-rebound efforts like the one he put up in 36 minutes Sunday into a ‘17-of-22 for 45’ night or something.
He is so ruthless about getting to his spots in isolation that is seems like he never takes a shot he shouldn’t make. He’s looked a little fatigued at times late in games, his three-point shooting (33.9 per cent) hasn’t quite come around and he’s still only played a relative handful of games with a brand-new team — and yet he’s averaging nearly 25 points, nine rebounds and two steals a game, all in line with his numbers in 2016-17 when he was third in the MVP vote.
Wait until he catches fire.
• Kyle Lowry (12 points and 10 assists) remains a high-IQ marvel with the competitive fire of an undrafted rookie working his way up from the G-League. Late in the second quarter the Heat had the Raptors in a defensive rotation and swung the ball to a wide-open James Johnson on the weakside. Lowry sprinted out to the corner at full speed to meet his former teammate but, upon arrival, got his hips low and stutter-stepped to the ball in control — just like they teach it.
There was no need to fly by and contest because Johnson’s not an elite three-point shooter. Lowry’s effort made the ball stop and then forced Johnson into an awkward dribble-drive into help, and Johnson ended up kicking the ball out of bounds. It was a small play in the grand scope of things, but when your 14-year veteran, all-star point guard plays that hard and that smart and leads the league in taking charges too, who won’t follow suit?
• Pascal Siakam has delivered on a summer of Instagram promise. Superstars are a must to be an elite NBA team, but you can only acquire so many of them through the trade or the draft lottery or free agency. What often tips the balance for teams as they try to climb the ladder is the emergence of stars from unlikely places — Draymond Green was a second-round pick by the Warriors, for example.
Siakam put up 21 points on just nine shots against Miami, a tribute to his tireless running in transition and his incredibly skillful finishing in the paint. Would anyone have predicted Siakam running a corner pick-and-roll and unloading a ferocious left-hand dunk on the Heat’s Hassan Whiteside as he did in the first quarter Sunday when he was coming out New Mexico State three years ago?
Of course not, because if they did, Siakam would have been taken seventh instead of 27th.
He’s averaging 14.2 points on 63-per-cent shooting as a starter in his third season and just wears out defences busy trying to figure out how to manage Leonard, Lowry, Green, and Jonas Valanciunas and Serge Ibaka — the Raptors’ platoon at centre, who combined are giving the Raptors 48 minutes of all-star production in the paint. They were good for 25 points and 17 rebounds against Miami, as an example.
Which isn’t to say all is perfect, which has to be concerning for the rest of the NBA.
Entering Sunday night’s game, the Raptors were 19th in the NBA in three-point percentage, which can be explained mainly by the fact that with the exception of Green — who was leading the team at 44 per cent before going 0-4 against the Heat — nearly all of their proven three-point shooters are shooting poorly by their standards.
Odds are that won’t continue and the Raptors have shown signs in wins Friday and Sunday that their numbers will begin to normalize. Will C.J. Miles (who had 10 points off the bench to tie his season-high) shoot 25 per cent from deep for the season? No, he won’t. Similarly, while expecting Fred VanVleet (10 points and four assists) to match the 41.5 per cent he managed last year might be a stretch, there is no way he’s going to shoot just 32 per cent for the rest of year.
Similarly, Leonard — a 38-per-cent three-point shooter for his career — was just 22 per cent from deep in November before he went 3-of-8 against Miami. Which way do you think those numbers are headed? Lowry has slumped in November too but he’s shown himself to be one of the league’s best volume three-point shooters not named Steph Curry over the past three years. He’ll be fine, and the Raptors’ best shooting is likely ahead of them.
A more interesting question is whether the bench unit returns to something approximating the weapon it was for the Raptors a year ago.
There are all kinds of reasons why the Raptors are a net-negative — -0.5 to be precise — so far this year when the starters leave the floor compared to an NBA-best +3.5 a year ago — the main reason the Raptors have struggled to hold and extend leads at times this year.
There are some continuity issues — a product of Nurse’s decision to flip-flop Ibaka and Valanciunas as starters, and the injuries and absences that have kept VanVleet, Delon Wright and OG Anunoby from logging a high volume of minutes together at full strength. Miles has struggled. They lost the bench battle to the Heat (71-42) largely because of a transcendent effort by Wade against a wide array of powerless Raptors defenders.
But that’s not going to happen every night. There are only so many first-ballot Hall of Famers coming off the bench across the NBA. As VanVleet and Wright and Anunoby hit their stride, and Miles finds his stroke — all of which seem to be in the category marked ‘sooner than later’ — the Raptors bench should become a net positive again.
“The ceiling is high, man. And the way we’re playing it should continue to get higher,” said Miles. “It’s one day at a time, one practice, one game. But we should keep figuring out what we can do to push it higher so that ceiling is game whatever of the Finals.”
[relatedlinks]
