TORONTO – Pascal Siakam received a pass underneath his own basket, looked up and began a fast break.
The three Golden State Warriors that managed to get back all had eyes on the breakout Raptors forward who had just crossed the 30-point plateau for the night a few minutes earlier.
It would prove to be a big mistake. Siakam saw his Toronto Raptors teammate Danny Green starting to run to the right corner, and as the trifecta of Warriors players collapsed on Siakam, he made the right play and lasered a chest pass to a waiting Green who caught the ball right in his shooting pocket, got his feet set behind the line and drilled his third triple of the evening to put the Raptors up 12 with 7:32 left to play.
Timeout Warriors, and, essentially, game over, as the Raptors would go on to take Game 1 of the 2019 NBA Finals, 118-109.
After a nightmare Eastern Conference Finals series that saw him shoot 4-of-23 from three-point range, Green, the league’s second-most accurate three-point shooter during the regular season (45.5 per cent), got the monkey off his back in a big way Thursday night.
“Keep shooting, man. That’s it, there’s no secret,” Green offered after the game. “When you’ve got a shooting slump you’ve got to keep shooting.”
It’s been a message he’s been preaching since he first became mired in that series-long slump against Milwaukee and at long last it would seem his words rang true.
“And it’s hard not to think about it because everybody in the world’s telling you don’t think about it — everybody you come across — keep shooting it,” said Green before the series started. “Trust me, I’m going to keep shooting. Don’t think about it though. I’m trying not to. I keep glancing at my inbox. You keep reminding me. People text me to don’t think about it. I know that. Everybody I come across, try not to think about it, keep shooting. I’m not second guessing myself.”
And even if Green was secretly doubting himself, any fears should be put to rest for now, and maybe he can return to the lights-out, three-point assassin he had been all season long.
In Game 1, Green went 3-for-7 from outside and finished with 11 points. Not overly-impressive numbers, but when put into the larger context of what it might mean for the Raptors moving forward, getting Green back to remotely-close levels to the player he was during the regular season would be a huge boost to Toronto during the Finals.
Green has been playing solid defence throughout the post-season and Game 1 was not different, punctuated by a charge he drew on Klay Thompson that led to a technical foul on the Warriors all-star guard with just over five minutes to play. As a true ‘3-and-D’ player, Green was only doing half his job against Milwaukee and there’s no one who seemed to be more acutely aware of this fact than Green himself.
That’s why when Green drilled his first three of the game early in the first quarter he seemed to revel in seeing the ball go through the hoop just a little bit more than he normally would, making sure to keep the end of his perfect shooting form locked into position with his right arm hanging out, as if he was trying to program the feeling back into his brain.
A weight had been lifted off of Green. Something that all 19,983 in attendance at Scotiabank Arena could see, as well as Green’s Raptors teammates.
“We know what he’s capable of,” said Fred VanVleet who also recently got himself out of a shooting funk. “We knew it was gonna turn around and we saw it tonight.”
And the Raptors will be banking on it extending further beyond that.
“Milwaukee just wasn’t his series and it was probably good to get that one over with in his view and kind of get a clean slate,” said Nurse of Green.
New series, new opponent. That’s all that seems was required to bring back old Danny Green just in time for the NBA Finals.
