TORONTO — So, you’re an NBA head coach. Your conference title winning team has lost the first two games of a second-round playoff series on its home floor in particularly dispiriting fashion. The opposition that handed you those two losses is a chronic rival that has made beating you in frustratingly tormenting ways year after year look downright easy. That rival is led by one of the greatest basketball players in human history, an absurdly gifted athlete who is somehow, implausibly, continuing to find ways to improve his game in his mid-30’s.
You gather your team for a practice on a windy Friday afternoon before you depart for two games against that rival in their building. If you lose both, your season is over. You stand up in front of your team prior to a pre-practice film session. What do you say?
“It’s pride, it’s toughness,” Dwane Casey said Friday, speaking after practice before his Toronto Raptors departed for Cleveland, where they’ll play two awfully important games against the Cavaliers. “The toughness part is the part I didn’t think we played with last night. I thought we did in Game 1. We did in parts of last night. But we didn’t do it long enough. So, it’s about grit, toughness.
“The rookies, they don’t know any better. They should just be playing hard. But the veterans, they understood. They spoke up in the film session, spoke up in our practice this morning. They understand what we need to do now. The difference is between words and actually getting out there and doing it. I can get up there and speak and draw up X’s and O’s all we want to. But it’s just physicality, grit, and toughness.”
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That would certainly be a start. If there’s one thing that should upset the Raptors more than anything about how events have transpired over the last two games, it’s how unchallenging Cleveland made its dominant Game 2 victory look. LeBron James was clinical, unbothered, sniper-esque as he methodically laid waste to the Raptors Thursday night. Kevin Love, too, was able to operate with far too much impunity.
The Raptors may be outgunned in this series. They may be destined to succumb to the greatness of James, a truly extraordinary player. But the least they can do is put up stauncher resistance than they did Thursday.
“It can’t look like a summertime workout, or a pregame workout. It’s got to look like there’s some duress or distress,” said CJ Miles. “Make them wrestle, make them fight. I always say, ‘if I’m going to go down I’m going to go down with all my bullets gone.’ You’re going to go down fighting. And that’s the way it’s got to be.”
What’s especially torturous for the Raptors at the moment is that they have not played exceptionally poorly on the offensive end in either of the first two games of this series. In Game 1, they shot 52.5 per cent through three quarters, hitting eight of the 20 three-pointers they took. They then ran into one of the most hard-luck shooting quarters of their season, going 5-of-25 from the field in the fourth, as the Cavaliers stormed back.
Thursday, the Raptors didn’t have a single quarter in which they shot lower than 47.4 per cent. They finished the night shooting 54.3 per cent from the field (44-of-81), 40 per cent from three-point range (12-of-30), and 90.9 per cent from the free throw line (10-of-11). It’s not easy to have such a successful offensive performance and still get blown out.
Now, if Serge Ibaka was not only playable Thursday (he wasn’t), but something resembling the stretch four defender he’s been over his career (he hasn’t been in a while), it certainly would have been a massive help to the Raptors. Love had his way with a series of Toronto defenders, particularly during a third-quarter stretch opposite Miles, and finished with a 31-point, 11-rebound night. If the Raptors can’t contain him, the series is as good as over.
Casey spent much of the second half Thursday searching for lineups that could limit secondary options like Love while OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam focused on James. That’s where not having a serviceable Ibaka broke Toronto’s back. The Raptors needed Ibaka in that game desperately. Instead, he spent almost the entire second half watching from the bench.
“Like baseball players, some people go through ruts, and our job as a coaching staff and as a team is to help [Ibaka] out of it, not bury him, put dirt on him,” Casey said. “We’re going to support him, we’re going to push him, we’re going to try to make things easier for him, instead of putting dirt on him and saying he’s dead.”
But there’s a case to be made that even if Toronto had a vintage version of Ibaka, it wouldn’t have been enough. The biggest problem Thursday — the one there isn’t really a solution to — was James doing things only James can. Look at his shot chart.
The Raptors had him mostly shooting long, contested two-pointers, which is exactly what they want. Keep him away from the restricted area, don’t let him get open looks beyond the arc. That was the game plan. And it didn’t matter.
In the second half especially, when he went 13-of-19 from the field, James made a number of shots that are practically un-guardable. Perhaps none of them were more breathtakingly absurd than this one — late in the shot clock, under tight coverage, fading away to his left — that generated audible gasps from the Toronto crowd:
It’s an incredibly difficult shot, and there were many more like it. And on a night when James is doing things like that, when Love is having a renaissance, when Jeff Green is quietly coming off the bench to go 4-of-6 from beyond the arc, and when the Cavaliers cough up the ball just three times against one of the NBA’s best turnover-generating teams during the regular season, well, it’s pretty hard to engineer a way for the Raptors to win.
“Obviously, you don’t like it — but some of the shots [James] made last night were him being him,” Miles said. “He stepped up in the moment, he did a lot of great things. There were contested shots, they were fadeaways from 20 feet, the shout-out to the Jumbotron, whatever you want to call it. I mean, he made some tough shots, he made some great plays.”
Toronto’s Game 1 loss now looms huge. If the Raptors shoot just marginally better in that fourth quarter, if just one of Toronto’s several clean tip-in opportunities at the buzzer drops, we’re looking at a very different situation going to Ohio. But because those things didn’t happen, it’s now a two-game deficit heading into a building where the Raptors have dropped nine of their last 10, to play a team that has beat them in eight consecutive playoff games spanning three seasons.
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Even if the Raptors continue to put up a torrential 119.8 offensive rating like they did in Game 1, even if they continue to limit turnovers (they had 11 Thursday), even if they continue to out-rebound the Cavaliers as they have in each of the first two games of this series, it’s extremely difficult to envision a scenario where the Raptors win four times in five games with James playing the way he is.
James is having the best postseason of his already iconic career. He has perhaps his weakest supporting cast of any playoffs he’s played in, and it hardly matters. He’s 33, he just finished a season in which he led the NBA in minutes, he’s played more games and minutes — both regular season and playoffs — than anyone since entering the league in 2003, and in the first two games of this series, he’s played 47 and 41 minutes of practically flawless basketball. He’s been unstoppable. He put up a triple-double in Game 1 and called it “one of my worst games of the season.” If you’re the Raptors, what can you do?
You can try. You can play with the pride and toughness the team spoke about at practice Friday, and try to at least make James’s dominance somewhat burdensome. You can work to take away Love, take away Green, take away shooters like J.R. Smith and Kyle Korver. You can try to play faster and not let the Cavaliers drag the pace down to the crawl they prefer to operate at. You can try to fight your way back into it.
“We’re professional players. It’s a seven-game series. We can feel sorry for ourselves if we want to. But I don’t think our guys are going to,” Casey said. “We know what we didn’t do and have to do better. We know it’s tough. It’s not going to be easy. But, yet and still, we have the toughness and grit.
“That’s what we’re made out of. And that’s what we have to depend on.”
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