TORONTO — With just under four minutes to play in Game 2 of the NBA Finals and the Toronto Raptors down eight points, Toronto guard Fred VanVleet hoisted up a three-pointer that hit iron and came into the waiting hands of Golden State Warriors centre DeMarcus Cousins.
Unbeknownst to Cousins, Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry was coming around behind him looking to poke the ball loose.
Lowry succeeded in doing so, but he caught a fair bit of Cousins’ arm in the process, leaving official Scott Foster no choice but to blow his whistle and penalize Lowry with his sixth and final foul.
Lowry looked around pleading and in subtle shock, probably more because he had full understanding what sort of impact his departure from this contest meant.
Not only were the Raptors losing their second-best player, they were losing their emotional leader and proverbial engine that’s pushed this team within three wins of an NBA championship.
All Lowry could do was look on from the bench sullenly and utterly helpless as the Warriors finished the job they started in the third quarter of Sunday’s affair, evening these 2019 Finals at a game apiece with a 109-104 victory as the series shifts to Oakland for Games 3 and 4 on Wednesday and Friday.
Lowry’s incredulity is understandable from a competitor’s standpoint, but not necessarily when you take a closer look at how he’s trended throughout this entire post-season.
Throughout the 20 playoff games the Raptors have played this year, Lowry has been averaging four personal fouls per game, a notable uptick over the 2.6 per contest he was averaging in the regular season.
Granted, Lowry has been playing more minutes every night during this post-season run than during the regular season, meaning the likelihood of him picking up more fouls is greater, but the same can be said of the minutes increase seen of Leonard and he’s managed to stay relatively foul-free, only reaching the four-foul mark just twice all playoffs long.
So what gives with Lowry? He knows he’s far too important to the Raptors to get into the foul trouble he’s been getting into — most recently fouling out of Game 2 and picking up five in Game 1.
“A lot. It affects a lot,” Lowry said of how being in constant foul trouble impacts his approach on a given game. “It takes me off the floor.”
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Sunday featured what appeared to be a particularly tight whistle with referees Foster, Tony Brothers and Ed Malloy calling a fair amount of ticky-tack stuff for both teams. As such, this compounded with Lowry fouling out in a Raptors loss in the Finals has seemed to bring this trend to the forefront.
It just hasn’t been much of a talking point because the Raptors have been successful despite the amount of time Lowry’s had to sit on the bench with foul trouble.
There have been 13 games so far in the playoffs that Lowry has had four or more fouls, and the Raptors are 9-4 in those contests. In games that have seen Lowry pick up five or more, they’re 4-2. Meanwhile in games when Lowry has picked up less than three fouls, the Raptors are 4-3.
There’s admittedly not a whole lot to glean from these innocuous records but it does speak to the aggressiveness with which Lowry plays.
“You’ve got to play physical basketball,” said Raptors coach Nick Nurse. “But you’ve got to be able to adjust and all those kinds of things and try to stay out of it, and you’ve got to avoid the silly ones, too.”
Lowry is deservedly praised for the playoffs-leading 16 charges he’s drawn so far, as well as his tough, physical play defensively hounding opponent guards. But there’s a lot of grey area involved with the interpretation of plays that see Lowry pick up a foul in real time, and Games 1 and 2 of the Finals have illustrated this.
Each of these clips were a foul call on Lowry, but they very easily could’ve resulted in a favourable call or outcome for the Raptors.
“A couple of them I didn’t think I fouled,” said Lowry of the Game 2 calls against him. “You’ve got to just keep moving on. At the end of the day, I just have to put myself in a better position not to foul.”
It’s a razor’s edge that Lowry has effectively managed to walk along without much repercussion — such as when he fouled out in Game 3 against the Milwaukee Bucks and again in the aforementioned Game 1 of the Finals, when he had five fouls.
In both instances, Lowry and the Raptors had a reliable man behind him to pick him up.
“I think we were fortunate the other night that we had a nice run when he got his fifth,” Nurse said. “And that double-overtime game, I think we lost him with six minutes to go in regulation. Again, Fred has done such a good job of running the team that we were able to compensate for that.”
There was no such compensation for Lowry in Game 2, however, and the price he paid came at his own team’s expense.
