TORONTO — The official goal was a win. Get one of those and then focus all your energies on getting another. Do that and the Toronto Raptors would be in a series with the Cleveland Cavaliers by the end of the weekend.
But the minimum was to provoke a fight. Not necessarily punches thrown, ejections piling up. As Raptors head coach Dwane Casey pointed out, this isn’t hockey. Embarrassed or out-classed, you can’t drop the gloves.
But for the Raptors, Game 3 of the second-round series against the Cavaliers was about forcing Cleveland to acknowledge their presence. To make them feel, if not threatened, at least uncomfortable. To be in the fight, if not starting one.
"You work all year to go against the champ in a boxing match," said Casey before his team took the floor at the Air Canada Centre against the defending NBA champions. "You train, you hit the heavy bag and you bounce out and you come out and go to the rope-a-dope instead of throwing a punch."
Casey was saying that through the first two games his club had been too cautious, waiting for an opening that wasn’t going to come. Time to change tactics.
"To beat the champ, you have to throw punches," Casey said. "Whether they’re haymakers, uppercuts, whatever, maybe a couple below the belt, but you’ve got to box. You’ve got to fight, you’ve got to compete."
But that doesn’t guarantee anything. The Raptors squared up to the Cavs. They moved forward. "We competed, man," said DeMar DeRozan. They threw punches and even landed a few. But if there is anything to learn after the Raptors fell 115-94 to trail 3-0 in the series, facing elimination on Sunday, it’s that the fight is over and Toronto is a local middleweight matched with a world-class heavy.
No NBA team has ever come back from down 3-0 and the Raptors won’t be the first. Not against LeBron James. Not against his Cavaliers. After coasting through the regular season, the Cavs can smell their third straight NBA finals — it would be the seventh straight for James — and have roused themselves accordingly.
The Raptors are fodder, a chance for the Cavaliers to sharpen their combinations, someone to spar with in advance of the main event.
DeRozan won’t say it. He won’t speak about the end after putting up one of the best playoff performances of his career — 36 of his 37 points came through three quarters as he almost single-handedly kept the Raptors in the mix, refusing to let the Cavaliers run them out of their home gym.
"We have another opportunity," said DeRozan. "We can’t look at history of teams being down 3-0. Whatever it may be. We have another opportunity to have another opportunity. That’s all that matters and we have to go out and play that way [on Sunday]."
He went into battle not knowing whether Kyle Lowry would be running with him or not. It turned out Lowry had to back off, waiting until four minutes before tip-off to decide his badly sprained left ankle wouldn’t allow him to run and cut and chase Kyrie Irving around the ACC floor.
"I didn’t know ‘til late, ‘til they did starting lineup, that he wasn’t going to go," said DeRozan. "It was tough to change your mindset, not just me, the whole team as well. But we still competed man. We still gave our self a great opportunity."
But it was gone in an instant. Casey has said all series that his team’s margin for error against the Cavaliers was somewhere between slim and none. We’ll never know if he made a critical mistake when he started the fourth quarter with DeRozan on the bench along with Cory Joseph and Jonas Valanciunas. The Cavs had James on the floor and in just two minutes, with DeRozan sitting, Cleveland pushed a two-point lead to eight points. By the time Valanciunas came back midway through the fourth quarter, the Raptors were down by 19.
Casey said DeRozan needed a rest. DeRozan said he didn’t.
"I could have kept going," DeRozan said. "I didn’t feel like I needed a blow. At this point in time there’s no need for a rest."
DeRozan did seem to run out of gas down the stretch — he scored one point in nearly seven minutes in the fourth quarter — but in the bigger picture the Raptors seem like scenery in the Cavs’ latest drama, another stage set for LeBron to shine brightest.
He barely seemed stressed as he rolled to 35 points on 16 shots while grabbing eight rebounds and dishing seven assists in 41 fairly low-key minutes. James didn’t stop to pretend to drink a beer or spin the ball casually before draining either of his two triples, but he did try and make a number of left-handed floaters just to keep himself interested and found time to jaw with Drake, seated courtside.
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The difference between DeRozan and James was that the Cavs’ star had help. When the game started to turn, he was on the bench. It was Kyle Korver, added by trade by the Cavs mid-season and whose career 43 per cent average from three trails only Steph Curry among active players, who swung the balance. The Raptors were trailing by one when he checked in for James with two minutes left in the third quarter. He hit three of his four threes in a 60-second span over the end of the third quarter and the start of the fourth, and the game began to split.
"We got stops, and Kyle got hot," said James, explaining how the Cavailers finished on a 42-22 surge.
In contrast DeRozan, without Lowry, was a man on an island. He finished with three assists but should have had more, except you don’t get assists for hitting teammates with passes for open threes only to see them clang them right and left, never centre.
Toronto missed their first 12 three-point attempts and ended up just 2-of-18 for game while the Cavs shot 13-of-23. For the series, Cleveland is out-scoring Toronto 135-51 from three, while shooting 50 per cent to the Raptors 27.9, an insurmountable advantage.
"It’s tough. We couldn’t make no threes. When you see them knocking down threes left and right, getting to their spots, it’s kind of deflating. It’s tough to win a game when you only make two three-pointers," said DeRozan. "We were in the game throughout the whole game, but shooting 11 per cent from the three-point line, it’s tough."
He might as well have said impossible.
That the Raptors were in the game without hitting anything from deep speaks to their tenacity. Casey wanted his team to show up, to scrap.
They did that. Norman Powell played through his own ankle injury to do a reasonable job guarding James straight up for much of the night. Emergency starter Joseph helped keep Irving to 7-of-21 from the floor. Valanciunas was 8-of-10 from the field and likely deserved more minutes after being reinserted into the starting lineup. He knocked James to the floor twice as the Raptors tried to be more physical, to make sure they were in the battle.
Not that it mattered.
"We were fighting," said Valanciunas. "We were fighting. It was up and down. We were fighting. Honestly, today we were not giving up but they were better than us."
Someone might want to bring a crowbar Sunday or spike James’ water bottle. Or, at the very least, find some magic cream for Lowry’s ankle. Because without any of those things the Raptors will be done, the fight will be over, the result of drawing a superior opponent above their weight class.
It’s only a matter of time before they’re down for the count.
