CLEVELAND — For the most part, they seemed unbothered.
A Toronto Raptors team playing together in the post-season for the first time, with only one player in the lineup (RJ Barrett) having been a starter on a team that had ever won a playoff series — that was the unspoken concern, that the noise and the crowd and the hype would be too much.
That they’d be either overwhelmed or overhyped. They’d be so focused on the details they would forget to play. Or so energized to compete that they’d forget the details.
Still there was some confidence pre-game:
“We’re ready. There’s no doubt about that,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic, before making his playoff debut as an NBA head coach on Saturday. “We’re gonna be starting to throw punches from the start and compete. This is what we prepared for not (just) last week, but the whole season and our whole lives. We’re all excited to go out there and compete.”
And they did that. The Raptors' best quarter n what ended up being a 126-113 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers was the first quarter.
They led for most of it. And if the Cavaliers fulfilled their early intention of getting to the paint and attacking the rim — three of their first four buckets were dunks by either Jarrett Allen or Evan Mobley, their pair of athletic seven-footers — the Raptors stood up well to the Cavaliers' plans for them defensively.
For good reason, the Cavaliers were satisfied with Scottie Barnes (30 per cent on the season) and Jamal Shead (32 per cent) shooting threes, but Barnes hit three quick ones and Shead (17 points) hit one of what ended up being five threes as he started for Immanuel Quickley (hamstring), so that was working out.
And while the Cavaliers had a primary defender draping themselves all over Brandon Ingram to deny the Raptors' leading scorer the ball, Toronto weathered that too. Cleveland rarely if ever sent a second defender to Ingram, so they kept the paint packed for the most part. Ingram did what he needed to do and scored several tough, contested baskets and got to the free-throw line, too.
The Raptors led most of the first quarter, save for a sloppy 7-0 run in the final minute that allowed Cleveland to take a 35-31 edge after 12 minutes.
If the Raptors weren’t completely thriving, things seemed fine. The game was within reach.
“I think we handled the environment and the crowd was what we were expecting,” said Barnes. “I think we handled that pretty well. The game didn’t go the way we wanted it to.”
There is that part. The leaks started to show late in the second quarter when a 10-0 run engineered by the Cavaliers' greatest hits of talent gave a hint of what was to come: comfortable drives to the rim by the Cavs' twin-superstar backcourt, Donovan Mitchell and James Harden; a driving dunk by Mobley over Barnes; a triple by Harden set up by a Mitchell drive.
But that was just an appetizer as the Cavs took a 61-54 lead into the half and detonated on the Raptors with a 21-6 run to start the third quarter. Toronto trailed by 22 midway through the third. There good intentions didn’t matter anymore.
“Turnovers, lack of focus, lack of running, lack of energy,” was Rajakovic's partial list of woes.
Said Barrett, who finished with 24 points on seven-of-13 shooting while making seven-of-nine free throws: “We got hit first in the third. Once it got to 20 it was tough. You can’t go down 20. But I think for a lot of guys it’s their first playoff game, us as team, our first playoff game. We got one under our belt. Obviously we want to win, and it sucks to lose, but I think it was good for us, to see what it’s like. Now we can watch film, practice, make adjustments and then come back.”
It’s hard to know what kind of adjustments could make up for what seemed like a glaring disparity in talent.
But since they’re in Cleveland for a few more days anyway, figuring out how to keep Ingram as part of the offence while not having the rest of the group stagnate may be a good place to start. Ingram finished with 17 points on five-of-nine shooting while going seven-of-10 from the line, but he scored just four points and had one field-goal attempt in the second half.
“They tried to deny me the ball every time that I went down the floor. Obviously, they knew most of the stuff that we've been running all year. I think that's just a part of the playoffs,” he said. “We got to figure out how to make the adjustment next game, and let that not be too effective."
And his quiet second half?
“Coach wanted to use me as a screener. Also he noticed that my man wasn't coming off of me, so he wanted me outside of the action a little bit and being a receiver. But at the end of the day, me shooting nine shots is not going to win basketball games, so I’ve just got to figure out ways where I can still be effective while they're doing whatever defensively.”
Rajakovic agrees.
“We’ve got to do a better job of executing, freeing him up, playing to our standard of ball movement,” he said. “We did not do a good enough job of running our stuff with pace. We did not do a good enough job to involve Brandon. Some of that is on me. We as a group, we’ve got to do a better job not just Brandon, of moving the ball and making quicker decisions, pushing the ball in transition. We were way too stagnant tonight.”
What else?
How about finding a way to score in transition?
Toronto led the NBA in fast-break points during the regular season, using their aggressive, ball-hawking defence to force turnovers and run, hunting easier offence in transition. When the Raptors went undefeated against Cleveland in a three-game stretch between Oct. 31 and Nov. 24 — the teams haven’t met since — the Raptors outscored Cleveland 62-38 on the break. But against a rested, healthy and experienced Cavs team, the Raptors' offensive oxygen was slowly turned off.
By the end the third quarter, the Raptors had managed just one point in transition — they finished with three for the game. They had only three steals.
“I thought we did a very poor job. We did not look for kick-ahead (passes),” said Rajakovic. “We did not look for opportunities to run. Some of the situations where they scored, we were just looking (at) what happened instead of moving on to the next play.”
Meanwhile, the Cavaliers were able to carve up Toronto in the halfcourt.
Mitchell led all scorers with 30 points on 10-of-19 shooting. Harden had 22 points and 10 assists.
It wasn’t just them, however. Mobley and Allen combined for 27 points on 16 shots., and he Cavaliers won the offensive-rebounding battle 7-4 . Max Strus came off the bench for 24 points. They made 16-of-32 threes.
Meanwhile, Raptors starting centre Jakob Poeltl was scoreless in the first half and finished with four points and six rebounds in 21 minutes. That Rajakovic leaned more and more on rookie Collin Murray-Boyles (14 points on 7/8 shooting) is telling, but hardly a solution.
The Raptors will study film and have a practice Sunday. They’ll try to find ways to shave down their 18 turnovers.
But they might look at their own performance — 52-per-cent shooting and 48 per cent from three are good marks for them, especially without a bucket of fast-break points to boost their numbers — and figure what else can they do?
The Cavaliers are very good. They have been the NBA’s fifth-best offence since the all-star break and likely will get better as they get more familiar with their newly healthy lineup and the addition of Harden by trade in February.
“Obviously they have two guys that are amazing players, their bigs, Strus was huge for them tonight, we just have to watch the film,” said Barrett. “This is a team that we believe we can beat. We believe we can win this series. We just have to make some adjustments and come out the next game and be ready.”
An alternative view: you could argue they were ready for Game 1, and it didn’t matter.
The Raptors have struggled all season against the NBA’s best teams, and their early-season success against Cleveland aside, the Cavaliers very much look like one of those teams.
Three-point Grange
Lineup juggling
If you thought to yourself: ‘I haven’t seen Ingram, Barnes, Barrett, Murray-Boyles and Sandro Mamukelashvili play together very often this year’, you would be right. That group was on the floor for a grand total of two minutes this season. A similar version with Ja’Kobe Walter instead of Barrett also was on the floor in the first half and they were equally unfamiliar with playing together, having played just two minutes as a unit, per www.databllr.com.
“You know, we're just not going to be stagnant and always be conventional," Rajakovic said. "We are going to try to adjust on the fly as well, you know. And there are things there that I think we did really well, that film is going to prove that. We've just got to do it much more consistently.”
Three-point Shead
Leaving Shead open from three and collapsing into the paint seems like a good strategy. Coming into Saturday’s game, the Raptors' second-year guard hadn’t made more than two threes in a game since Jan. 21 and had made more than three in a game just once in his career.
His five threes against the Cavs on six attempts were a new career high. He’ll need to keep taking them and making them if Cleveland is going to keep inviting him to shoot.
Like a good neighbour?
There was a smattering of boos — or at least it sounded that way — during the Canadian anthem. Could they have simply been booing the Raptors, Canada’s team. A more charitable interpretation, maybe.
But there were clearly some ‘USA’ chants as Cleveland went on their big third-quarter run. I’m not sure I’ve heard that at a Raptors road game before. Sign of the times, maybe.
